JEFF BECK 1944-2023
YOU BETTER BELIVE
Jeff Beck made the guitar do things no-one had imagined, let alone heard before. And while other axemen of his pioneer generation were more loudly lauded, he was the one who kept moving, kept growing, in the 21st century. If that went underthe radar, then it was just too bad. “Jeff had a mystique about him,” discovers Mat Snow. “He didn’t give it all away.”
Portrait: Clive Arrowsmith
Heart full of soul: Jeff Beck in 1971.
Credit Camera in Press/Clive here Arrowsmith
IN ANY ARTIST’S LIFE, THERE’S OFTEN TALK OF A moment, an epiphany, which sparked the whole creative journey.
Jeff Beck revealed his epiphany on an American TV show devoted to his most fervent passion.
Not music, nor even guitars: cars.
In 2009, when Car Crazy came to film on his East Sussex spread where he stabled the collection of hot rods and custom cars he’d rebuilt himself, our host recalled his uncle taking little Geoffrey for a tear-up in his MG, getting up to all of 75mph, whereas in the family car his dad never pootled above 45. The MG also had that rare extra, a radio, which sat tantalisingly silent until Geoffrey, fiddling about as small boys do, switched it on and out burst music such as he’d never heard before: the blues.
His outraged uncle flicked it off, and the next time Geoffrey was taken for a spin the radio had gone.
It’s all there: speed, excitement, fun, music, America, the forbidden. Though rock’n’roll was yet to come, featuring his absolute favourite player, Cliff Gallup of Gene Vincent’s Blue Caps, young Geoffrey was already besotted with the hits of electric guitar pioneer Les Paul, despite his Brahms-loving mum’s disdain. “She’d say, ‘That’s all tricks,’” he told writer Dave Thompson, “but it caught my ear straight away because of its astonishing speed and a slap echo – this great sound dimension that hit me for the first time in my life. After post-war austerity, this was all I needed.”
Small wonder that Geoffrey Arnold Beck sold his soul to the devil on the A3 Kingston bypass to become the legendary Jeff, perhaps the only electric guitarist ever to inhale the same stratospherically rarefied empyrean of brilliance breathed by Jimi Hendrix.
Getty (3),
Avalon.red, Shutterstock
SERIAL WINNER OF EVERY GUITARISTS’ poll to name the best of the best, Jeff Beck became famed not just for his instrumental prowess but also for his habit of hitting the off-ramp on fortune’s highway just as the seriously big time loomed. When he died on January 10 aged 78 of bacterial meningitis, he had not quite the instant brand recognition of the guitarist whose gig he took over in The Yardbirds in 1965, Eric Clapton, nor even of his old pal who succeeded him in that spot, Jimmy Page. Most of the time he seemed happy with that connoisseur status – but not always.