It's unfortunate that there aren't more articles and books in English about him and his band, and more interviews in English. I have ordered the remastered/expanded CD/DVD of their 1969 album Eight Miles High (this was in their psychedelic/prog-rock phase, and one side of the album was an extended cover of that Byrds classic), and that includes a late-'60s documentary with English captions, but it hasn't arrived yet.
Mostly I have to try to pick out what words I do know from Dutch interviews and news stories and TV talk show appearances like the two below, from 1976 and about twenty years later (either 1996 or 1997).
They all speak English - most people in the Netherlands do. They recorded in English to reach a wider audience. But there are all these interviews where you hear them singing in perfect English, and then they switch to Dutch with just occasional English words.
If there are captions in Dutch, I can at least type those into Google Translate since I'm not familiar with that many Dutch words, and it's even harder to follow spoken Dutch.
But even if I could translate everything easily, George typically let other band members do most of the talking. He was the band's leader as well as its founder, but I've seen interviews of just George and lead singer Barry Hay where Barry did at least 90% of the talking. And I've never seen any interviews or articles where George himself talked about all the help he's given other artists. Pretty modest and a bit shy. But very much the person most responsible for Golden Earring's creation, success and longevity.
The song at the start of that second video - "Another 45 Miles" - had been a huge hit for them the winter of 1969-70, when George was 21 and they'd already had hits in the Netherlands for several years. And it was so much a fan favorite that not only were they still doing it at almost every show till 2019, and for that 1996/1997 TV appearance where George was nearly 50 (though he definitely didn't look it there), George would do it for at least some of his shows with Vreemde Kostgangers (Strange Boarders), the supergroup trio he formed in 2016 as a side project with two other singers who'd been stars in the Netherlands in the 1960s-1980s, and whom he had hits and successful tours with while still keeping Golden Earring together and touring.
1969:
2017, Vreemde Kostgangers:
When he was recently made an honorary citizen of the Belgian town he's lived near most of his adult life, a band they had there covering his music sang this.
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