they disbanded ONLY because the band's founder and lead guitarist, George Kooymans, was stopped from playing by ALS. He passed away last summer. They'd last played a sold-out arena concert in November 2019, with plans for a spring 2020 tour postponed by the Covid shutdown. George was not only still with Golden Earring then, but was also recording and touring in a duo with American guitarist and songwriter Frank Carillo, and recording and touring in the supergroup trio Vreemde Kostgangers (Strange Boarders, a Dutch way of saying "It takes all kinds" ) with two other famous Dutch musicians, one a folksinger, the other from a ska band - and VK's last album, released after George fell ill, topped the Dutch charts.
Golden Earring would probably still be together and working if George hadn't had ALS. His old bandmates are still playing, but no longer together. It wouldn't have been Golden Earring without him. He was only 13 when he taught the 15-year-old neighbor who became his bass player to play guitar (later he married that neighbor's kid sister), and he wrote or cowrote almost all of Golden Earring's songs, wrote songs for the duo and trio he also belonged to, and wrote hits for other Dutch artists.
It would have been nice if he could have stayed healthy and young forever.
But he took good care of himself (well, after some early years of partying, including with Keith Moon, including a party after which George had to be carried onto the plane the next day), and he was still doing well before he had ALS. This is George in 2018, with the other two members of Vreemde Kostgangers, doing a song that was a huge hit for Golden Earring in the late 1960s (a song he'd written for his longtime girlfriend and future wife after she left him for a while, after he wrote hits for a beautiful young singer, starting her career). A 50-year-old hit the audience loved:
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