Golden Earring – Radar Love

The Song That Drove Itself To Number One — And The Dark Secret Barry Hay Hid Inside Its Lyrics For Fifty Years

Two thirteen-year-old neighbours in The Hague started a band in 1961. Sixty years later, one of them was diagnosed with ALS, and the band that had never once changed its core lineup simply stopped — because, as Barry Hay told a Dutch newspaper, they had always said they would keep going until one of us fell over, and George Kooymans was always the toughest of the four of them. George Kooymans died of ALS on 23 July 2025 at his home in Rijkevorsel, Belgium, surrounded by his family. He left behind a catalogue of nearly 30 Dutch top-ten singles, 25 studio albums, and one song so elementally powerful that it has been played on every highway in the world since 1973 and still sounds exactly like driving too fast toward someone you need to reach. “Radar Love” was released in August 1973 as the lead single from Moontan, Golden Earring’s ninth studio album. It remains one of the most perfectly constructed rock recordings ever made — and most people who love it have no idea what it is actually about.

The single version reached No.9 on the Record World chart, No.10 on Cash Box, and No.13 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States — though that American peak came nearly a year after the European release, the record entering the Hot 100 on May 5, 1974, and climbing for twenty weeks. It reached No.7 in the UK and No.1 in the Netherlands. It hit the top ten in Canada, Australia, Germany, and Spain. Moontan was certified Gold by the RIAA — the only Golden Earring album to receive that recognition in America — and was later voted the ninth-best Dutch pop album of all time by readers of music magazine Oor. During the height of the song’s American success, the band had Kiss and Aerosmith as their opening acts. Both of those bands went on to become enormously famous. Neither of them ever wrote a song quite like “Radar Love.”

The song began, as George Kooymans explained over the years, with a title and a melody. “George had the melody,” Hay remembers. Like many of Golden Earring’s songs, “Radar Love” began with the title and grew from there. Kooymans wrote the music; Hay built the lyric around a concept drawn from his deep personal interest in extrasensory perception. The surface reading of the song is clear enough: a man is driving through the night, compelled homeward by a psychic connection with his lover. She is thinking of him. He senses it. The radio keeps playing songs that carry her message. The miles disappear. But Hay confirmed the death interpretation — that he was very interested in ESP at the time, which inspired the story of a guy who has a psychic bond with his lover, even in death. He senses that she urgently wants him to be with her, and in his haste drives recklessly, causing a fatal accident — but even in the afterlife, the song’s narrator and his lover still have radar love. The song that sounds like the most exhilarating drive of your life is, on its deepest reading, a ghost story. The man never makes it home. The connection survives death itself. Barry Hay put all of that into a rock song and then watched people use it as a driving soundtrack for half a century. He was not wrong to let them.

The recording is constructed as a suite — like “Highway Star,” “Stairway to Heaven,” and “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Radar Love” is composed with several distinctive and quite different sections that flow into each other with the logic of a long journey rather than a pop song. The intro starts with a guitar riff in four separated phrases — the first slightly reminiscent of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.” According to bassist Rinus Gerritsen, the intro was inspired by Carlos Santana. Kooymans builds from there — the rolling bassline arriving, then Cesar Zuiderwijk’s drumming, one of the great rhythmic performances in hard rock history, playing with a physicality and precision that sounds simultaneously mechanical and completely human. During the chorus, the band is joined by a brass section; Bertus Borgers plays saxophone and Eelco Gelling plays slide guitar. The lyrical reference to Brenda Lee came from Barry Hay’s mother’s bar in The Hague, where “I’m Sorry” was played constantly at the start of evenings — but its title didn’t fit the spirit of the song, so Hay chose another Brenda Lee title instead. There is something in that detail — a boy in his mother’s bar, listening to the wrong song, filing it away — that captures exactly how great rock lyrics are built: from the specific, the accidental, the overheard.

The route to an American audience ran through an unlikely connection. “We signed up with Track Records, the label of The Who,” Hay recalls. “And they really put an effort into it, because they had a sort of monkey wrench. If they could put us together on tour in Europe, they could put us together in Madison Square Garden. So we were sort of the sons of the Who.” The Who’s touring circuit opened American doors that years of Dutch chart success had not. They toured America opening for the Doobie Brothers and Santana — a remarkable piece of scheduling that placed a Dutch hard rock band in front of two of the biggest American audiences of the era. The song did the rest. Hay says that playing “Radar Love” never really gets old, in part because the band strives to keep it fresh: “We’re a band that never really plays it the same.” In fifty years of performing it live, they never once treated it as furniture.

The covers tell their own story. U2, R.E.M., White Lion, Def Leppard, Carlos Santana, and the Blue Man Group have all recorded versions. The White Lion version charted at No.59 on the US singles chart. None of them have ever quite captured what the original does — that specific combination of momentum, melancholy, and raw sonic architecture that makes the record feel like it is moving even when you are standing still. In 2011, the Dutch postal service issued a postage stamp for Golden Earring’s 50th anniversary that, when held up to a smartphone with a special app, played “Radar Love.” A country put the song on its stamps. That is a different category of cultural ownership than a chart position.

In January 2026, the band announced one final concert series — “Golden Earring: One Last Night” — at Rotterdam Ahoy. Due to his ALS, Kooymans was not scheduled to play. Five euros from every ticket went to ALS research. All five shows sold out immediately. The band that had opened for Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Eric Clapton; that had toured America thirteen times; that had played the same four men for fifty-one years without a single lineup change, took their final bow in the city where it all began, without their founder. Hay’s words when Kooymans first announced his diagnosis carry the weight of everything: “We always said we would keep going until one of us fell over. I didn’t expect George to be the first.” Kooymans was always the toughest of the four of them. He wrote the riff that drove ten million cars home. He built the melody that Barry Hay filled with a ghost story about love surviving death. He was right about all of it. Watch the video, read the full story at Music Videos Club, and turn it up. It was always meant to be loud.