When Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry talks about his biggest influences, two names are always bound to come up: Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. And in an interview with Q magazine in the early 2000s, Perry explained exactly why Page and Beck were so inspiring for him.

Perry began by naming a handful of albums that have had a major influence on his own playing. These included The Yardbirds’ Little Games (1967), recorded with Page as the sole guitarist; the first four albums Page created with Led Zeppelin; Beck’s solo debut Truth (1968) and The Jeff Beck Group’s Beck-Ola (1969); and John Mayall’s Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton, aka The Beano Album (1966).

“The first four Led Zeppelin albums, I have to have on me at all times,” Perry said. “The first two Beck albums and the last Yardbirds records are seminal for me – outlandish, experimental stuff. And I must have bought the John Mayall Blues Breakers album twenty times. If you have enough copies, you can never lose it. I listen to all these albums all the time for inspiration.”

Comparing the three former Yardbirds stars – Clapton, Beck and Page – Perry stated: “Jeff and Eric are so influential, but I guess Jimmy has the greatest influence because of Led Zeppelin – a pure inspiration for this thing called hard rock.

“Jimmy wasn’t just an amazing guitar player. He was an incredible producer and he wrote all these great songs. He had this world vision, and created a whole movement with Led Zeppelin.

“When he was cutting the first Zeppelin album, he knew what he wanted. That’s part of his genius – always knowing what he wanted.

“He’d been out in America with the Yardbirds and he saw this big gap that needed to be filled, and he knew what he needed to fill it. His vision was so much more global than Jeff and Eric’s. Playing guitar was just one part of the puzzle for Jimmy. His production values, the way he put Bonzo [drummer John Bonham] in the spotlight, became a touchstone for rock music.”

Aerosmith’s 1979 album Night In The Ruts featured a version of the Yardbirds song Think About It.

Perry told Q why he considered this a pivotal song for Page.

“We covered Think About It because it was only a b-side,” he said, “and we wanted people to hear this really cool song. It’s the only song that Jimmy did with the Yardbirds that pointed the way to Led Zeppelin. It’s proto-Zeppelin.”

Back in 1974, Aerosmith’s second album Get Your Wings included a version of the seminal rhythm and blues song Train Kept A-Rollin’ – which Jeff Beck recorded with the Yardbirds in 1965, and which Jimmy Page performed live with both the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin.

In fact this was the first song that the four members of Led Zeppelin ever played together in their first rehearsal in 1968.

Aerosmith’s recording of Train Kept A-Rollin’ actually featured lead guitar from noted session players Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter instead of Perry and his Aerosmith bandmate Brad Whitford.

But as Perry stated, this song was hugely important in his own development as a guitarist.

He explained: “People always say there are certain songs that take you back to a certain time, the first time you heard it. People say that to me about [Aerosmith’s hit ballad] Dream On. And for me, when we play Train Kept A-Rollin’, I still feel the way I felt way back when I heard the Yardbirds’ version. It was like a drug – it set me free.”

Aerosmith ended up performing the song live with both Page and Beck – on separate occasions.

Page guested with them at the Monsters Of Rock festival at Donington Park in 1990, while Beck jammed with them in the US many years earlier.

“It was back in the ’70s that Jeff got up with us and played Train,” Perry recalled. “That was amazing, but of course I was intimidated – he’s a fucking genius! He’s Mozart – he’s that brilliant!”

Perry did his best to describe that level of genius.

“With Jeff, you just knew that he didn’t want to sound like anybody else. He was always pushing the edge, going into jazz.

“I always felt that if Jeff played a lick that sounded like somebody else, he’d throw it away. I’m still astounded that the sound from his amplifier just comes from his hands.

“A lot of guitar players will tell you the same thing – that Jeff is head, hands and feet above the others.

“The first time I saw Jeff play live, he was playing a Les Paul, so I had to have one of those. I bought a ’68 Gold Top. I wish to God I still had it!”

Legendary folk singer Donovan knows a thing or two about great guitar players. In the ’60s he had Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck playing on his records. He also witnessed Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton performing at their peak.

Speaking to MusicRadar, Donovan discusses that period and his connection to those groundbreaking musicians.

“I loved Hendrix,” he says. “My friend Gypsy Dave and I were the first ones to say hello to Jimi when Chas Chandler, the bass player of The Animals, flew him in from America.

“And of course The Yardbirds had three super guitar players. One was called Jeff Beck, one was called Jimmy Page, and one was called Eric Clapton."

He continues: “Jimmy Page loved my music from day one. Jimmy was on [Donovan’s 1966 hit] Sunshine Superman, and one time when I visited him at his house in Windsor he showed me an EP of mine that was only released in France, and one of the songs on it was one I'd forgotten I'd written. It was called Every Man Has His Chain. Jimmy showed me that EP and he said, ‘Don, I’ve followed you from day one. I love your music, Don, and I will be there for you whenever you want me.’

“So Jimmy followed the unfolding Donovan story, and it made sense that at one point Jimmy would like his own band.”

When Page formed Led Zeppelin – originally under the name of The New Yardbirds – he enlisted another former session musician, John Paul Jones, who had worked with Donovan.

“JPJ – John Paul Jones – could put arrangements together,” Donovan says. “So Page said him, ‘Will you please join me and help me start a new band?’ These super session guys all wanted to do their own bands, but it’s not easy.

“I mean, who knows what was in Page in JP J’s brains when they were talking to each other about starting a band, but when Page asked JPJ he was begging him – because he knew JPJ was a talent beyond any other talent that anybody knew about.”

Donovan says of the three legendary guitarists who had played in The Yardbirds at various stages: “Clapton chose pure blues, and he hated when the volume went up. He actually said to Jimmy Page and Beck, ‘You're too fucking loud!’ Because he’s a purist.”

He also fondly recalls a connection with another iconic guitar hero – Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple.

“Ritchie called me up and said, ‘We just love your stuff. Do you mind if I record your song? The song was Lalena, which was a ballad, and when Deep Purple recorded it I was so honoured.”

It’s coming up for three years since Jeff Beck passed away, and Ritchie Blackmore has been paying tribute to the guitar great in a new podcast interview.

Blackmore was talking to Rock Of Nations With Dave Kinchen and Shane McEachern when conversation turned to his contemporaries, including Beck.

" Jeff was a great guitar player," says Blackmore. "That was a big blow, him going, I mean, he was vegetarian and he didn't take drugs particularly or anything. I was very shocked to hear about him dying that way. That was terrible.

"He had a very special way of playing. It was so different from anybody. I always used to go and see him play, because I found him very refreshing. And he would always put himself down. I'd say, 'How is your latest record, Jeff?' And he'd go, 'Oh, it's a lot of rubbish.' And he would always say that about anything he put out. He was always reaching for something he couldn't find."

Blackmore also spoke about the early days of Deep Purple. “It was the five of us… we got together in this old deserted house and rehearsed there and did our first record – Hush. We did it in two takes. You can tell if you listen carefully, you’ll hear the singer [long lost original Purple frontman Rod Evans] singing a bit flat. There were no pitch controls in those days.

“I came up with the name Deep Purple. I was thinking of Pink Floyd and the Moody Blues. There were all these colours, so I thought ‘well we should have a colour’. There was a piece of music that my grandmother used to play – ‘When the deep purple falls’ blah blah blah whatever it’s called. I was just happy to be in a band and to be making some money.”

In the late ’60s, folk singer and songwriter Donovan was riding high with a run of hit singles that included such classics as Sunshine Superman, Mellow Yellow and Hurdy Gurdy Man.

During that successful and intensely creative period, Donovan worked with both Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, who subsequently joined forces in Led Zeppelin.

And in 1969, a stellar line-up of musicians was assembled for the recording of Donovan’s most audacious song to date.

This heavy-rocking number was named Barabajagal.

To create its powerful sound, the singer was backed by guitarist Jeff Beck and two members of Beck's band – bassist Ronnie Wood and drummer Micky Waller – plus The Rolling Stones’ favourite guest keyboard player Nicky Hopkins.

And on top of all that, three great female backing singers were added into the mix.

“We knew that people were gonna go crazy listening to this amazing thing,” Donovan says now.

And as he tells MusicRadar the story of Barabajagal, he begins by giving credit to the producer who did so much to shape his career – Mickie Most.

“It started one night in 1969,” Donovan says. “I needed a new single, because my last single was dropping off the charts, so Mickie says to me, ‘What have you got?’

“I played him three songs and he picked out Barabajagal. He said, ‘What the fuck is that thing called? I can't even pronounce it!'

“And he says, ‘We’ll get a band in and I’ll just roll the tape and start recording, and we won't know what the fuck is going to happen. Is that alright, Don?’ I said, ‘Yeah!’”

It was a no-brainer for Mickie Most to have another of his acts, The Jeff Beck Group, backing Donovan on this track.

A year earlier, Most had produced the group’s first album Truth, credited solely to Beck, which had the guitarist joined by Wood, Waller and a young singer named Rod Stewart.

In 1969, this same line-up was working with Most on a second album.

Donovan recalls: “Mickie said, ‘I'm doing Beck now, and I'm recording a thing called Beck-Ola. Why don't I bring Jeff in with his band?'”

For this session, Rod Stewart’s services were not required, but Donovan was well-acquainted with Jeff Beck.

“I felt kind of close with Beck,” he says. “He was living with Celia Hammond, the model, and she was best friends with my wife Linda.”

As Most had suggested, none of the musicians involved were permitted to hear Donovan’s new song before the recording session began.

As Donovan remembers it: “Mickie had said, ‘‘Nobody's got to know the song, okay? You don't play them the song until five minutes before I start the tapes. What do you think?’ I said, ‘Yeah, let's do it!’

“So for the session, Mickie had a table laid out with all the hors d'oeuvres, the best wines, and I arrive, and after me it's the drummer, Micky Waller. Always the drummer arrives first for a session.

“And I haven’t played the song to anyone yet. But as the drummer's getting the kit together he’s playing this rhythm and I said, ‘So you heard the song? You're not supposed to hear the song.’ He said, ‘What song?’ I said, ‘The track we're doing - you’re playing the drum pattern!’ He said, ‘Well, that's fucking all right, innit? See you later!’

“And then the next one comes in. It’s the guy on piano who played with the Stones – Nicky Hopkins.

“So Mickie said, ‘All right, you can play the song to Nicky.’ So Nicky goes up to the piano and he says nothing. He never did. And he opens a fucking Silver Surfer comic on the piano. He loved the Silver Surfer.

“He goes, ‘Hey Don, what’s this song? There’s only two chords.’ And I dive into it with my J-45 acoustic guitar named Cherry Red. And after a minute or so Nicky goes, ‘I've got it.’

“So then the three girls walk in – Lesley Duncan, Suzi Quatro and Madeline Bell…”

These three singers were gifted and highly respected.

In subsequent years, Lesley Duncan recorded solo and with Elton John, singing backups on Elton's early ’70s albums Madman Across The Water and Tumbleweed Connection – the latter featuring a version of Duncan’s ballad Love Song, performed as a duet. She was also a backing singer for Pink Floyd on The Dark Side Of The Moon.

Madeline Bell performed as a solo singer and with the group Blue Mink, and took session work with The Rolling Stones (on the classic You Can’t Always Get What You Want), Joe Cocker, Elton John, Giorgio Moroder and more.

Suzi Quatro, the most famous of the three, had success in the ‘70s as a glam rock star with hits such as Can The Can and Devil Gate Drive released on Mickie Most’s label RAK.

Donovan says of this trio’s contribution to his track: “I played it to the girls one time and they went, ‘Ow! Goo Goo Barabajagal!’ So right away they got it.”

Next in was the bass player. Ronnie Wood.

Donovan continues: “Woody comes in. ‘All right, what's going on?’ I play the song to Woody and he goes, ‘Okay, got it.’

“And then Mickie says, ‘Where the fuck is Jeff?’

And right at that moment Jeff strolls in, and it's like Spinal Tap. It really is. He walks in, and we're all sitting around waiting, and he sits down and nobody says a word. And finally Mickie says, ‘Jeff, where's your guitar?’

“Jeff looks around and says, ‘Yeah, where the fuck is it?’ And then he remembers. He’s like, ‘Oh, shit! It’s locked in the van on its way to Leeds for our gig tomorrow.’

“But then he says, ‘Just call up any of the rental agencies in town, and order a Fender Strat, and tell them who it's for.’ And that was it. We made the call and Jeff got the Strat.

“So we play the song once, we play it twice, and then Mickie says, ‘That's it. No more rehearsals. I’m recording the next one!’

“And we kick in, and everybody is in order, and we’re doing it – but Mickie was going to have to put it together and there was gonna have to be a drum break, because you couldn't go on forever. So at one point Mickie says, ‘Stop!’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ’It's a train, and it’s going helter-skelter down the fucking track. We've got to stop it somewhere.’

“So Mickie tells Micky the drummer, ‘We've got to stop this train and then start it again.’ Then Mickie says, ‘What's going to happen after that?’

"Well, I had a pal with me, Julian, who played harmonica, and he said, ‘I’ve got a poem that Don can read.’ And I looked at it, and Mickie looked at it, and he said, ‘Can you do this?’ I said, Yeah.’

“So we stopped the train, and then the train started again. That’s the coda for the song. And Mickie went, ‘Jesus Christ, this is unbelievable!’”

Barabajagal was released as a single in June 1969 and rose to No.12 in the UK and No.36 in the US.

The initial pressings gave the song its full title: Goo Goo Barabajagal (Love Is Hot).

It was Donovan’s last big hit. It also remains one of his greatest and most experimental songs. And as he says now, in tribute to his departed friend: “Jeff was incredible on it.”

Of all the millions of songs that have been written since the dawn of time, only one can claim to have laid the foundations for what would become Led Zeppelin.

Beck’s Bolero was recorded in 1966 as Jeff Beck’s first solo outing after the guitarist had made a name for himself as Eric Clapton’s replacement in The Yardbirds.

Clocking in at just 2min 53 secs, Beck’s Bolero featured an all-star cast with Beck and Jimmy Page on guitars, Keith Moon on drums, John Paul Jones on bass and Nicky Hopkins on keyboards.

The sessions went well and the plan was for the quintet to find a singer and continue as a supergroup like Cream – who had been formed by Eric Clapton only a handful of days earlier.

This suggestion resulted in the famous quip from either Keith Moon or John Entwistle, depending on who you ask, stating that the new project would go down “like a lead zeppelin”.

However, it was not meant to be. Page and Jones would form Led Zeppelin two years later with Robert Plant and John Bonham.

Beck said of Page: “I fell in love with Jim’s playing 'cause we spoke the same language. We were out to get the most out of the studio, bending the rules, like using slap echo – doing all the things you weren’t allowed to.”

The rhythms in Beck’s Bolero were inspired by 1928 orchestral piece Boléro by French composer Maurice Ravel, though Beck chose to bastardise the concept into his own overture of wailing bends, psychedelic slide and thunderous riffs.

In doing so, he created a sound that would help shape the early hard rock and heavy metal movement of the following decade, thanks to its mind-bending cacophony of meatier and thicker distorted guitars, aggressive strumming and crashing cymbals. Beck himself even once stated the song contained “the first heavy metal riff ever written and I wrote it”, though if you look a little deeper, its origins aren’t quite as simple as that.

The original writing credits were assigned to Beck, but this is something Page immediately contested, resulting in his name being recorded as the sole author.

Both guitarists agreed it was Page who came up with the chords and rhythms, but Beck felt he’d also made enough of his own significant contributions to the arrangement.

Page’s recollection in a 1977 interview with Guitar Player magazine, however, was somewhat different.

“On the Beck’s Bolero thing… the track was done, and then the producer just disappeared,” he explained. “He [Simon Napier-Bell] was never seen again; he simply didn’t come back, he just sort of left me and Jeff to it.”

Page went on to reveal how the track came to be and who performed what part.

“Jeff was playing and I was in the box. And even though he says he wrote it, I wrote it. I’m playing the [Fender Electric XII] 12-string on it. Beck’s doing the slide bits, and I’m basically playing around the chords.”

He added: “The idea was built around Maurice Ravel’s Bolero. It’s got a lot of drama to it; it came off right. It was a good line-up too, with Keith Moon and everything.”

Beck later admitted: “No, I didn’t get a songwriting credit, but you win some and lose some down the years."

Thankfully, the guitarists were able to put water under the bridge and remain friends in the years that followed.

Although Beck’s Bolero was recorded during sessions that took place at London’s IBC Studios on 16 and 17 May 1966, the track was not released until the following year, as the B-side to Beck’s debut single Hi Ho Silver Lining.

Beck’s Bolero was also included on Beck’s first solo album Truth, released in 1968, which saw the guitarist partnered with Rod Stewart on lead vocals, Ronnie Wood on bass and Micky Waller on drums.

The sessions took place before Beck had made the jump from Gibsons to Fenders.

“I was using a Les Paul for the lead guitar and for the backwards slide guitar through a Vox AC30,” Beck once explained. “It was the only amp I had and it was covered with beer! Actually, I think it was the beer that gave it it’s sound!”

He also noted how an accident while the tape was rolling ended up making rock ’n’ roll history.

“You can hear Moon screaming in the middle of the record over the drum break,” Beck revealed. “If you listen after the drum break you can only hear the cymbal afterwards 'cause he knocked the mic over! Wonderful!”

For Page, this was undoubtedly one of the more memorable moments of the recording process. “You can hear him scream, then hit the mic, and from there all you hear are the cymbals,” he said. “The song just continues. It was sort of funny.”

The composition itself is divided into three sections – starting with the opening Ravel-inspired rhythms underneath Beck’s soaring guitar leads, with the guitar shifting between major and minor to create haunting atmospheres.

Things calm down for Beck’s heavily ambience-effected slide solo, which explores more of a psychedelic feel before reverting back to the intro idea.

Then it all explodes with a fuzzed-up single-note riff that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut, released some three years later.

The last minute of the song revisits the original motif but in a much more chaotic manner, with all of its elements fighting each other for space in a remarkably forceful way.

It all ends abruptly, closing with some reversed leads from Beck, using a similar concept to the title track of Jimi Hendrix’s debut album Are You Experienced, released just two months later.

It was Page who suggested using the technique on Beck’s recording.

“The phasing was Jimmy’s idea,” Beck admitted. “I played a load of waffle and he reversed it.”

While Hi Ho Silver Lining ended up becoming Beck’s biggest hit, being embraced by football crowds up and down the country, its B-side was infinitely more groundbreaking.

Beck’s Bolero laid down the blueprint for the heavier guitar music that arrived in the following decade and, of course, gave the world its first taste of what would soon become Led Zeppelin.

John McLaughlin isn’t always mentioned in lists of the greatest-ever guitar players. But of course he should be.

McLaughlin is more of a guitarist’s guitar player, meaning that those in the game know, while outsiders overlook him.

“That’s true,” he tells MusicRadar. “But the thing about guitar is that if your playing is really good, people get to know you quickly.”

Asked to name the guitarist he believes is the most underrated of all time, McLaughlin replies without hesitation:

“Leslie West. Remember him? From Mountain. I went to see them in New York, and I’d never heard of Leslie West at the time, but I’d been hearing his guitar playing on some stuff.

“It was just beautiful. We lost him early, and I think that guy was really an unsung hero.”

McLaughlin himself was hailed by none other than Jeff Beck as the greatest player of his generation.

He says now: “Well, Jeff was a sweetheart. And I felt that Jeff was outstanding in every way. He had a way of playing, didn’t he?

“I remember when we started playing together in the ‘70s, and subsequently, later, and whether we’d be jamming or in the studio it was inspiring.

“It was in his fingers. He would just nail it. And his tone, it was like butter.

“He had the tone, the technique, everything. He had the taste, too. I mean, I don’t have many guitar players’ albums on my iPhone, but I can tell you this – Jeff is there.

McLaughlin adds: “I think everybody kind of agrees with me, right? I think even Eric Clapton, and however many other guitar players, I think that we all agree that Jeff was killer.

“We all miss him, you know? But we’re all onward to the same destination, so we might as well laugh while we’re alive. So, there you go.”

Epiphone has teamed up with the Gibson Custom Shop once again to bring us an affordable replica of one of the most iconic – and valuable – electric guitars in history, Jeff Beck’s 1954 Oxblood Les Paul.

Joining the million-dollar guitar club in January, when it and over 130 of Beck’s guitars went under the hammer at Christie’s, the Oxblood Les Paul was a true one-off, and arguably his most-famous guitar.

This was the guitar he was pictured with on the cover of his 1975 debut solo album, Blow By Blow. It was originally a Goldtop, fitted with P-90s, until its owner – not yet Beck – asked for some modifications, and came into Beck’s possession just as his “YardBurst” 1959 Les Paul Standard was in need of repair.

Speaking to Guitarist ahead of its auction, Amelia Walker, specialist head of Private & Iconic Collections, Christie’s London, detailed the story of how the original Oxblood Les Paul ended up with Beck. It goes back to 1972. Beck, Bogert & Appice are on tour in the States, and Beck is looking for a Les Paul in Memphis.

“His search for a new Les Paul coincided with the ‘Yardburst’ getting damaged again – because it has had a few fair breaks, that poor guitar. So he was really looking for a guitar that could replicate that fat Les Paul sound,” said Walker. “BBA was a loud band and that was their signature [style] – a power trio with a lot of volume.”

Beck visited the venerable Strings & Things but didn’t find what he was looking for. Ironically, his friend, Buddy Smith, who was driving him around these stores, had visited Strings & Things not long before and had picked up the Oxblood.

Unbeknownst to Beck, this was exactly the guitar that he was after, and it sitting right there in in Smith’s car.

“Buddy hadn’t yet paid for it, however. The guitar itself had been owned by another guitarist,” said Walker. “This guy had taken it into Strings & Things six months previously and said, ‘It’s a Goldtop. I want you to respray the guitar to match my shoes [laughs]. I don’t want these P-90s, either, I want humbucking pickups and I want a slimmer neck profile. Here you go.’

“So they did all the modifications that we see now. Then, when he went back to pick it up, he decided he didn’t like it any more, and then Buddy Davis walks in, says, ‘I love it.’”

Beck and Smith made the deal, and the Oxblood was about to get famous.

Now, back to the replicas. In 2009, Gibson unveiled a limited edition Custom Shop run of them, 50 aged to match the original. If memory serves us well, there was a similar Epiphone Oxblood Les Paul released around that time, and it, too, had a wraparound bridge like the original, but this release – launched today to celebrate Beck’s birthday – is unquestionably a very different instrument, with a higher-end spec and more faithful to the original.

As per previous Inspired By Gibson Custom, this is Epiphone going all-in with the spec at this price point. We have Gibson USA pickups, with a Custombucker humbucker pairing in the neck and bridge positions. There is a Gibson Historic Wraparound bridge.

The fundamentals of this Epiphone guitar’s build are also quintessentially Gibson. The body is solid mahogany, capped with maple, and it has a glued-in mahogany neck shaped into a Jeff Beck custom profile (“a Large C”), and joining the body with a long neck tenon – one of the biggest selling points of these Inspired By Gibson Custom models.

Another selling point – huge selling point – is the return of the ‘Open Book’ style headstock, with the Epiphone logo inlaid in aged MOP. Very tasteful, and that aged mother of pearl matches the trapezoid inlays on the rosewood fingerboard.

Again, befitting the hotrodded vibe of the original, this has been fitted with a set of Schaller M6 90 tuners. There’s a Graph Tech nut. Under the hood you’ve got ‘50s-style wiring, with Mallory caps, CTS potentiometers. On these models you have Switchcraft jacks and switches as standard.

The whole thing ships in a hard-shell guitar case, and this is as high-end – and as cool – as an Epiphone Les Paul gets. Priced £1,199/$1,1299, the Jeff Beck 1954 Les Paul Oxblood is available now. See Epiphone for more details.

Punch the words ‘iconic keyboard intros’ into a Google search and a whole raft of songs will splurge out in the search results, most of them big rock or pop classics — Seven Seas Of Rhye and Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, A Whiter Shade Of Pale by Procul Harum, Jump by Van Halen, The Final Countdown by Europe, Bloody Well Right by Supertramp, Lady Madonna by The Beatles, Take On Me by A-ha, Baba O-Riley by The Who…

The list goes on and on.

But there is one song that is noticeably absent from these results, possibly because it is not played on a Steinway grand, a Hammond B3 organ or that staple of mid-80s synthdom, the Yamaha DX7.

This song is played on a Hohner Clavinet, an instrument produced from 1962 to 1984 and originally intended for home use and the gentle strains of late Medieval, Baroque and classical music.

But by the early ’70s the clavinet’s fat, gritty, staccato tones were finding favour as a defining instrument in funk and soul.

The clavinet was a fresh and distinctive sound, and its most iconic recorded moment was on Superstition, a song written and recorded by Stevie Wonder.

Superstition was released as a single in October 1972 and shot to No.1 in the Billboard Hot 100.

On Superstition, Stevie Wonder laid down one of the meanest, groove-laden funk riffs ever committed to tape.

It heralded in a song that would become regarded as one of his most innovative works.

By the dawn of the 1970s, the singer, musician, songwriter and producer born Stevland Hardaway Morris was taking control of his career.

A decade earlier, as a prodigiously talented 11-year-old, he had been signed by Berry Gordy to the new Tamla Motown label in 1961 and given the stage name ‘Little Stevie Wonder’.

Because of Wonder’s age, Gordy drew up a rolling five-year contract, in which royalties would be held over until Wonder turned 21. Meanwhile, Wonder and his mother were paid a weekly stipend to cover their expenses.

On 13 May 1971, Wonder reached his 21st birthday, and after 10 years of being under contract with Tamla Motown, he consciously let his contract expire.

By then he was a creative and commercial force to be reckoned with, having scored hits with Fingertips (1963), Uptight (Everything’s Alright) (1965), My Cherie Amour (1969), Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours (1970) and also having co-written songs for other artists, such as the 1970 hit single Tears Of A Clown for Smokey Robinson & The Miracles.

Wonder then signed a new, 120-page contract with Motown, which gave him complete artistic control and a much higher royalty rate.

In March 1972, he released the first album under the new contact, Music Of My Mind, a conceptual record featuring songs that flowed together thematically.

This album was inspired by social, political and mystical themes, and it marked the beginning of a long collaboration with Robert Margouleff and Malcom Cecil of pioneering electronica duo Tonto’s Expanding Head Band.

By 1972, Wonder was relishing the artistic freedom that his new Motown contract allowed him. From May to July that year, he and his new collaborators began working on the songs that would become his 15th album, Talking Book.

Electric Lady studios in New York’s Greenwich Village was the location for the recording of the album’s key track, Superstition.

Electric Lady was a relatively new facility, designed as an artist-led studio, and had been a creative home for Jimi Hendrix before his untimely death in 1970. By contrast with most studios of the time, Electric Lady had a relaxed ethos.

For starters, working hours were completely flexible. During the Talking Book sessions, Wonder, Margouleff and Cecil were accustomed to starting work at 7pm and finishing at sunrise.

“If we needed to work three days in a row, it didn’t make any difference — there were no restrictions at Electric Lady,” Margouleff told Curtis Berry in a piece about the recording of Superstition, published on the website of WSDG, an architectural acoustic consultancy. “Plus it was just beautiful and they had a ton of custom equipment.”

At the core of the studio’s technology was ‘Tonto’ — a massive conglomeration of multiple synthesisers, such as Moogs and ARPs, which played a huge role in Wonder’s work at the time.

Due to Wonder’s lack of sight, the whole studio was arranged as ergonomically as possible.

“We set up the instruments in a big circle,” said Margouleff. “We had the drums, Tonto, the clavinets and the Rhodes keyboards set up in the control room, and there was always an open mic. Stevie could easily move from one instrument to another as he saw fit.”

In addition to singing, Wonder played drums, Moog bass and Hohner Clavinet on Superstition.

Aside from the guitar and horn overdubs that would be added later, no rehearsals were needed.

All the sounds were in Wonder’s head, and the track was developed by him in the studio.

One other musician who had a significant impact on the song was Jeff Beck.

When Wonder learned that Beck was an admirer of his work, he invited the guitarist to play on the album.

At that time, Beck was in the early stages of putting together hard rock power trio Beck, Bogart & Appice.

"There was a time when I was pretty bored with my music, and I think somebody at CBS asked me what I wanted to do," Beck recalled in the 1984 book The Guitar Greats by John Tobler and Stuart Grundy. "I said I loved Stevie's stuff, so they quietly broke it to him that I was interested in doing something together, and he was really receptive.”

An agreement was quickly drawn up for Beck to become involved in the sessions that became the Talking Book album, in return for Wonder writing him a song.

That song would become Superstition, and the first germs of it reportedly came when Wonder stepped out of the Electric Lady studio for a few moments one day and Beck got behind the drum kit.

When Wonder returned he allegedly told Beck to keep playing — and then began to improvise on the clavinet over the top of the beat.

“One day I was sitting at the drum kit, which I love to play when nobody’s around, doing this beat,” recalled Beck in Annette Carson’s book Jeff Beck: Crazy Fingers. “Then the lick came out – Superstition. I thought, ‘He’s given me the riff of the century!’”

Wonder created most of the song on the spot and he and Beck laid down a rough demo of the track that same day.

Wonder’s signature riff actually consists of two parts, both fed through a synth and panned to the left and right of the mix to create one of the meanest funk grooves ever to appear on a mainstream record.

It’s a stunningly infectious polyrhythmic blend, over which Wonder’s top line vocal melody flows.

Despite Beck’s initial drum rhythm it was Wonder who played drums on the final version, his fluid, instinctive groove owing much to his early apprenticeship with Motown drumming legend Benny Benjamin of Motown studio band, the Funk Brothers.

One element that takes the groove to real heights is the rhythmic counterpoint of the brass, which enters the mix 49 seconds in, and is played by horn arranger Steve Madaio on trumpet and Trevor Lawrence on saxophone.

There’s a lean simplicity to every element of the song, with each note and beat really being made to count.

Wonder’s muscular Moog bass line nestles seamlessly with the kick drum and there are some beautifully fluid lines that underpin and excite, such as at 0:51, where the bass echoes the dizzying top line melody of the brass.

At times, it’s hard to believe that this isn’t a bass guitar, as the feel and the performance are so in-the-pocket and exhilarating, such as at 1:16, where the Moog bass swoops up above the drum fill on the break.

The vocal delivery is seamless, soulful and gritty. This track may have been constructed primarily by Wonder overdubbing in the studio but it has all the feel and exhilaration of a searing live band performance.

Wonder’s initial plan was to let Jeff Beck record Superstition as part of their agreement and then let Beck release his version first, with newly-formed power trio Beck, Bogart and Appice. But when the release of the trio’s debut album was delayed, events quickly changed.

Motown CEO Berry Gordy heard Wonder’s Superstition and was blown away by it. Gordy knew instinctively it would be a massive hit and insisted it be released first to propel the sales of the Talking Book album.

Superstition was released as the lead single from Talking Book on 24 October 1972, while Beck’s version was released months later, in March 1973, on the Beck Bogart & Appice album.

Gordy’s instincts were spot on. Superstition shot to No.1 on the Billboard Hot 100, giving Wonder his second No.1 single, the first being Fingertips back in 1963.

Superstition marked the emergence of Stevie Wonder as a mature solo artist, one with complete artistic control over his own music. Pivotally, it was the song that enabled him to cross over to the predominantly white mainstream market.

The song represented a significant personal achievement for Wonder. In 1973, in an interview with Tony Norman of NME, he said Superstition was “really the first successful tune I’ve written for myself”.

Jeff Beck received no songwriting credit for Superstition and the release of Wonder’s version ahead of Beck’s arguably meant that the guitarist missed out on a potential hit. But if Beck bore any grudges, he didn’t voice them.

To his credit, Wonder did give the song Cause We've Ended As Lovers to Beck, which was written by Wonder for his wife Syreeta.

Beck went on to record an instrumental version of the song for his landmark album Blow By Blow (1975). The song inspired one of Beck’s greatest performances and became a showcase for his profound talent and technique.

37 years after the release of Superstition, at the 2009 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary Concert, Beck and Wonder took to the stage to perform a stunning rendition of the song.

Over five decades on from its release, Superstition sounds every bit as vital and enthralling as it ever did.

Wonder first played the song live, months before its release, when he toured as the support act on The Rolling Stones 1972 US tour through June and July. His presence on the tour heralded his impending mainstream appeal. But at its heart, Superstition remains a peerless soul classic, albeit one with a monstrous, earthshaking funk groove.

It had been thought that Jeff Beck’s final recording was on Mark Knopfler’s charity single Going Home, which came out in March 2024. However, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band guitarist Mick Rogers has revealed that he knows better.

In a new interview with Guitar World magazine, Rogers spilled the beans on the guitar legend’s final session in August 2022: “I went down to his house, his manager - a great friend of mine, Colin Newman - put us two together.

“We had a play together, and I believe I’ve got the last recording Jeff Beck ever did in the studios. We got together with some rockabilly guys and did an album which still hasn’t been released.

“I spent a day with Jeff and the famous white Strat was sitting on the couch. I thought: ‘Jeff, pick it up and play it!’ He was very sheepish, but what a guy! We could empty a room because we were just talking about rockabilly and how he grew up - we were both Cliff Gallup fans.”

So why hasn’t the album been released, you might well ask? Well, apparently, Beck wasn’t too happy with his tone on the recording.

“We played a track called Lucille by Little Richard, but nothing came of it because Jeff was playing through his dodgy Marshall and didn’t like the sound,” Rogers said.

"He said: ‘We’ll do it again, later on.’ Of course, he then went on tour with Mr Depp. When I listen to the track now, I think: ‘Jeff, there’s nothing wrong with your sound.’ He could have played through a paper cup, and it still would have sounded like Jeff Beck! He was just wonderful.”

Of course, he sadly didn’t get a chance to correct the recording. The following month Beck went on tour with Johnny Depp, which went on until his final ever show in Reno, Nevada on 12 November. Two months later he died.

Rogers had no news on when this recording might be released. Given its likely status as Beck’s final session, though, you suspect that it’s unlikely to remain in the vaults forever...

Jerry Cantrell’s new solo album, I Want Blood, is out now and if you pick it up you’ll hear a ton of wah pedal, a ton of talk box, and maybe a Rolling Stones influence, too, and we have the late electric guitar maestro Jeff Beck and legendary film director Martin Scorsese to thank for it.

Speaking to Guitar World, the Alice In Chains guitarist revealed that his influences on the album run the gamut. There are those we might expect, such as Black Sabbath riff-master Tony Iommi, who has always been a lodestar for Cantrell’s writing. But when faced with writer’s block, the lyrics for his follow-up to 2021's Brighten proving hard to come by, Cantrell took himself down to his local cinema in search of inspiration.

“With Off the Rails, I was stuck – didn’t quite know where to finish it – so I went and saw Killers of the Flower Moon,” he says “There’s this scene where all of the workers are burning the fields, and they become distorted figures on the screen. That’s where I got ‘heat distortion’ from. Even though it has nothing to do with the film, specifically, Martin Scorsese broke me out of my writer’s block and I was able to get a second verse started.”

Another Scorsese picture give him a guitar tone to work with. Watching The Departed, the Stones’ Gimme Shelter had Cantrell adding a vintage tremolo pedal to his pedalboard.

“Keith Richards uses an amazing tremolo effect on his guitar,” says Cantrell. “I copped that. We found a 1958 DeArmond tremolo pedal, and I put it on Echoes Of Laughter and maybe another song.”

Cantrell has long been a fan of the talk box, breaking it out on early AIC classics such as Man In The Box. I Want Blood was an occasion to use two different talk boxes, with producer Joe Barresi’s encyclopaedic knowledge of vintage gear turning Cantrell onto a late ‘60s model after showing him a video of Jeff Beck playing it.

“There is a lot of Cry Baby and talk box on this record,” says Cantrell. “We went heavy with those. We used two different kinds of talk boxes on on Vilified and Throw Me a Line. One is the Dunlop that I’ve been using forever, which is just the box on the floor and the tube coming up to the mic.

“But while we were messing around with talk boxes one day, Joe showed me a clip of Jeff Beck with a Kustom ‘The Bag’ on. It’s much smaller – like a bag that hangs over your shoulder, with a much smaller straw and a wood bead for you to hold onto with your teeth.”

That bag came in custom colours, all the psychedelic patterns of the era. It was not just for guitar. Kustom Electronics designed it for guitar, electric piano, harpsichord and organ. Any amplified instrument would work. This is what you are hearing on Beck’s She’s A Woman, from Blow By Blow. You might well hear it on future Alice In Chains recordings. Cantrell is a fan.

“It was a different feel, but it was so fucking expressive!” he says. “I had never seen that clip of Jeff Beck before, and then Joe was like, ‘I’ve got one of these, man. We should try this!’ So he whipped that thing out. I believe the Bag is what you’re hearing on Vilified and Throw Me a Line.”

I Want Blood is out now via Double J Music/Virgin. You can read the full interview with Jerry Cantrell in the latest issue of Guitar World.

One of Jeff Beck’s most famous guitars has been sold for £1,068,500 at auction.

The 1954 'Oxblood' Gibson Les Paul was pictured on the cover of Beck’s classic 1975 album Blow By Blow.

The guitar had a pre-auction estimate of £300,000 - £500,000.

A representative of auctioneers Christie’s stated: "Originally it was not an Oxblood. It was a Gold Top.

"Fans will know it from the cover of his debut solo album Blow By Blow, released in 1975, recorded with George Martin.

“He [Beck] used it for the encore at the end of David Bowie's final performance as Ziggy Stardust in July 1973.”

Blow By Blow was the first album credited to Beck as a solo artist and includes one of his most celebrated tracks - Cause We've Ended as Lovers, written by Stevie Wonder.

On January 22, a selection of Jeff Beck’s guitars and other items of gear will be auctioned by Christie’s in London.

Ahead of the auction, Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry has told MusicRadar about his long friendship with Beck and the discussions they had about the tools of their trade.

Whenever you ran into Jeff on the road, what were your observations about the gear he traveled with?

“He had some cool guitars he traveled with that he'd picked up. I'm sure he had a bunch that was given to him over the years, but on the road, it was pretty much whatever current Custom Shop Strat he'd gotten from Fender. That was it.

“And with his pedalboard, in all the years I'd seen him play, he only had maybe two or three effects. I know he was using a Klon [overdrive] for a while. And he had a wah-wah pedal, and he'd use one of those voice box things with the tube [Talkbox]. I think he had an SPX90 Yamaha, the stereo delay in the '80s or '90s when everyone was using them.

How about amps?

“Every time I'd seen him, he'd usually have a Marshall and a Fender. That was it. One thing I know that he did is rather than have reverb coming from his amp he would have the reverb put on after the fact through the monitors.”

Why do you think he did that?

“Because sometimes, when you're pushing the amp, when you have reverb on it, the reverb gets washed away. You only hear it when you stop playing, you know?

“But in the studio, when you've got your amp cranked, and then you put reverb on it, it sounds like you're playing in a room. It's like you're in an echo chamber.

“To get that, he would have the reverb come up through his monitors. So, his reverb was really, really present. I know that's one of the things he used to do.”

Of the things you observed, what other nuances impacted Jeff's tone?

“Another thing is—and we're talking about strings now—I'm pretty sure I heard him say he used .8s when he was around the house.

“All of us, you know, are getting older, and we're all starting to have our knuckles get bigger. So, to save wear and tear, he would use .8s when practicing around the house. But when he was on the road, he used .9s. I'm pretty sure that's accurate.”

After Jeff passed, you got to play one of his Strats on tour with the Hollywood Vampires…

“It was his number three [Stratocaster]. The whole premise of the Vampires was to pay homage to the guys who had passed on.

“I think we were going to have it on the road with Aerosmith, but when that [the band’s Peace Out farewell tour] got cancelled, I gave it back to Jeff's guitar tech.

“He's the guy helping the family put Jeff's stuff together for the auction. I think he might have given it [the Stratocaster] to Billy Gibbons to play just to keep it out on the road. I'm hoping to get a chance to play it again—but again, there's nothing special about it except that it was Jeff’s."

Jeff's iconic guitars ranged from his Oxblood Les Paul to his beat-up Tele to his many Strats. Which guitar do most associate him with?

“He really found his voice when he just stuck to the Strat, you know? With the variety of tones, there's just something about the Strat. The way it's set up with the volume knob right there and how the vibrato arm just falls right on your hand, that guitar was designed for him. And once he started playing the Strat exclusively, he never went back.

“Listening back to some of his recordings from when he was still using his Les Paul, compared to how his style kept evolving, he couldn't do a lot of the stuff he was doing without the vibrato arm. He used that like a musical instrument. It wasn't just an effect to dive bomb.”

No one really used a vibrato arm on a Strat quite like Jeff Beck.

“Even Jimi Hendrix didn't use it as musically as Jeff did. He really used it to make the guitar sound like he was playing slide. You couldn't tell the difference. He used it in a really musical way, and you couldn't do that with any other guitar.”

What was Jeff like off the stage?

“I think we spent more time in his garage than we did looking at guitars! If he wasn't playing, he was working on a hot rod. He had some close calls; he had some bad accidents and f**ked up his hands, you know? But he loved that whole '50s thing. He played great rockabilly.”

Jeff played a lot of that fingerstyle in a way that's unique to him. He played with a pick early on but switched to fingerstyle later. Did he ever mention why?

“I said to him, 'Why get rid of the pick?' He said, 'Well, one night, I was doing a gig, I dropped the pick, and I was actually kind of too drunk. I was afraid if I bent over to pick it up, I'd fall. So, I played the rest of the show without the pick and started to really like it.' That's what he told me.”

“I don't know if it went like that, but he liked to play all that rockabilly stuff and shit. He said, 'I can do a lot more of that without a pick,' so he just stuck with it.

“When he played without a pick, his thumb was his main hammer. A lot of times, when you play without a pick, if you're used to playing with a pick, it's a combination of your pointer [index] finger and your thumb. But he pretty much relied on his thumb.”

What can we learn from Jeff's reliance on relatively common guitars?

“I mean… that's what he chose to play live. I think that says a lot. Obviously, it was about the music. He was able to get what he needed out of the latest, greatest Strat from the Custom Shop. I don't think he was attached to them the way a lot of us are to our particular guitars. I don't think there was one particular guitar he had on the road with him all the time that was number one.”

It was more about the player than the gear, right?

“He had the Noiseless pickups and whatever odds and ends they did at the Custom Shop, but there's nothing special about the guitars. I don't think he was concerned about it, though I'd imagine he'd play all his vintage stuff in the studio.

“But whenever I'd see him play live for real, you know, it was an off-the-rack Strat. He was never one to say, 'I've got to play that. That's my number one. That's the one I can't live without.’ I think that was interesting. He looked at the guitars like tools, not something you get attached to.”

Back in the early ’70s, Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry got a nasty surprise after seeing one of his biggest heroes, Jeff Beck, in concert. On his way home after the gig, Joe realised that a new fuzz pedal he’d been given that night had just been stolen from Beck!

But as Joe tells tells MusicRadar, he did make it up to Jeff many years later…

The theft of Beck’s pedal happened around the time that Aerosmith signed to Columbia Records in 1972.

As Joe recalls now: “We had a little bit of cash to get tickets to see Jeff play, which would have been after Rod Stewart left his band. And as we were driving home from the gig, our new road manager pulled out this Colorsound [Tone Bender Fuzz] that he’d snatched from Jeff’s road box.

“I said, 'Where did you get that?’ He said, 'Well, there were like four or five of them in this box. I thought I'd give it to you.'

“I said, 'We don't do that. We don't steal stuff.' I was pretty pissed off about it, you know?

“But before I had a chance to try and send it back to Jeff, it got stolen from me. I shouldn't have had it anyway, and the bottom line is that I always felt bad about it.”

It was many years later, after Joe had become friends with Jeff, that he was able to pay him back by giving him an original Klon Centaur - known as the holy grail of overdrive pedals.

“I saw Jeff playing one time and he was using a Klon,” he says. “It was the one with the brushed aluminium case.

“Being from Boston, near where the guy who makes them is from, I had a couple of Klons. Brad [Whitford, Aerosmith co-guitarist] and I were some of the first guys to get our hands on those. I had three or four original ones.

“So, at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, when Jeff was inducted, we played Train Kept A-Rollin' and it was a lot of fun. I took one of my original Klons, told Jeff the story, and gave him one of my Klons, an original one.”

Joe now believes that this pedal may be included in the forthcoming auction of Beck’s guitars, amps and other items of gear.

Billed by auctioneers Christie’s as simply Jeff Beck: The Guitar Collection, the event is staged in London on 22 January.

Joe says that this pedal can be easily identified. “It probably has an Aerosmith sticker on the bottom of it because anything in the Aerosmith inventory gets a sticker with a serial number,” he explains. “So if one of those comes up for sale, that's the story! And there's a little bit of mojo in that particular one.”

Join us for our traditional look back at the news and features that floated your boat this year.

Best of 2024: As cross-cultural high points go in post-war austerity Britain, the American Folk Blues Festival tours that started in 1962 took some beating. Seemingly out of nowhere, iconic blues artists of the age such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker and Sonny Boy Williamson fetched up on these shores to enlighten and dazzle.

The media loved it. In 1964, Granada Television released a special documentary, watched by 12 million people, and filmed on the platform at Wilbraham Road railway station in suburban Whalley Range, Manchester. Muddy Waters performed, sporting a trilby and Telecaster, and surrounded by a large group of fans. Another highlight of the event was Sister Rosetta Tharpe. After stepping gracefully along the puddle-strewn platform, Tharpe strapped her beloved white ‘61 Les Paul SG Custom over her long fur coat and launched into the first number of her set.

“Didn’t it rain children? Didn’t it rain?” she sang in her powerful, low tones as the audience roared its approval. Singing a gospel tale about Noah’s flood to the sodden audience on a suburban Manchester branch line was an irony not lost on the audience. Tharpe’s sheer power and electricity bowled the crowd over. “She staggered everybody,” recalled one fan.

The American Folk Blues Festival became an annual event and on Thursday, 25 February, 1965, 200 miles due south, a similar epiphany took place at the Marquee club, 90 Wardour Street in Soho, London. On the bill that night was Buddy Guy, a guitarist who had made a name for himself playing with blues icons such as Muddy Waters. Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson.

Buddy Guy was a pioneer of the use of distortion and feedback in the blues and his playing was unlike anyone else around. His style was dynamic, fearless and utterly enthralling. He would search for the highest squalling notes, all delivered with impeccable feel and emotion.

As he stepped out on stage at the Marquee that evening, the audience included guitar luminaries of the British blues explosion, such as Eric Clapton. He was all too familiar with Buddy’s talent having heard him on records by Muddy Waters, Little Walter and Willie Dixon. "Guy’s playing just stood out in the mix, because of the originality and vitality of his playing, recalled Clapton in 2005, as he and BB King inducted Buddy Guy into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Clapton went on to describe the impact of Buddy’s performance at the Marquee back in 1965. “In the flesh, he was earth shattering,” recalled Clapton. “His style on every level was fantastic. Doing all the things we would later come to associate with Jimi Hendrix, playing with his teeth, his feet, and behind his head. He brought the house crashing down.”

Clapton recalled that Buddy gave a “thundering performance, delivering the blues with finesse and passion in a way I had never heard before”. It also set Clapton to thinking that a trio was a pretty good line-up for a band.

“All in all, everything about that night was deeply profound for me," Clapton added. "The blues was clearly alive and well and it looked good too, for as well as being the real thing, musically Buddy was a star. His suit, his hair, his moves, his sunburst Strat, everything was sharp and perfect. He was for me what Elvis probably was for most other people.”

Like all the iconic blues musicians, George ‘Buddy’ Guy came up the hard way. Born in 1936 in Lettsworth, Louisiana, he was one of five children in a family of sharecroppers and began learning the guitar by playing a two-string diddley bow that he made. He later gravitated to a Harmony acoustic and in the mid-1950s was playing with bands in Baton Rouge.

In September 1957, he moved to Chicago and soon earned a reputation as a uniquely gifted player, falling under the electric crossover influence of Muddy Waters.

Buddy signed to legendary blues label Chess Records in 1958 but his career there never really flourished. The label’s founder Leonard Chess allegedly described Buddy’s style as “just making noise”, according to a piece by Greg Prato in 2012 in Rolling Stone and the label attempted instead to promote him performing R&B ballads, jazz instrumentals, soul and novelty dance tunes.

But Buddy was also working as a session guitarist with Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson among many others. And he was soon in demand.

Buddy’s first electric guitar was a Les Paul Goldtop, but this was stolen in 1957 from a club in Chicago, as he recalled in an interview with Reverb you can watch above. When it came to getting a replacement instrument, it wasn’t a Les Paul he went for, but a Stratocaster. It was an unorthodox choice for the blues. At that point Strats were more associated with country music. But Guy knew within seconds of trying the Strat that this was the guitar for him.

“Man, that guitar: you could hit a note on that guitar and hold it until next week,” he recalled about his first Strat, in the Reverb interview. “People look at you and ask, ‘Is that you still playing?’ Because it still looks like it’s holding that sound too long.”

This was the guitar he was playing at the Marquee club in 1965 and for Clapton and others in the audience such as Jeff Beck, his choice of a Strat was a revelation. That gig was still fresh in Clapton’s mind in 2013, when Guitar Center presented Clapton with the Fender Custom Eric Clapton ‘Brownie’ tribute Stratocaster.

“I heard Buddy Guy on an album called Folk Festival of the Blues where he was the new kid on the block playing with Muddy and Howling Wolf and they’re all singing and he just launched into this solo that killed everybody dead. And then I went to see him play and I thought, ‘This is the sound’. And funnily enough, I saw [Steve] Winwood using [a Strat], just about the time he was about to leave Spencer Davis. And Hendrix.”

Guy reflected to Reverb on he influenced players like Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck to use Strats. “They said they didn’t know a Strat could do that,” Guy added. “Eric and them laugh now every time I get in the room, saying, ‘Man, we didn’t know a Strat could play the blues until we saw how you did it’.”

Clapton sought out Strats with maple necks but most of the models in the UK at the time had rosewood necks.

“It wasn’t until I went through the States on tour that I started picking them up in pawn shops for a song. I’d buy four or five at a time.”

For Jeff Beck, the impact of seeing Guy at the Marquee in 1965 had a similarly profound effect.

“Buddy Guy just hit the spot for me,” Beck told Don Wilcock, author of the biography Damn Right I Got The Blues. “It’s his youthful vigour, sort of manic stuff and comedy. He has a lot of very exquisite timing and is delightfully out of key sometimes. That’s what I find so charming. It’s just a hair sharp. It wouldn’t be right, had it been dead on the note. From there on, I was like a junkie. I would go around looking for other people to share the same stuff. I was bringing it up to Eric and Jimmy – ‘Have you heard this stuff!?'”

Jimmy Page too was bowled over by Buddy Guy’s playing. "Jeff Beck and myself, we were still probably teenagers when we heard Buddy Guy,” recalled Page on The Late Show with David Letterman in December 2012. “I remember being with Jeff and playing the vinyl which was called Folk Festival Of The Blues, where Buddy Guy is really young on it and he’s playing with Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin’ Wolf, etc, and he sings two songs on it and just the whole delivery, and the passion, and the drama… the guitar is just out of this world.”

Despite his fearsome reputation as a player, until 1967 Buddy Guy was having to work as a tow truck driver in the daytime while playing clubs at night. But by the end of the decade, his fortunes were changing. In March 1969, he was invited to play at the so-called Supershow, in Staines, Middlesex, alongside Clapton, Led Zeppelin, Jack Bruce, Stephen Stills, Buddy Miles, Glen Campbell and others.

In 1972, he established the Checkerboard Lounge with LC Thurman, a blues club in Chicago’s South Side. He left the partnership in 1985 and in 1989 opened Buddy Guy’s Legends club, a venue that is still thriving today.

Guy’s career received a significant boost during the blues boom of the late eighties and early nineties, and in 1990 and 1991, Clapton invited him to be part of 24 Nights, a live album compiled from 42 concerts at London’ Royal Albert Hall. Guy went on to sign a deal with Silvertone Records and recorded his album Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues, in 1991. This was his break into the mainstream market and from that point on, Buddy Guy’s stature on the world stage was elevated.

In 2006, he appeared onstage with the Rolling Stones at the Beacon Theatre in New York, a performance so effortlessly impressive that at the end of the song, Keith Richards, handed over his black Guild Starfire to Guy as a tribute and gift.

Buddy Guy is now the last, living American blues legend. When Clapton and BB King inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame in 2005, their induction speeches were both reverential and heartfelt. When Buddy Guy himself stepped onto the podium to accept the honour, he was clearly moved.

“Look at this,” grinned Guy as he looked over to his left where BB King and Eric Clapton were standing. “To be standing here and [having to] pick up a guitar and get between these two guys and play… man, you’ve got to be me to know how I feel tonight. This is no small task.”

As he ended his acceptance speech, he left the assembled artist and music industry dignitaries in the audience with one last parting thought. “If you don’t think you got the blues,” he grinned, “just keep livin’.”

• "He showed me some things that Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson had taught him – he knew those people": Hubert Sumlin, Howlin' Wolf and their legendary blues legacy

Over 130 guitars owned by the late guitar icon Jeff Beck are headed to auction, with his 1954 Oxblood Les Paul Standard headlining a collection that will be showcased in Los Angeles before going under the hammer on 22 January in London at Christie’s.

Some of these electric guitars need little introduction, such as the 'Yardburst' 1959 Les Paul Standard. Gibson recently unveiled a Murphy Lab replica of it, restoring its Dark Cherry Sunburst finish to make it look exactly like it did during his days as a Yardbird.

The original had been stripped and modified, as was Beck's wont. Christie's says he bought the Les Paul for £175 for it in 1966, from London’s gear hotspot of the time, Selmer’s, on Charing Cross Road. It will surely down as one of the best investments in rock ’n’ roll history.

Beck used it to record Over Under Sideways Down and Happenings Ten Years Time Ago. But it also served him well during his solo career, most notably on signature tune, Beck’s Bolero.

We can’t talk about Beck’s guitar collection without mentioning the Fender Stratocaster. This was the guitar he was synonymous with, his preternatural command of the whammy bar making the instrument talk.

This forthcoming auction will see his 1954 Strat (serial number: 0062) find a new home. Steve Marriott from Humble Pie gave Beck this guitar in 1976. Like many players of the time, including Eric Clapton, Beck took advantage of Leo Fender’s bolt-on design and swapped the neck out for a ’58.

Speaking to BBC Radio 2 in 2022, Beck said Stratocasters were perfect for his needs. “It does what I want,” he said. “It's infinitely variable in its tone and capabilities with the spring-loaded bridge. It was though it was made for me – thank you very much, Leo!”

Think of Beck and the white Stratocaster will come into mind. The oldest of these was named Anoushka, after Anoushka Shankar, daughter of Ravi, who signed the guitar at Beck’s request. It was Masterbuilt in the Custom Shop by J.W. Black and was his main recording guitar for a number of years.

Beck’s wife, Sandra Beck, says it is time these guitars and more found a new home, and said that this was what he would have wanted. They are to be played.

“After some hard thinking I decided they need to be shared, played and loved again,” she said. “It is a massive wrench to part with them but I know Jeff wanted for me to share this love. He was a maestro of his trade. He never lusted after commercial success. For him it was just about the music.

“He constantly reinvented himself with his musical direction and I could not single out one person, one recording or one guitar as his favourite. I hope the future guitarists who acquire these items are able to move closer to the genius who played them. Thank you all for considering a small piece of Jeff that I am now hoping to share with you.”

Beck’s Oxblood Les Paul [pictured at the top of the page] is forecasted to be the most valuable, with estimates between £350,000 and £500,000. It has been well played, appearing on the cover of Beck’s first solo album, 1975’s Blow By Blow.

Perhaps the guitar that best exemplifies Beck’s Frankenstein sensibility when it came to modding guitars was the "Tele-Gib", though this time it was Seymour Duncan who did the modding. This guitar started life as a 1959 Fender Telecaster. Duncan found it in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1972, when it had been “butchered” by ill-advised mods.

Working in London in 1974, Duncan took the opportunity to fix this Telecaster up and give it to Beck. He had something special in mind for the pickups, and took a pair of Gibson PAF humbuckers out of an old Flying V, once owned by Lonnie Mack, and installed them in the Telecaster.

“It was hard finding the magnet wire needed for winding the coils,” recalled Duncan, writing on the Seymour Duncan website. “I found the wire at a motor repair shop and ended up with two different rolls of wire for winding the coils. I used the heavier gauge to wind the neck pickup also because I had only a small amount. I used the finer wire to wind the bridge pickup because I could get extra turns on the bobbins for increased sustain, harmonics and output.”

Beck loved it, and used it on Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers and Freeway Jam. Duncan was given an Esquire in return. It is expected to fetch between £100,000 and £150,000.

And a particular favourite of ours from this collection – a guitar that has inspired the likes of John Mayer – was Tina, the pink Jackson Soloist that was used in (and named for) Beck’s session work with Tina Turner. It is expected to fetch between £8,000 and £12,000. We’d pay that for the Kahler vibrato unit alone.

The Jeff Beck Collection will be available to view by the public from 4 to 6 December in Los Angeles, with public viewing in London opening on 15 January 2025 before the auction on the 22nd. For more details, head over to Christie’s.

Few bands are able to articulate the complexity, depth and range of human emotions quite in the same way as the Tedeschi Trucks Band. They’re the kind of group who seem to have infinite layers of dynamics to explore, with all kinds of subtle builds to bridge into the soaring rootsy hooks and spellbinding bluesy magick they typify. 

Fronted by singer/guitarist Susan Tedeschi, with husband and slide guitar maverick Derek Trucks adding his inimitable sense of flair, the band formed after the pair met while she was opening for The Allman Brothers, the legendary southern rock band her future husband had been playing in. After briefly performing together as Soul Stew Revival, which saw their respective bands merged into together, the Tedeschi Trucks Band was born in 2010 and the pair have never looked back.

This year Tedeschi is being awarded her own signature Telecaster through Fender, based on the early 90s green American Standard model that was immortalised on the cover of her 1998 Just Won’t Burn album and, for reasons she goes on to explain, has never been far from her side ever since. To have her name on an artist model is a huge honour, she tells MusicRadar, though as we learn from this conversation with the husky-voiced blues star, her career has been full of unexpected yet welcome surprises.

“Having a signature Fender guitar really is a dream come true,” she beams, video conferencing MusicRadar from the Florida home she shares with her husband and family. “You know, there’s really not a lot of women who have achieved that, so for me it’s like a triple honour.”

As she goes on to explain, the visibility of females in the music industry is improving, both on and off stage. There’s still a long way to go before the word equality can be stated with any absolute certainty, but from her perspective it’s empowering to see how girl power is thriving across the board. “I was kinda blown away when I went to the factory how many women build the guitars,” she grins. “I was like ‘Holy shit, it’s mostly girls in here!’ When I asked about that, they told me some of the men are too rough and would end up breaking the guitars! That was amazing to hear, it kinda reminded me that women have superpowers.”

 The new signature model features custom single-coil pickups voiced specifically after her prized instrument, a C profile maple neck, a Master TBX tone control and a distinctive four-ply tortoiseshell pickguard. But perhaps it’s the Aged Caribbean Mist finish that will catch people’s attentions first and foremost, no matter how far they might be from the stage. As fate would have it, the original guitar – a 1993 model acquired by Tedeschi two years later in 1995 – carried a slightly different shade of aquamarine when it found its way into her life...

“My Tele was a little more blue originally, but over time it became more green,” she continues. “Fender asked me which colour we should use for the new signature: the one it was or the one that it is. And I told them, ‘Definitely the one that it is now!’ It’s such a gorgeous colour. We’re all really happy with it... I will never look at that finish and think it’s ugly!”

If you’ve managed to catch the official Fender promotional video for the signature, you will already know it’s a guitar that sounds every bit as beautiful as it looks, especially when placed in the hands of a player as skilled as Tedeschi. For the performance clips, she was plugged into a Fender amp with the tremolo engaged and nothing in between. As she goes on to explain, a guitar and an amp are all she needs to get the job done, and as we all know it’s a job she always does very well.

“It was probably a Deluxe Reverb or Vibrolux,” says Tedeschi. “I find Twins a little too bright for me. I’m not a huge fan of them because they tend to be really loud and piercing. That’s why I’m more into the sound of a Deluxe or Vibrolux. And, of course, a Super Reverb... that’s what I use on a regular basis when I’m on stage. Just an old-school Super and that’s me!” 

One thing you mention in the video is how the neck pickup is notably warmer than other Telecasters. Why do you think that is?

“That’s the thing about any pickup or guitar... they’re all different. This pickup was hand-wound years ago, it was actually a used guitar when I got it. I found it hanging up on the wall at Cambridge Music in Somerville, Massachusetts. This was back in 1995, so it was already a couple of years old. It felt kinda customy, as if the previous owner had done their own thing to it.

“I just loved the sound of the guitar. Sure enough, when Fender took it in to try and replicate it, they found it hard to get it exactly right at first. But they did a great job of finding a sound that was warmer and hotter like mine. It’s such a hard thing to capture. Most of us players don’t realise how every guitar will end up sounding different. Fender kept sending me pickups and I would try them out until I found the one that was closest, with more volume and more depth. It’s a nice contrast to the thinner sounds you usually get from a Telecaster.”

It definitely seems to have more low end and less twang...

“For sure. People sometimes say to me ‘Oh yeah, you play a Tele!’ but in my head I’m thinking my guitar doesn’t really sound like one. It still has the pickup selector so you can mix up the sounds or even go in-between to get them out of phase for more of a Buddy Guy kinda tone.

“I love learning about this stuff. I’m not really a huge tech person, I’m more of a ‘plug in and go’ style of player. But along the way I’ve been learning about different pedals and other gear. Over the years I’ve mainly just stuck with my wah-wah pedal and a tuner, though I love the sound of vibrato and tremolo, too... those tones are always fun. I quite like Supro amps for that. They always make a really nice tremolo, as do Ampeg with their Reverberockets, which have a lovely vibrato and tremolo.”

It’s interesting that your model features a TBX tone circuit like some of the old Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton Strats, where one to five are the classic Tone knob parameters and six to 10 take things up a gear...

“I wasn’t sure about it at first, always staying in the first half of the dial, but then found myself using that stuff more and more. Once you get over the threshold of the halfway point, it definitely starts breaking up a bit more and sounding thicker. If I want a really warm tone, I’ll roll it back from five and crank up the volume. It’s all there, you can find it, but the settings are slightly different to a regular Tele. Ultimately there are more options.”

So which players drew you into playing Telecasters?

“Early on, I remember Albert Collins playing one. Of course, he always sounded amazing. But, you know, it wasn’t so much the players as it was the guitar itself. I feel like the Telecaster picked me! I had a dream about this guitar and went back to the store to buy it the next day. I liked it because it sounded a bit like a Strat and Tele, but with a different take on it, falling almost in between. I knew straight away this guitar would be very universal. You can use it for any style of music.

“My husband Derek usually plays a Gibson SG, so he has that humbucker sound. Having a single-coil guitar is really helpful for me because it helps create a different sound. Using two guitars with humbuckers could end up sounding quite same-y and too similar. We don’t want to have the exact same tone when we are playing together. Having different guitars helps people out who they are hearing – obviously Derek and I have our own feel as musicians, but using different guitars and tones makes it even more obvious. It creates more space.

“A lot of people don’t think about this, but when you are recording or mixing a band and you bring up two things that sound similar, they can occupy the same space in your hearing and in your brain. A little bit of separation can help instruments compliment each other more.”

Your guitar is adorned with all kinds of signatures from famous musicians such as the late, great B.B. King. Can you talk us through your favourites?

“The first signature was done in 1997 by Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown. I was so excited because I was going to Martha’s Vineyard with my band to open for him. We got there and President Clinton decided to have a party at the venue for his secretary. Somehow, Carly Simon, who owned the place, kicked me out of my spot and kept Gatemouth, who was quite upset by that.

“He told them ‘Susan’s with me!’ to stop Secret Service coming in and making us leave. Then he looked at me and said ‘You are like my granddaughter, so you are going to stay with me today so we can all hang out!’ He was smoking pot out of a pipe with all these government agents running around, and this is before marijuana was even legal. He was the OG, telling everyone he was the Deputy Sheriff in Slidell, Louisiana. He was so great to me and that’s how he ended up being my first signature.

“And then in 1998 I went on tour with BB King and Buddy Guy, who were the next ones to sign it. Buddy signed ‘Buddy Guy 98’ on the back of my headstock, which is where my name is on the signature guitars. Most of the people who have signed my guitar are musicians I’ve opened for or played with, rather than random people. Jimmie Vaughan is also on there because I’ve toured a bunch with him. I used to have Double Trouble on there, too... but it came off. They were my band when I was opening up for The Allman Brothers, which is when I met my husband.

“Other people on there are Willie Nelson. Doctor John came off, sadly, his signature wore off over time, as did Bonnie Raitt’s and John Hiatt’s signatures. Other idols that are still on there are Kris Kristofferson, Joe Walsh, Ron Wood, Ernie Isley, Herbie Hancock, Little Melvin, John Lee Hooker... it’s a really special guitar but it’s quite sad I’ve never lacquered it to protect the signatures. It’s the only thing that’s a bummer, I’m afraid they will all come off one day. I need to protect what’s left!”

 So how many guitars do you own in total and which ones would you say are the most collectable or meaningful?

“I actually don’t know! Right now we’re renovating our house and all our stuff is moving around – some of it’s on the road, on the truck, in the studio and elsewhere. Sometimes I feel like it’s Derek who owns all the guitars but that’s not true. I own a bunch of guitars, like a 1977 Telecaster in Natural with all the original parts. That’s a beautiful guitar that sounds really good.

“I also have a Cream Custom Shop Telecaster with a maple neck but a rosewood board. All of my guitars have a rosewood fretboard because I prefer warmth over brightness. I also have a 1970 Strat that my husband bought me years ago for my birthday, and it’s my birth year Strat. He also got me another one of my favourite guitars, which I really need to bring out on the road but I’m too scared because there’s only 88 of them in the world, and that’s a 1960 Blonde dot neck Gibson 335.

“It’s gorgeous, it’s pristine and it’s amazing... though it does need a new set of strings right now. When the studio gets renovated I will be using that on our records.”

What can you tell us about your very first guitar? 

“It was one that my Dad gave me, which originally belonged to him, a 1971 Martin 00-18. I wrote many songs on it as a teenager and other tracks like Looking For Answers and stuff like that. It’s very special to me, especially because you can get that Elmore James sound by putting in a Lawrence pickup, plugging into a Deluxe Reverb and cranking the reverb up all the way. It’s that sound!

“One year, Derek was doing an Elmore tribute record and asked me how to get that tone, so I gave him that guitar and he was blown away by how close it got him. Especially given how he plays, because his intonation is so perfect on slide. That was a fun little thing! I guess tone really is just trial and error, you learn by doing stuff and trying different things out.”

You mentioned that you tend not to use too many pedals. But beyond the wah and tuner, are there any that have impressed you over the years?

“There’s a company called Moollon who makes a few pedals that I really like. Every once in a while I will switch them in, but one I use a lot is the Z.O.D. Zeppelin Overdrive which can do boost all the way to distortion. You can control the gain, volume, treble and bass to dial in the tone you’re looking for, whether it’s more clean or broken up. I use their pedals quite a lot.

“I also really like Piedmont Custom Electronics, who are based in Atlanta and make Derek’s Aluminum Falcon pedal. They made me something specifically for me Tele which sounds really cool. One other pedal I use a lot is called the FuzzBubble-45, made by Analog Alien. Those are really cute and fun. I try not to get too into the pedal thing. My husband had this pedal he borrowed from someone that cost something like $2,500. I didn’t even want to try it, just in case I liked it and wanted one. That’s an insane amount of money... more than what you’d pay for an amp!”

The last time you were in the UK, you performed two songs with your husband and Eric Clapton as part of the Jeff Beck tribute shows at the Royal Albert Hall. That must have been emotional!

“Jeff Beck was probably one of the most unsung legends of guitar. You’d always hear about Eric Clapton and BB King, while Jeff kinda flew a little bit more under the radar. But he was also a huge superstar that everyone was aware of. I first opened for him back in 1998 or 1999 in New York City.

“He was so sweet and actually invited me up to meet him and talk to him. In that moment, I remember thinking ‘Wait a minute, this really is Nigel from Spinal Tap!’ He was talking about his frets and amp settings... it kinda blew my mind because when I went to music college, we’d be watching Spinal Tap the whole time. He was one of those guitarists who could play anything, from The Beatles to Jimi Hendrix to even classical stuff. The sky was the limit with him. He was so gifted and could do it all, and would always create his own sound. He was so versatile and so great at playing melodies from the heart.

“He was also very supportive of women. He’d have a lot of female artists working with him, which was special and unique in such a male-dominated industry. His drummers and bass players had often been women, and even some of the other guitarists playing with him. All the badass guitar players love him because they know how hard it is to do what he did. Eric Clapton loved him, so did my husband.”

What do you remember about those two performances?

“It was so surreal, honestly. Walking out there, it was me, my husband, Eric and Doyle Bramhall II – so that’s four of us on guitar, all taking solos. One of the songs was The Sky Is Crying because Derek felt it was a good one that we could all play lead on. The other song was I Must Have Done Somebody Wrong.

“I grew up as a huge Eric Clapton fan, to the point where I had recurring dreams about him as a teenager. And then those dreams literally came true later on in life! I found myself saying ‘What the hell is happening?!’ Being on stage with him, in that moment, celebrating Jeff was such an honour and felt like a dream. As a little girl I’d had dreams like that and there I was on stage at the Royal Albert Hall. I’ve played there many times, but not with Eric Clapton next to me! So that was huge.

“There was a lot of love from all the people celebrating that night. We all loved Jeff. It was very dreamlike, with so many ‘pinch me’ moments. At one point I found myself hanging out in the wings, waiting with Johnny Depp being like ‘What’s up, dude?’ or chatting to Kirk Hammett from Metallica. It was amazing how many people from different worlds came together to celebrate a beautiful guitar player, musician and person.”

 What was your highlight from the other performances?

“There were so many. Seeing Derek play Goodbye Pork Pie Hat was pretty wild, because that’s such a classic Jeff song which he took from Charles Mingus. Derek didn’t even know it and learned it last minute because Eric kept throwing things at him. It’s Jeff Beck and people are used to hearing it in a certain way... luckily Derek is such a badass, he could do it. I was nervous for him! But he sounded beautiful on that.

“It’s only been a year or so since that happened, but it also feels like a lifetime ago because we tour so much. We’re on the road 200 nights a year, so it’s hard to remember. I know Gary Clark Jr played. Ronnie Wood was great, it was wonderful to see him and Rod Stewart. I was watching them and then realised it was Jeff Beck who started The Faces. It’s easy to forget how all these things came together. We almost take it for granted, but these guys are still around and you can see their energy, light and excitement. It’s very inspiring. Rod Stewart moving around like that at his age is pretty badass!”

The last album you released, I Am The Moon, starts with Hear My Dear – a song where it sounds like you are singing to your husband in the chorus...

“I definitely am! But he’s the one who actually started writing that song, even though me and Mike [Mattison, vocals/acoustic] helped too, it’s really Derek’s song. And it is his melody, so it’s very special to me.

“I love the dynamics on that track. When we play it live, we bring our 12-piece down to a whisper and that’s why it’s so impactful. It’s one thing to get hit in the face with sound all the time, but when you all come down together, you can hear all the nuances and it can become very moving and emotional, which is beautiful. We’re all a team working together, it’s not the Derek and Susan show! It’s really much bigger than that.

“When we came over to do three nights at the Palladium in London, I remember playing Hear My Dear and Eric Clapton was in the audience. He came out and was crying... he found the music so moving, he loved it. Even though I’d known him for 20 years through Derek, he’d never really heard me play guitar until that night... and that’s when he invited me to come out and play the Jeff Beck thing. Playing in front of your heroes is very intimidating but also very exciting.”

I Am The Moon was quite an epic project, given how it was a quadruple album consisting of four consecutively released parts. What can we expect next from your band?

“I think it’s a very special record because it shows how the writing, for all of us, has gotten better and better. This is a really unique band and we have a bunch of new stuff written. We can’t wait to get in the studio to record it. A lot of it is in the same vibe as I Am The Moon, but some of it also feels quite different and unique.

“It’s such a gift to play music and help heal people. I feel like people really need it, the world has changed so much after Covid. We’re starting to realise how much we need each other. Nobody wants to be isolated, so it’s nice to get out and let the music take you on a journey. That’s one thing about our band that really keeps me motivated.

“Sometimes I just want to get off the road and don’t want to tour, but it’s a 12-piece band with mouths to feed and bills to pay. We’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing – adding light into the world instead of darkness... there’s already plenty of darkness out there.”

• For more information on the Susan Tadeschi Telecaster visit Fender

Make no mistake, while he never received such incendiary levels of popularity as Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page – his predecessor and successor respectively in The Yardbirds – Jeff Beck was without doubt one of the most astounding players to have ever manhandled a guitar. 

After having stepped in to fill Clapton’s shoes in the genre-pioneering “Yardies” aged just 21, Beck stayed at least one step ahead of the musical curve throughout his nearly six-decade long career. 

His studio releases spanned genres ranging from blues-rock to hard rock, jazz fusion and even electronica. His experimentation with the physicality and tonal possibilities of the electric guitar seemingly knew no bounds, and he was equally adept at riffing, soloing, playing slide and creating melodic, whammy bar-driven soundscape adventures. 

Perhaps herein lies the reason that not as many listeners have embraced or understood Beck as they have Clapton or Page: it is simply very hard to define him as a single ‘type’ of player.

If you were to stick Jeff Beck’s entire back catalogue on shuffle, you’d be confronted with some serious generic shifts – perhaps to a slightly confusing extent, especially if you were not around to follow the developments of his career in real time. 

This, combined with the predominantly instrumental nature of much of his work, can make for some slight accessibility hurdles – but if perseverance is warranted with anyone, it's warranted with Jeff Beck. 

This list aims to provide some jumping-off points to start exploring his expansive repertoire, with stand-out tracks from key points in his career. 

1. Beck’s Bolero – Truth (1968) 

Recorded in 1966 and released in 1967, Beck’s Bolero was Jeff’s first release after leaving The Yardbirds. Strictly speaking, it was released merely as the B-side to Hi Ho Silver Lining, but even Jeff himself might thank us for not dwelling on that one for too long. Two years after it was recorded, the track was added to Beck’s 1968 debut album, Truth. 

The song was inspired by Maurice Ravel’s Orchestral piece, Bolero, and was written by Beck’s long-time friend, Jimmy Page, who also played the rhythm parts on his Fender Electric XII twelve-string electric guitar. The band also featured Keith Moon on drums, John Paul Jones on bass and Nicky Hopkins on keys. It was an ensemble that could quite easily have gone on to become Led Zeppelin had the stars aligned a little differently. 

The song consists of three distinct parts. Over the first section, Beck’s lead parts, which he played on a Gibson Les Paul through a Vox AC30 amp, alternate between a fuzz-driven main melody and an echo-laden slide motif. Part two leaps into action with a scream from Keith Moon and the melody line is ditched in favour of multiple interwoven layers of guitar effects including feedback, phase and echo – all rather experimental soundscaping techniques for the time. 

The climactic part of the track builds with layers of unadulterated blues-rock wailing before concluding abruptly at just 2 minutes and 50 seconds. All in all, it’s a pretty wild ride, and its psychedelic leanings just about pre-date other milestones in the genre such as Jimi Hendrix’s arrival in London and the formation of Cream. 

Reflecting in a 2018 Classic Rock Magazine interview, Beck noted of the track’s particular alchemy: “I couldn’t believe it when we went back and listened to it in the control room. We were going: ‘This is amazing. What can we do with it?’ And the next thing we know Keith is back with The Who and the whole thing never got off the ground.” 

2. Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers – Blow By Blow (1975) 

Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers is a real highlight of Jeff Beck’s 1975 George Martin-produced, all-instrumental album, Blow by Blow. It was written by Stevie Wonder and features some of Beck’s most vocal and mournfully expressive playing. 

Wonder and Beck had become friends a few years earlier and collaborated on Wonder’s 1972 record Talking Book. Alongside the words “thanks to Stevie” in Blow by Blow’s liner notes, Beck also dedicates the track to Roy Buchanan – a player who had been an early influence on him. 

Buchanan pioneered expressive playing techniques like creating tone and volume swells by manipulating his guitar’s control knobs. 

You can hear the direct influence of this right from Beck’s opening wails and then throughout the song’s emotive melody and lead parts. It’s a technique that Beck adopted, perfected and advanced throughout his career until it became a trademark of his sound. In live performances, you’ll rarely see him without his little finger within touching distance of the volume and tone pots – poised ready to create dynamic variances akin to the human voice.

The unique guitar tone on this track is also owed, in part, to the use of a unique guitar: Beck’s famous “Tele-Gib”. A gift to Beck from Seymour Duncan, the Tele-Gib is a hybrid guitar with the body of a 1959 Fender Telecaster and the pickups of a 1959 Gibson Flying V that had once belonged to Lonnie Mack. 

In the words of Duncan himself: “I worked on each detail of the guitar, so that it would be something unique and worthy of Jeff’s talent. Once it was finally ready, I brought Jeff the completed guitar and he seemed impressed.” 

There aren’t many video recordings of the guitar in action, but you can see it in a live performance of Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers from Amnesty International’s The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball from 1981. For this performance, Beck was joined on stage by none other than Eric Clapton.

3. Goodbye Pork Pie Hat – Wired (1976)

Goodbye Pork Pie Hat has long been a staple of Jeff Beck’s live performances, and it set the bar high for instrumental fusion when it was released on 1976’s Wired. 

It is not an original composition, of course, but a reimagining of Charles Mingus’s ode to saxophonist, Lester Young. The jazz standard has also been tackled by artists as diverse as Bert Jansch, John McLaughlin and Joni Mitchell (who even added lyrics to her version), but Jeff Beck’s simmering and moody rendition has endured particularly well. 

By comparison to most of the tracks on Wired, Beck’s playing here is quite restrained, but is nonetheless impassioned, with slow melancholic bends and plenty of trademark expressive techniques from both the left and right hand.

By this point, Beck had largely moved on from playing Les Pauls to favouring the Fender Stratocaster, which for the first time we see pictured front and centre on the album cover. The Strat would become the guitar most used by Beck for decades to come, thanks in no small part to the extra sonic possibilities offered by its tremolo arm system. 

As the track progresses, Beck’s use of experimental whammy bar techniques intensifies and his phrasing becomes increasingly unorthodox. Expertly controlled feedback is used to tip the track into an almost space-age feel, while the jazz-blues progression that meanders underneath tethers Beck’s wild interpretive techniques back to earth and back to the musical traditions he grew up listening to.

4. Nadia – You Had it Coming (2001)

Nadia is the fifth track on Jeff Beck’s eighth studio album, You Had It Coming, and it is a reworking of a Nitin Sawhney’s song from 1999 – a slide-meets-whammy bar masterpiece with Indian-influenced inflections. Speaking to Classic Rock, Beck cited the track as one of his career-defining moments in a 2018 Classic Rock Magazine interview.

“It was a challenge and a half to try and get all those Indian scales and stuff, but once I got the melody it was plain sailing,” he said. “At one point I copied a blackbird song. I used to hear one in an apple tree outside my window when I was a child, and that melody was so whistle-able. So we bought a CD of bird songs and slowed the blackbird song right down so that I could pick out the melody. Then I transposed it onto a bottleneck.” 

Throughout the track, Beck switches from using a slide to fretting notes with his fingers and nuancing them with whammy bar flutters to gain access to the notes in-between the standard delineations of the frets. 

His absolute mastery of both techniques makes it difficult to distinguish between the two at various points in the track, and they melt together almost seamlessly. The resulting sound has a quality not unlike an electrified sitar, yet all of what we hear is coaxed from a humble Fender Stratocaster. 

By this point in his career, Beck had also long since ditched using a pick, opting instead for the more dextrous approach of picking with his thumb and fingers.  A 2008 live performance of the track from Ronnie Scott’s gives a particularly good insight into just how involved both the left and right hand techniques are on this song.

Beck switches adeptly from slide to fretted notes, while attentively tweaking the volume and tone controls, tremolo arm and switching the pick-up selection from bridge to neck and back again. There’s so much going on that if you blink, you really will miss a trick! 

5. Hammerhead – Emotion & Commotion (2010) 

Hammerhead won the 2011 Grammy award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance, against stiff competition from the likes of The Black Keys, Dave Matthews and Dweezil Zappa.

While much of Emotion & Commotion is characterised by rich orchestral accompaniments, Hammerhead is much more reminiscent of Jeff Beck’s earlier, rockier offerings from the days of the Yardbirds and 1970s albums like Blow By Blow. 

The track opens with a Jimi Hendrix-esque wah wah driven intro not unlike ‘Voodoo Child (Slight Return)’ in its style and delivery. However, at around 38 seconds in, the track takes a stylistic shift, the rhythm section joins in, and the track launches into a driving cyclical riff with a rolling 12/8 feel. It’s Jeff Beck at his grooviest. 

Beck’s lead work on the track also transmutes from restrained, languid swells to full-blown, in-your-face ear meltery with overdriven dive-bombing whammy bar work that would give even Eddie Van Halen a run for his money. 

Beck has credited Czech-American musician, composer Jan Hammer as the inspiration for Hammerhead. Hammer had played keyboards with the Mahavishnu Orchestra in the early 1970s, and collaborated with Beck as early as 1976’s Wired, before going on to compose film and television scores – including the theme for Miami Vice. 

Unlikely as it may seem, some stylistic similarities can be heard between the classic ‘80s theme song and Beck’s award-winning, hard-riffing masterpiece.

• Classic interview: Jeff Beck

Gibson is commemorating the late Jeff Beck with a limited run of 130 YardBurst 1959 Les Paul Standard models from the Custom Shop.

The Gibson Gazette reports that the $9,999/£8,999 model aims to be a "faithful recreation" of the '59 Burst Beck as it was when he used it with the Yardbirds before his own Jeff Beck Group and follows the 2009 signature Les Paul based on Beck's 1954 'Oxblood' model. 

“Jeff was enormously proud to have owned the original of this guitar,” says his widow Sandra Beck. “He was aware and fully supportive of the amazing job and love that Gibson Custom provided to create this instrument and would have hoped that this guitar will give hours of pleasure to those who play it.”

The recreated  Jeff Beck YardBurst 1959 Les Paul Standard has a significant attraction for those usually put off by the single cut's usual heft; it's made from one-piece 'lightweight' mahogany. The Dark Cherry Sunburst finish has been aged in the Murphy Lab to match the appearance of the original guitar's during Jeff’s Yardbirds era  (it was later stripped) with a black single-ply pickguard and unpotted Custombuckers featuring double Classic White bobbins.

Each guitar was built in Gibson Custom Shop in Nashville, Tennessee and comes with an aged Lifton hardshell case and "special memorabilia" covering Beck’s career. 

Beck's original '59 Burst was famously purchased from a pre-Cheap Trick Rick Nielsen (then a guitar dealer) but allegedly stolen following a chaotic 1969 gig with the Jeff Beck Group in Ellenville, New York, featuring Rod Stewart on vocals. Its reappearance on the market decades later was then the source of controversy over its sale and ownership. 

“You know, I sold Jeff Beck the second Les Paul he ever owned not long after on 4 June 1968," Neilsen told MusicRadar in 2017. "I’m not kidding one fucking bit! It was a ’59 that had a Bigsby on it… If you look close, you can see where it used to be. I traded a Gibson SG and $25 for it. I have pictures of me with him, Buddy Guy and Stevie Ray Vaughan 10 years after selling him that guitar.”

Find out more at Gibson

There's no ultimate test of what makes a great guitar instrumental. But fine melody, emotive performance and technical prowess are a pretty good start. Top-notch production won’t hurt either and success in the charts does at least tell you that a lot of people like it.

One particular barometer, however, informs us that other great musicians also think it’s cool:  when you find guitar and amp demonstrators performing it at trade fairs. These guys are at the top of their game, understand composition, recognise ability and know all about tone.

Time was when Jeff Beck’s interpretation of Stevie Wonder’s Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers would always be heard at major guitar shows in Los Angeles, Frankfurt and across the UK. So full of dynamics and expression is this masterful Beck performance that it was often considered the perfect vehicle for showcasing the capabilities of both player and equipment.

The number highlights the touch, tone and technique of the late 'guitarist’s guitarist', but Jeff should have got another Wonder song entirely.

After the demise of various Jeff Beck Group line-ups, the ex-Yardbirds guitarist had high hopes for his power trio, Beck, Bogert & Appice, formed at the end of 1972. But it wasn’t to be and the band broke up in early 1974.

“We needed the catalyst, somebody to write these incredibly interesting songs or riffs that we could get off on,” Jeff told this writer in 1989. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t forthcoming – I was into Stevie [Wonder] and I wanted to be doing more black, souly stuff.”

Wonder wrote Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers for his wife Syreeta, but gave it to Jeff after Motown Records insisted Stevie record Superstition himself, a track he’d actually composed for Beck. Wonder had penned it as a thank-you to Jeff for playing on his 1972 album Talking Book.

“The idea was that I was going to guest on his record and he was going to give me a song in return,” said Beck. “Stevie gave me [Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers] as an apology for releasing Superstition first. He wrote [it] for me, but the record company had the power to prevent any other record coming out and they said, ‘This is a number one smash: Beck doesn’t get this’.”

Jeff did end up recording Superstition with Beck, Bogert & Appice, but it was overshadowed by Wonder’s chart-topping version. Yet it’s arguable Beck got the better vehicle to express his talents with. Its moody C minor key and unusual chord changes would enable him to use almost every nuance in his arsenal of licks, tones and techniques.

Recorded at Air Studios in London with Beatles producer George Martin, Beck found the experience both inspiring and intimidating. “As ever there, the atmosphere was great,” he told Total Guitar later about recording the song. “When you’re in a good studio with good people, sometimes tracks can just come together out of nowhere. I am always amazed at what people can create when they are in the right mindset.”

Working with Martin, though, was something of a double-edged sword. “George Martin always made me feel like I was in the headmaster’s office when I was in a studio with him,” Jeff confessed to Total Guitar. “I always tried to be on my best musical behaviour. But he had a unique way of hearing and visualising tracks so we got to create some amazing music.”

In his 1989 interview with me, Beck elaborated further: “At last there was somebody who spoke the same language, musically. We were actually getting down to the mechanics, the nuts and bolts of making good sounds on record. He frameworked some pretty simple tunes and made them sound magnificent.”

Listening to the techniques and tones on Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers, nothing is played ‘straight’. The track’s intro uses violining: picking a note with the volume down and slowly swelling it back in; Beck constantly manipulates his guitar’s controls to vary input gain and drive, switches pickups, or bends, slides and pulls strings in all manner of ways.

“There’s really no fun in keeping things simple, is there,” shrugged Beck. “Tonal variation’s free when you’ve got an electric guitar, and it’s completely up to you – there’s no law [that] says you can’t switch pickups in the middle of a solo to add that little bit more interest. I could never see the ultimate satisfaction in doing a load of end-to-end tricks, without resting and letting your soul come through a bit more.”

Phil Hilborne – guitarist, transcriber and teacher extraordinaire – has played the song at all the major guitar fairs. He picked up on Jeff’s “soul” reference: “I played it at the NAMM show and can’t think of a tune that equals it for showcasing touch, tone and soul. The melody is memorable – anyone can whistle it – and Jeff played it with such purity and beauty that it’s just about incomparable.”

Speaking of tone, while we know that for years Beck has preferred Strats, the Blow By Blow album sleeve depicts him playing his ‘oxblood’ Gibson Les Paul. Was this the instrument he used to create one of the most emotive instrumentals ever recorded? It seems not. With an apology to the guitar’s namesake and personal hero, he confesses: “Fender Telecaster… sorry Les!”

• Jeff Beck interview: "I was pretty down at the time, I'd lost my girl, Hendrix had come and smeared everybody across the floor… I’d fallen out with the Yardbirds

Mark Knopfler’s eagerly anticipated all-star supergroup version of Going Home, his theme to Local Hero, has been released, with the single featuring over 50 legendary guitarists, including the late Jeff Beck, who opens the charity single with a “spellbinding” piece of electric guitar manipulation that would be his last ever recorded solo. 

Now we can finally listen to the track – all nine minutes and 49 seconds of it – can we work out who played what on the track? That is easier said than done. Produced by Knopfler’s long-standing co-producer and Dire Straits keyboardist, Guy Fletcher, Going Home has a credits list that reads like a who’s who of guitar. 

You’ve got David Gilmour, Eric Clapton, Slash, Brian May, Jeff Beck, Steve Cropper, Duane Eddy, Steve Vai, Sheryl Crow, Derek Trucks, Susan Tudeschi, Nile Rodgers, Pete Townshend, Hank Marvin, Tony Iommi, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Armatrading… The list of guitarists goes on and on, with other musical A-listers popping in, all to help raise money for the Teenage Cancer Trust and Teen Cancer America

Ringo Starr and his son, Zak Starkey, play drums. Sting plays bass guitar while Roger Daltrey plays harmonica. It’s a bewildering array of talent. Thankfully, a video will be dropping next week with a commentary on who is playing what to help us make sense of it all – though there’s no mistaking the work of Beck, Knopfler, Gilmour or May. 

And the Times has run a report from Paul Sexton – who wrote the sleeve notes – which sheds some more light on the project, which all started with Townshend and Clapton dropping by Knopfler’s British Grove Studios, in Chiswick, west London, followed by Sting and Sam Fender – whom we’d like to think got the same train down from Newcastle – with contributions delivered in-person and digitally from across the globe. 

When it came time to mix, Fletcher had an abundance of material to stitch together, and he got to work on a five-minute edit and the full version that’s being made available on digital platforms. 

He offered some clues as to who is playing what. For starters – and no one needed this one – Jeff Beck is playing the intro, as ever all fingerstyle, on the edge of break-up, jockeying the whammy bar, a performance Knopfler describes as “spellbinding”.

“Once I got Jeff Beck’s contribution, there was no way I was going to mess with that,” Fletcher told the Times. “It was as pure as it can be. What he did with it brings you to tears, it’s absolutely astonishing. Only five or six months after I received it, he passed away. The fact that he’s first is kind of beautiful.”

Fletcher says Armatrading plays electric guitar throughout the track and “just wailed” while there is no shortage of Gilmour for Pink Floyd fans to pick out.

“When David Gilmour came in, he played loads of stuff, but there were certain licks that were just absolutely Gilmour,” said Fletcher. “Same with Ronnie Wood, instant Stones.”

The track grows more rock as it gathers momentum, and much of that was to do with the influence of Queen’s Brian May, who made a telling contribution.

“Brian May did an entire section, about a dozen guitar harmonies, and when he comes in it’s unmistakably Brian,” said Fletcher, who added that Bruce Springsteen's contribution was similarly hard to miss, so keep your ears tuned for a Fender Esquire.

“What I really want to do, more than anything else, is just to thank each and every one for this sterling response,” said Knopfler upon the single's announcement in February. “I really had no idea that it was going to be like this. It hit Guy and I quite early on that we had to extend this piece somehow, to take in the number of people who joined in... I think what we’ve had is an embarrassment of riches, really. The whole thing was a high point.”

Going Home is available now, and it's for a good cause. You can find out more about those causes at Teenage Cancer Trust and Teen Cancer America. 

Going Home (Theme From Local Hero) credits

• Joan Armatrading, Jeff Beck, Richard Bennett, Joe Bonamassa, Joe Brown, James Burton, Jonathan Cain, Paul Carrack, Eric Clapton, Ry Cooder, Jim Cox, Steve Cropper, Sheryl Crow, Danny Cummings, Roger Daltrey, Duane Eddy, Sam Fender, Guy Fletcher, Peter Frampton, Audley Freed, Vince Gill, David Gilmour, Buddy Guy, Keiji Haino, Tony Iommi, Joan Jett, John Jorgenson, Mark Knopfler, Sonny Landreth, Albert Lee, Greg Leisz, Alex Lifeson, Steve Lukather, Phil Manzanera, Dave Mason, Hank Marvin, Brian May, Robbie McIntosh, John McLaughlin, Tom Morello, Rick Nielsen, Orianthi, Brad Paisley, Nile Rodgers, Mike Rutherford, Joe Satriani, John Sebastian, Connor Selby, Slash, Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr and Zak Starkey, Sting, Andy Taylor, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, Ian Thomas, Pete Townshend, Keith Urban, Steve Vai, Waddy Wachtel, Joe Louis Walker, Joe Walsh, Ronnie Wood, Glenn Worf, Zucchero.

In 2017, Robert Adam Stevenson had a life-changing decision to make: stay in Oxford with his band, A Silent Film, or move to LA and follow his real passion: recording other bands. “I didn't like being a front person in the band,” he admits, “and I was so much happier being buried in the studio.” So bury himself he did, and during every recording session he drove his band's engineers and producers mad by asking endless questions, but he quickly became knowledgeable enough to record and mix the group. So when they split, Robert had something to fall back on, to become a studio producer/engineer himself.

“It turned out I loved helping other people get through that creative process,” he smiles. “I just wanted to make records all year round and now I can with different people!” And if you're going to fall back on something, you might as well do it in LA, right? At least that's what Robert thought, and in 2017 he decided to relocate there to practise his new craft.

“I just risked it all, sold the band's backline on eBay which got me three months of Air BnB in LA!” Robert almost winces at the decision he made back then, but seven years on it appears to have paid off. Through perseverance, taking every job he could (including “writing some terrible K-Pop”), some good luck, knowing his way around a studio, and being able to help artists unleash their creativity, Robert has worked with some of the biggest names, from co-producing Johnny Depp and Jeff Beck to engineering Queens Of The Stone Age – and being nominated for a 2023 GRAMMY in the process. 

We caught up with him in his LA home studio to talk recording and mixing guitars, Johnny Depp's fanboy Jeff Beck excitement, recording the late great Taylor Hawkins, and even how Josh Homme got into a scrap with a band in Oxford. There's insider info on the notoriously secretive QOTSA recording process – ok, not much, but what did you expect from the Area 51-level security that surrounds Troy Van Leeuwen and Josh's guitar processing? But we do find out is how an engineer/producer gets the best from a band in the studio – and the best guitar recordings. And that it might not be so much about the gear in that studio, but more about getting on with – and the best from – the people within it.

“Oh yeah,” laughs Robert. “that's 90% of the job!”

The studio role 

What is the difference between a producer and engineer? The definitions seem to be blurred…

RAS: "You're right. On a business level, an engineer will get a day rate, but with a producer you are in for the long haul, and get points on the record and a fee per song. So you have to be a bit creative on how you are booked. It's important to me to be a part of the creative process, so I'll push my luck. Sometimes you are not supposed to speak your mind but fortune favours the brave! Read the room, build the trust.”

What is a typical day in the studio?

"It is completely different every day. I consider myself hands-on with the computer and positioning mics – actually being an engineer. But I also come at it from a musical and producer mindset. I'm listening intently to the main creative forces in the room, learning those personalities, and working out where they are hitting their walls. If you can realign someone's perspective, then they can be far more creative. They crave that as well, which is something I learned from being the front person in a band myself."

So your own band experiences have been an advantage…

"It seems to have worked for me with some of the really big names that I have been lucky enough to be in the room with. Sometimes they are not looking for me to produce, they want me to engineer, but all my gears are moving. I'm thinking 'how can I help' and I'm trying to be ahead of the curve of their thought processes."

So you could be doing anything from miking up to sitting on a Pro Tools session and suggesting notes changes?

"Oh yeah. I'll push my luck!"

How much of the job is dealing with the personalities rather than gear?

"90%?! [laughs] The vibe and how people feel, and the type of people in the room are all super important. Also, trying to keep focussed on how inspired someone is, and never letting the gear get in the way. There are some people that love it, but there are others who can't stand it. Jeff Beck could not stand talking about gear; he would just sit back and pretend to be immediately disinterested. My job was to just have it all up and working so he could focus on the music."

LA connection

Ok, talking of Jeff, how did you get to work with such big names when you moved to LA?

"I happened to be working in a studio where Johnny Depp's nephew, Billy Rassel, came in – only in LA, right? He's an aspiring producer and came in to record an artist and I grabbed the reins and finished the project. He said, 'my uncle is really going to like it' and I was like, 'whatever, that's another world'. 

“But Johnny loves making music and I got the call one night: 'Can you come over?' I ended up working through the night, listening to his stories, and helping them make some music. And it just turned out that – and how lucky am I?  – that music happened to be him preparing ideas to give to Jeff Beck because they'd just struck up this friendship.

"I then did the Depp/Beck record [the album 18]. They were so kind to give me a co-production credit. Afterwards Jeff  – and again this is mind-blowing – asked me to play keyboards on tour. I ended up doing the UK, rest of Europe and the US in 2022. It was crazy!"

How did you meet Queens of the Stone Age?

"Through Johnny as he and Josh [Homme] are very good friends. Josh was literally over at the house hanging with Johnny. I'm a huge Queens fan. I remember seeing them play for their first record at Reading thinking, 'This is insane, this is the guy from Kyuss [Homme's former band] doing his new thing!'. I had all those stories that I could talk to Josh about. There was this great incident in Oxford when QOTSA came and had a fight with this Oxford band called Winnebago Deal in an Indian restaurant. It was legendary in the Oxford scene, that Josh Homme had come to town and had a fight with one of the cool bands. So I brought that up in front of Josh and Johnny, and his eyes lit up and he said, 'Oh my god, I remember, yes!'."

Who won the fight?

"Josh, obviously."

How did it work in the studio with Josh, Troy and the band?

"I was coming in, being the engineer and getting that album done [In Times New Roman]. It was incredible to see how it unfolded: a lot of tape and everything on outboard. Basically the rule is never to use computer plugins. I had been making records trying to make them sound like tape on computers my whole life, and to just finally be let loose on a tape machine with a proper budget on a record like that was an incredible learning curve."

How did you find the process?

"Josh had said, 'we're going to do a lot of tracking on tape' and I was like, 'are you sure because I haven't actually recorded onto tape?'. But because he has this 'do everything in a roundabout different way' attitude, the idea of me struggling to use a tape machine actually appealed to him! It was still a Queens record that was going to break the rules and bend everything that you think is conventional. Things would eventually ended up on the computer, but again, with no plugins as it would come through an analogue console."

Did that unconventional approach extend to recording Josh's vocal?

"With many artists you shouldn't just have this 'use your most expensive microphone' [approach]. They [QOTSA] were quite fond of having a few microphones set up at a time, and of course ambient mics set up as well that are very important. I hadn't done as many multi-microphone setups before working on that particular record."

What can you reveal about the QOTSA guitar sound and how they get it?

"That it is a very specific world that Josh keeps secret!"

Ok, how involved did you get with him and Troy in terms of their guitar sound?

"They know [it] themselves inside out and don't need anybody to point them in any directions. And the language they speak to each other in is incredible. They have code words and descriptives for the sounds that they have used in the past that they know work. 

"I was loving just hearing how they communicate about guitar tone. And that filled in so many blanks for [QOTSA] records that I love, so 'why does that record sounds so extraordinarily special?' And it's because of their processes and how they go about things in a roundabout way. It's very much 'find something that's not normal and now where can we make this work?' Combinations are key: light and shade is a massively important thing for them, and they just know the process. And Dean [Fertita, keys and guitars] is a very important part of that process too."

Is there anything that would surprise people about how QOTSA get their guitar sound? It's a vague question, I know…

"No that's fine and I'll give you a vague answer! [Laughs]. I mean, it's everything unconventional. Constant change, try this, try that. Sometimes the rule to get interesting guitar sounds is to go with small amp, single-miked and then loud in the mix, but then they'd do contrary to that in the studio too."

So basically, whatever they do and use in the studio, is unconventional…

"Yeah. I tell you what, I don't remember using an SM57!"

Guitar production 

How does your work vary with other guitarists in shaping their tone?

"Out of all band members, guitarists know their stuff and have the pedals and amps they love. I'd never get in the way of someone's enthusiasm for that, but it's great to show other options and see if it inspires them. And they appreciate being shown new things they can add to their arsenal."

How do you adapt to different personalities and styles?

"I just did a lot of guitar tracking with The Kills and they are so cool, absolutely wonderful, and Jamie [Hince], again, he knows his guitars. It was a joy, and we had a great session where it was set up with a wall of his favourite amps. He had his favourite mics and I added some too. It was lovely just thinking about guitars and having lots of options to play with. It's nice to be able to shake it up and have a lot of colours."

Do you have any tips for recording guitars?

"Yeah, the standard is a dynamic [mic] and a ribbon – we all love that combination and it becomes addictive. You can't quite imagine just recording with one or the other. I've become a fan of not miking too close to the grill. It used to be that you'd have the mic close to avoid bleed playing live. Once you're in the studio and not thinking about those things, it's lovely to pull the mic back six inches or a foot off the cabinet – it really changes the sound. 

"A lot of times I'll have a DI line running because it's become a common thing in music – everyone assumes there's a DI and you get to the end of the process where you've just recorded the mics and someone will say 'hey can I re-amp that?' So we have to DI everything now, just in case."

Do you have favourite mics for recording amps? Is it the dreaded SM57?

"Oh yeah absolutely. The SM is not dreaded! I did pick up some older Unidyne versions and I swear they sound a little richer in the midrange and less sharp. For the ribbon a Royer is great, but other interesting choices are a Coles, especially on a 4x12 – it just works. And then a Beyerdynamic M160 – an amazing microphone."

How do you approach acoustic guitar recording?

"Acoustics are very hard to record – I'm always wishing I had more time. I will often use whatever the vocal mic is as a starting point. The low end is hard to deal with, and I've also started using big valve mics but in omnidirectional mode – that gets a more balanced recording, and then I can boost the low end. Recording an acoustic at the 12th fret with that setup is a good place to start – no rules though! And of course dual mics help; it's nice to have a ribbon set back to capture the room."

What about mixing the guitar?

"It's usually to double track or not, a process that a lot of guitarists say they have to do. But often you are just taking up double the real estate and adding nothing interesting. So use different guitars, switch up the tone, multi mics are useful, or switch up the mics and add tons of ambience. It is nice to have the space recorded in on the finished recordings as it's unique."

Are bands (QOTSA aside) more open to using plugins in the studio these days?

"Yeah, sometimes I'll find that someone who has a great ear will have carved something out in a demo [using plugins], and that when you re-track it with a great guitar and a great vintage amp, they are not that impressed, and that's ok!"

What have you been impressed with on the digital emulation side of things?

"One company is Neural DSP. Those plugins have been really surprising with how good they are. Others I use are Plugin Alliance/Brainworx ones that matches well with UAD's, so I can swap between them. It's common to use a DI bass and add those Plugin Alliance bass sims on top in the studio. Sometimes it's better than the real thing, to be honest."

Overall, which have been your favourite studio moments during your time in LA?

“I was very lucky to be recording with Taylor Hawkins, around 2021 [for his band NHC with Dave Navarro and Chris Chaney] and just to see someone that brilliant recording drums, and seeing their reaction when they hear what you've recorded. Taylor loved all his Genesis and '80s sounding stuff – more than appeared on the Foo Fighters albums – so to be able to do that for him in the studio and him get really excited was a wonderful memory.

“The Jeff Beck album was just shockingly beautiful guitar playing. I'm keyed into these emotional experiences but watching Johnny [Depp] respond to Jeff's performances in the studio was amazing. Jeff would play things that he didn't necessarily think were special and Johnny would be laser-focused at the back of the room encouraging him and jumping out of the seat with excitement. To Jeff it might have been off the cuff but to Johnny it was just watching his hero, you know? A wonderful moment.

“And QOTSA. Oh my goodness, yeah. I just love that there was never a safety net. They just risk everything. Every song starts from a point of absolutely no safety net which I think is so crazy. Usually a band would come in with a demo and maybe you are playing to demo stems or maybe to a click track but [with QOTSA] it's none of that. It's just 'go at it and if it feels good, we're done'. The simplest things work sometimes but it's all about the people."

• Find out more about Robert's work at robertadamstevenson.com

As guitar players, we can learn so much from our idols. Our ultimate goal is to find our own sound and create something unique, but along the way we can pick up a few helpful pieces of advice from some of the greatest in the game.

In this lesson we’re going to check out five signature guitar techniques that you can learn from five iconic guitar players. Each of the guitar tricks we learn are things that each of the mentioned players have become known for, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use them in your own way. Use these techniques and ideas as building blocks when creating something of your own.

John Frusciante funk riffing

John Frusciante is best known for his many tenures as the guitarist in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Through the bands career, Frusciante has shown many difference angles to his playing, from Hendrix-inspired fuzzy leads to stunning chord work, but what he’s best known for his is ability to hold down a tight funk groove.

This funk riff is inspired by his frantic style of playing. The riff is made up of muted triplets which are broken out of to add double-stop accents or lead line embellishments. 

Before starting this, it’s important to get used to playing the muted triplets as tight as you can, consistent rhythm is very important in this style.

The lead embellishments in this example are simple phrases from the D minor pentatonic scale, you can improve your own licks in this style to give it a different flavour.

 Jeff Beck tremolo slide effect

The late, great Jeff Beck was known for many things, one of those was his expressive use of the guitars tremolo system. This lick is a Jeff Beck-style lick that emulates the sound of a slide guitar phrase.  The bar is used to simulate the sound of sliding in and out of notes, but also moving from one note to another and pitch matching.

The lick, on paper, looks like it’s just three notes, but the finesse comes into play with how you control the tremolo arm.

For the first note, you want to slightly dip the bar and bring it back to pitch as you slide into the 8th fret on the B string, this simulates the sound of a slide going to it’s note. 

The next part is using the bar to move from one note to a set target note. Play the 6th fret on the B and dip the bar slightly until the pitch of the string hits that of the 5th fret.

The final part is a slide to the 7 on the G. You’ll already be in a position with the bar dipped, so jump your finger to the G, slide up and let the bar return to it’s starting position and add plenty of tremolo arm vibrato.

John Mayer triad chords

If you’ve ever felt bored of your chord progressions, this tip is a great one to break out of that box. This is a great concept on how to get more mileage out of your chords. While this is something John Mayer is known for, this can also be considered to be a Jimi Hendrix style technique which is likely where John Mayer got this from.

This approach involves taking your regular six-string major and minor barre chords and breaking them out into smaller, triad chords on the G, B and E strings. This removes the high E and A string from the chord, freeing up more sonic space and just focusing on the key elements of a major or minor chord.

In this approach, you also use your thumb to reach other the top of the neck and play the root note.

Once you’ve got this chord style under your fingers, you can then extend the chord by barring the high E with your index finger, or using your now free little finger to add some melodic notes around the chord. 

If you’re playing a major chord, the notes you can add should come from the major pentatonic, and if playing a minor chord use the Minor Pentatonic scale.

Dave Mustaine spider chords

Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine is a thrash metal pioneer. He was one of the earliest archiects of this style of metal and has contributed some of the genres most iconic albums, songs and riffs. This technique is something Mustaine uses to enable fast, cross-string power chord movements without needing to shift your entire hand.

This technique will give your fretting hand fingers a stretching workout. 

Be sure to use your index finger and ring finger for the power chords rooted on the A string. Once you play that power chord, you keep those fingers in place while using the middle and little fingers to stretch over and play a power chord on the Low E string.

This is a really great technique for quick power chord changes across two different strings.

Eddie Van Halen two-handed tapping

This is quite possibly the most borrowed technique from a guitar legend, but it’s an essential one for most rock guitar players to know. If you’ve never borrowed or stolen any tapping licks from the Eddie Van Halen school of guitar playing, now is the time to start!

Two-hand tapping looks impressive and it sounds way more difficult than it actually is. Think of this like an extended pull off. 

Your fretting hand, in this example is just doing a constant pull off from the 8th to the 5th fret of the B string. With your picking hand, instead of picking the string, you’re tapping a higher note from the scale, in this case the 12th and 13th frets on the B string.

The tapped finger pulls off to the fretting hands 8th fret, which pulls off to the 5th fret.

This technique can be used with any scale, anywhere on the guitar, experiment with this and see where it fits your playing style.

Cozy Powell blazed through life like a comet, firing up every band he played with before moving on through the rock firmament, leaving a glittering trail in his wake. 

Although he died tragically in a car crash in 1998 he remains one of rock’s most influential drummers, whose history intertwines with many of the biggest bands of his generation, if not of all time. 

He is one of just a handful of drummers to have had their own hit singles, and his distinctive sound – huge and powerful but always warm and musical – is instantly recognisable.

Jeff Beck, who recruited Powell in 1970, recalls his big break clearly. 

"I was auditioning for drummers and I was late. When I finally arrived there were 15 drum kits set up and one double kit in red glitter," Beck told Classic Rock magazine.

"I said to my assistant: “Whose is that flash-bastard kit over there?” And she pointed and said: “He’s the guy you want.” 

"I said: “Let me hear him first and then we’ll go from there.” Cozy and I played for about a minute and you could see all the other drummers packing up their kits. 

"We struck up a friendship from that time on. His idol was John Bonham, and I guess he was my John Bonham."

Beginnings

Born in Cirencester, Colin Powell (born Flooks) took his nickname from the great jazz drummer Cozy Cole, who played with Cab Calloway and Benny Carter. Cole scored a hit record of his own, with the instrumental track ‘Topsy’ in 1958. It was an auspicious name but one that would take a lot to live up to. 

Powell didn’t let his namesake down. He started playing the drums in the school ensemble at the age of 12, but was kicked out for being too loud. 

Undeterred, he was soon gigging three or four nights a week with local bands. The late nights meant Cozy was invariably tardy for school and he was politely but firmly asked to leave. He got a job just long enough to buy his first kit, then packed his bags and headed to Germany where, despite being only 16, he found work playing the club circuit with a band called The Sorcerers. 

It was a hard grind, performing for hours every night and sleeping four to a room, but it gave him the chance to sharpen his chops and learn his craft.

In 1968, after three years of slogging around German nightclubs, Powell returned to his native soil and kept busy playing in a series of groups, often with other members of The Sorcerers. 

After performing with Tony Joe White at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, Cozy was offered the drum stool in the Jeff Beck Group, a highly coveted spot that raised his profile considerably. They cut two albums, Rough And Ready and The Jeff Beck Group, before Beck broke up the band.

Powell turned to doing session work for producer Mickie Most’s RAK Records label. After playing on numerous tracks for artists including Hot Chocolate and Donovan, Most convinced Powell to record a single showcasing his prodigious drumming, the result of which saw Cozy’s solo debut ‘Dance With The Devil’ get all the way up to Number Three in the UK singles chart. 

Powell’s appearance on Top Of The Pops made him a household name, and he released two follow-up singles, ‘The Man In Black’, (Number 18 in May 1974), and ‘Na Na Na’ (Number 10 in August 1974).

Over the Rainbow

In 1975 Powell took a break from the drums to spend several months indulging his other great passion, motor racing, competing on the British circuit before accepting an offer to join Ritchie Blackmore’s post-Deep Purple band, Rainbow, following another nailed audition (above). Cozy’s first recording with the group, Rising, reached Number Six in the UK album charts and still resonates with modern drummers.

In Rainbow, Powell developed his trademark live solo, performed to the accompaniment of the ‘1812 Overture’ and all the pyrotechnics that health and safety would allow. He played on three more Rainbow albums – On Stage, Long Live Rock’n’Roll and Down To Earth, which included the hit single ‘Since You’ve Been Gone’ – and in 1979 Cozy released his first album as a solo artist, Over The Top, featuring Cream’s Jack Bruce on bass and Gary Moore on guitar. 

Tracks like the aptly titled ‘Killer’ showed Powell in full flow, battering his tom toms over a double bass drum groove. Powell left Rainbow and joined the Michael Schenker Group, where he stayed for two years before joining Whitesnake, with whom he recorded ‘Slide It In’.

“I’m a huge fan of Cozy Powell, as a human being and as a drummer,” says Tommy Aldridge, who, like Powell, was a pioneer of double bass drumming in rock. “Cozy was one of the few drummers, one of my few contemporaries, that I actually considered a friend. 

"When I was working with Ozzy and we were supporting Whitesnake in Europe I got to know Cozy, and got to hang out with him.” Tommy later took over the drum stool in Whitesnake and found himself playing the songs he’d heard Powell perform when they were on the road together. “To have the opportunity to play some of those tunes that I heard him play, the real deal, night after night, was a real blessing.”

Bombs away

After the success of Over The Top, Powell released two more solo records, 1981’s Tilt and 1983’s Octopus. The latter featured a new incarnation of Powell’s solo in which he let rip over the rousing score from the movie 633 Squadron, a wartime adventure about an RAF squadron assigned to take out a Nazi rocket fuel factory. 

Cozy’s bombastic solo moved up a gear again when he became one third of Emerson, Lake and Powell. Their one album (released in 1986) and accompanying tour featured an arrangement of Gustav Holst’s ‘Mars, The Bringer Of War’, which gave Cozy room to cut loose, surrounded by more fireworks than a Guy Fawkes celebration. 

The late ’80s saw Powell return to session work, playing on Warlock’s Triumph And Agony with songstress Doro Pesch, Cinderella’s Long Cold Winter and Gary Moore’s After The War. Despite the fact that Moore and Cozy had worked together on Cozy’s solo material, their collaboration was not a happy one. 

Moore’s previous record, Wild Frontier, featured drum machines, which were anathema to Powell and, when they began rehearsals for a tour, Powell had to explain to Moore that some of the parts on Wild Frontier could not be replicated by a human being. He left before Moore hit both the road and the roof.

Adding another legendary band to his resume, Cozy joined Black Sabbath, co-producing Headless Cross with Tony Iommi. Back in a band again after several years as a hired hand, Powell told Metal Hammer magazine: “People say I keep moving around; I move around session-wise, but then again, I think a lot of drummers do. 

"It’s great to be part of a band; had the Gary Moore tour happened, it just would have been, ‘Do this, do that,’ and there’s not a lot of satisfaction in doing that after a while. I don’t mind doing it in the studio, but on stage you have to be able to play the way you feel best. 

"If every drum fill has to be the same every night, there’s no fun in that for me.”

Sidelined from Sabbath

Sadly, Powell’s involvement with Sabbath was interrupted in 1991 when he was injured while horse riding. With Ronnie James Dio back in the fold, Sabbath brought Vinny Appice in to record Dehumanizer, leaving a disgruntled Cozy on the sidelines. 

“I was kicked out of the band because a horse fell on top of me and I couldn’t play for six months,” he said. “I was disappointed in Tony’s choices, and especially because he didn’t want to wait for me to recover.” 

Like Powell, Appice would be in and out of the band’s ever-changing line-up for years to come. When he returned as part of Heaven And Hell, Appice paid tribute to Powell: “On those tracks that are on the CD The Dio Years, I used Cozy Powell’s drums,” explains Appice. 

“I thought that was cool. Cozy and Tony were mates and I said, ‘Great!’ I tuned them up a little bit, played them a little bit and started recording. I kept his spirit alive on the recording.”

After leaving Sabbath for the second time in 1996, Powell played on three albums with Brian May, as well records with Peter Green, Yngwie Malmsteen and Judas Priest’s Glenn Tipton,

On 5 April, 1998, Powell was driving on the M4 in the rain, talking to his girlfriend on his mobile phone. His black Saab 9000 Turbo suffered a puncture while Powell was doing 104 mph and spun out of control. Powell was killed in the crash, falling victim to his love of speed and ending the career of one of rock’s most charismatic figures. 

Gone, but never forgotten, Cozy continues to inspire drummers as he did John Tempesta during the recording of the track ‘Meat’ for Tony Iommi’s solo record. “There’s one fill that’s a triplet fill,” says Tempesta. “It’s pretty much a tribute to Cozy, very similar to his style. Tony Iommi turned around and smiled. He loved that!” 

Bonus - record breakers!

Tal Wilkenfeld played bass in Jeff Beck's band at the age of 21. She was an incredibly mature musician then, and has only gone from strength to strength since as a multi-instrumentalist solo artist and acclaimed session bassist. Now in an extended podcast interview with Lex Fridman, Tal has taken time to reflect on what an extraordinary bandleader Beck was, and how Prince took her to the edge of a cliff as a musician.

It's telling that she talks about the late guitar legend Beck in the present sense, and his legacy is very much still alive for her as it is for many musicians and listeners. 

"It just shows what a generous musician he is and that's evident in his playing across the board," says Tal reflecting on Beck's insistence she took a bass solo when they played Cause We've Ended Up As Lovers at the 2007 Crossroads Guitar Festival, a performance that you can watch above. "He is a generous, loving, open musician. He's not there for himself, he's there for the music. And he thought this would be the perfect musical thing to do."

Tal's willingness to face down scenarios that would instill fear into many other musicians has continued in her session career, including a recent gig playing Allman Brothers songs with the Allman Betts Family Revival.

"Different styles of music invite varying degrees of uncertainty or [lack of] safety in the way people might perceive it," she explains. "For instance, the tour I was just on playing Allman Brothers songs, I am standing on the edge of the cliff the entire night and if I mess it up… or I do a clunker or whatever it is, it's like, so what? I wouldn't have played half the stuff I'm playing if I wasn't constantly standing on the edge of the cliff. So I don't care about those few little things, I care about the overall expression."

The interview above features a lot of great insight from Tal about how she approaches the preparation behind all this – including just how vital it is to practice slowly, take breaks and not overload your brain with too much new information at once. Still, all the study in the world doesn't account for the value of reacting to music Tal has heard for the first time, and what that brings out of her.

"My favourite thing about going into sessions with musicians I adore is that we don't hear the demo," explains Tal. "Because if you hear the demo you're hearing what the producer or songwriter has already imagined that every instrument is playing. And it's like, I've already hear what you want, now part of my mind is already focussed on what you want and what the destination is gonna be, why did you bring me in here? 

"I want to not hear it and I want you to sit at a piano, sing the song and I want to hear the chords and the lyrics, or sit [with an acoustic] and play it. Then let's all go in the room and then take one, I would say 80% of the time take one has the most gold. Then there might be a mistake or two, or someone forgot to go to the b-section and you might want to punch that in so that you're hitting the right chord. But all the magic is in that first take. 

"And then sometimes it happens that we're rehearsing and it's take one, two, three- four, five… and then you're thinking about it too much and then you go and have dinner. Then the next take one after dinner is the one. It's usually after there's some kind of break. Obviously there are exceptions to the rule – sometimes it's take two or three."

Which leads Tal and Lex to Prince and his approach. Like Beck, Prince recognised not just Tal's musical talent but her knowledge of other instruments. She picks up the story… 

"With that particular album that we made together, it's called Welcome 2 America [recorded in 2008 and released posthumously in 2021], he called me up and asked me, he said, 'I want to make a band with you – I'm really inspired by what you're doing with Jeff Beck. I want to make a trio. Do you like the drum rolls of Jack DeJohnette?' That was like his first question. Yeah who doesn't like Jack DeJohnette? He's one of the greatest of all time. 

"Then he said – because we had a conversation about drums – 'It sounds like you're kind of particular about drummers so why don't you find the drummer and I'll trust you to find the drummer. You can audition some people and send me some recordings of maybe your two favourites and I'll pick out of the two or something.' 

"So I did that, went on a journey, found a couple of guys and he picked the one [Chris Coleman]. We went in and he basically would just be like, 'Ok so the A section is gonna go like this, then the B section I think we're gonna go to G and then the bridge, I might go to B flat but maybe I'll hold off… OK let's go, 1,2,3,4' And then we recorded it to tape. He did not want me to punch [n] anything.

"Then there was one song called Same Page, Different Book, and he talked through it just like he did, then he had me soloing between each phrase, like little fills. I didn't know that was coming up – and he loved that. He loved to have me on the edge of my seat, like falling off a cliff. That was my first falling off a cliff moment from somebody else holding me on the edge of the cliff, if you know what I mean. Now I just do it on my own because it's so fun and makes sense, it's the best thing for the music. 

Prince's insistence on capturing the moment without re-editing clearly had an impact on Tal.

"It's great," she says. "Nobody makes records like that anymore. Everyone wants to edit and edit, and re-record this and that. Unfortunately with a lot of music, and I'm not saying all music because there's plenty of great music coming out, but there's the danger of it being flat because every little imperfection is digitally removed." 

• Interview – Tal Wilkenfeld: “I’m a completely different bass player now. When I was in Jeff Beck’s band, I hadn’t even been playing for four years!”

As the saying goes, it is a long way to the top if you wanna rock ’n’ roll, and Sir Rod Stewart can relate. Rod the Mod has been looking back on the early days of the Jeff Beck Group and says that he and Ronnie Wood were so broke that they’d have to steal eggs.

Fame and fortune were in the post but in the meantime, Stewart, who was fronting the late electric guitar genius’ band, and Wood, who was on bass guitar, were living off scraps. 

In a recent interview with Classic Rock, conducted by Bryan Adams no less, Stewart spoke fondly of Beck, but admitted that he wasn’t exactly on top of the HR issues at the time.

“Jeff was a great guy, but he wasn’t a great bandleader,” said “I mean, you have to look after your band. I remember when me and Ronnie were staying in New York, and we never got a per diem, we just got our money every week, and sometimes that money would be very late in coming.”

It is a tale as old as time. The players are the last to see the bread. In Stewart and Wood’s case, quite literally, and even then they would have nothing to put in it. Thankfully, they had some friends in high-places who would check in on them and make sure they didn’t go hungry.

“Sometimes Jimi Hendrix’s girlfriend would go and buy us breakfast because we had no money,” said Stewart.

Stewart and Wood both joined up with the Jeff Beck Group in 1967. Wood was initially on rhythm guitar before switching codes to bass. They would both leave the band when Small Faces split to reform as Faces in ’69.

If their time in the band was brief, it was productive, leaving behind two studio albums that would cement Beck’s reputation as one of the world’s best guitar players, Truth and Beck-Ola. 

Stewart doesn’t blame Beck for those early days, scratching around New York City with empty pockets. Again, in a tale as old as time, the fickle finger of blame could be pointed at the management.

“[It was] no necessarily Jeff’s fault, but his manager,” said Stewart. “I think it was Peter Grant. So me and Woody would go up the corner from the Gorham Hotel where all the bands used to stay, and we’d go into shops and nick eggs – steal them.”

Which begs a follow-up question: what did you to do with the eggs, Rod? Drink them Rocky-style?

To find out, check out the full interview in Classic Rock.

An EP featuring a trio of Jeff Beck recordings that had hitherto only been aired at the late guitar hero’s funeral have been released in the build up to a pair of tribute concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

The tracks include live versions of Going Down and Elegy For Dunkirk, plus a version of his instrumental Midnight Walker Lament, from his last studio album, 18, that features the spoken word of Irish poet Imelda May. 

The poem was written at Beck’s suggestion, and one he loved, but sadly he never got to perform this version with May. May and Beck had collaborated together on the live 2011 tribute album to the late Les Paul, Rock ’N’ Roll Party (Honoring Les Paul).

Elegy For Dunkirk also features guest vocals from one of Beck’s collaborators, with opera singer Olivia Safe having previously recorded the track with Beck for 2010’s Emotion & Commotion. Safe sang Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem: In Paradisumat at Beck’s memorial service in February.

Going Down, meanwhile, is one of those tracks that many will remember Beck for. An old Freddie King favourite, this version was recorded in Paris in the company of a band fronted by Jimmy Hall on vocals, with a backing band comprising Carmen Vandenberg on electric guitar, Rhonda Smith on bass guitar, and Jonathan Joseph on drums. Beck’s widow, Sandra Beck, said the EP version of Midnight Walker Lament brings tears to her eyes.

“Imelda’s poem on Midnight Walker Lament on top of Jeff’s beautiful guitar work brings tears to my eyes,” she said. “Elegy for Dunkirk featuring Olivia Safe is a reminder of how Jeff’s playing, and opera interact. Going down, an up-tempo tune, was played live at Jeff’s funeral with a powerful vocal from Jimmy Hall.” 

Sandra Beck and Eric Clapton have joined forces to put together an all-star lineup of talent for two nights celebrating Beck’s life at the Royal Albert Hall. On 22 and 23 May, the likes of Doyle Bramhall, Eric Clapton, Gary Clark Jr., Johnny Depp, Billy Gibbons, Kirk Hammett, Imelda May, John McLaughlin, Robert Randolph, Olivia Safe, Rod Stewart, Joss Stone, Susan Tedeschi, Derek Trucks, and Ronnie Wood will grace the stage and pay their respects. 

Beck’s regular players – Rhonda Smith, Anika Nilles and Robert Stevenson – will also be in attendance, and there are sure to be a few surprises on the night.

• Jeff Beck: "I was pretty down at the time, I'd lost my girl, Hendrix had come and smeared everybody across the floor… I’d fallen out with the Yardbirds"

Just last week, Eric Clapton shared a previously unreleased version of Moon River that featured Beck teasing all kinds of magic from his Stratocaster. It was a track the pair had often played together live, and was made all the more poignant by the fact this studio version was recorded shortly before Beck passed away. 

The two concerts will raise money for the Southern Wildlife Care and Advisory Service (Folly Wildlife Rescue), which Sarah and Jeff Beck were patrons of. The charity rescues and rehabilitates wildlife in England’s West Kent, East Sussex, and surrounding areas. See the Royal Albert Hall for ticket information. 

Jeff Beck Tribute EP is out now via ATCO/Rhino, who will also be donating to the charity.

Eric Clapton has released a poignant cover of Moon River that features Jeff Beck in one of the last recordings before he died. The single, which is now available on all streaming platforms, arrives ahead of a pair of star-studded tribute shows held in Beck’s memory at the Royal Albert Hall.

Getting Clapton and Beck on record together is always a treat. The two Yardbirds have a very different but distinctive way of addressing the electric guitar and the sounds they get out of the instrument.

Here, Beck’s Fender Stratocaster picks up the melody line first laid down by Audrey Hepburn in Blake Edward’s 1961 romcom Breakfast At Tiffany’s. Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer would collect an Academy Award that year for Best Original Song. It’s apt, then, that it would go on to be adapted by guitar’s most original player. 

It’s not the first time Clapton and Beck have performed a duet on the track, most notably it featured on their 2010 Together And Apart Tour, which was captured for posterity on an epic live DVD. And it is certainly not the first time they have traded licks onstage; watching them duke it out on Further On Up The Road in 1981 – Clapton on a Strat, Beck on a Telecaster – is pure fire. That footage from Ronnie Scott's is hard to beat, too

It might not have been by design that Clapton had this recording on file to release right now but it certainly seems appropriate. Moon River’s languid tempo clears space for reflection, a moment to remember Beck by. 

It’s also a great example of what make Beck such a unique player; his style radically augmented the technique playbook, with that fingerstyle-whammy bar dynamic as good as a thumbprint in identifying who is on the instrument.

Moon River is part of a double-A side and will be released on 7” vinyl on 14 July, joined by a brand new original Clapton track, How Could We Know, that features Judith Hill, Simon Climie, and Daniel Santiago.

By then, the Jeff Beck tribute shows at the Royal Albert Hall will still be fresh in the memory. Hosted on 22 and 23 May, the events will welcome a formidable lineup of top-tier guitar players to the stage. 

Clapton has enlisted the likes of Billy Gibbons, Derek Trucks, Susan Tedeschi, Ronnie Wood, Doyle Bramhall II, John McLaughlin and Robert Randolph to take part.

Beck’s good friend and collaborator Johnny Depp will also be performing, with Joss Stone, Imelda May, Olivia Safe and the one and only Rod Stewart also on the bill. There are sure to be some surprises on the night. 

See the Royal Albert Hall for ticket details. Moon River is available to stream now and available to preorder on vinyl through Bushbranch/Surfdog Records.

• Derek Trucks: “I love hearing the Strat with the slide. Clapton is more tucked in. Duane’s slide sounded like it could totally flame out or go off the rails at any time“

Eric Clapton will head a tribute to Jeff Beck over two nights at the Royal Albert Hall on 22 and 23 May. Rhonda Smith, Anika Nilles and Robert Stevenson from Beck's band will appear and the following artists with personal and musical connections to the late guitar legend are said to have indicated their wish to appear at both concerts, but the lineup is subject to change:

Doyle Bramhall

Gary Clark Jr

Johnny Depp

Billy Gibbons

Imelda May

John McLaughlin

Robert Randolph

Olivia Safe

Rod Stewart

Joss Stone

Susan Tedeschi

Derek Trucks

Any surplus income from the shows will be donated to Folly Wildlife Rescue in Tunbridge Wells, Kent (of which Beck was a patron alongside Johnny Depp) and tickets go onsale on 15 March at 10am GMT from BookingsDirect.com. 

A presale will take place on 14 March at 10am GMT: register here.

The news follows Clapton's surprise appearance at Jerry Douglas's Transatlantic Sessions show in London in February where the folk song Sam Hall in tribute to "my friend Jeff" alongside an instrumental acoustic rendition of his George Harrison Beatles collaboration, While My Guitar Gently Weeps.  

The chance to see lap steel and Dobro legend Jerry Douglas with a string ensemble at the Transatlantic Sessions in London is a big deal in itself – throw a surprise appearance from Eric Clapton to play a Beatles classic and a tribute to Jeff Beck? Not a night you'll soon forget.  

It all went down on 11 February at the Royal Festival Hall and sees Clapton playing his Martin acoustic guitar for an instrumental While My Gently Weeps (the 1968 White Album song Slowhand collaborated on with George Harrison) before introducing his personal tribute to "my friend Jeff" with a rendition of traditional folk song Sam Hall. 

• Eric Clapton interview: "I actually have about zero tolerance for most of my old material. Especially Crossroads"

KISS might be one of the biggest rock bands in music but, as fire-breathing frontman and bass guitar player Gene Simmons will tell you, you don’t get to such an exalted station in this business without a comprehensive understanding of the fundamentals of pop music. 

The God of Thunder has made no secret of taking inspiration from all quarters of the musical landscape, always eager to discuss his influences and give credit where due, and in a recent interview with Goldmine he explains why the Swedish pop institution Abba have lasted the course and had such an influence on him.

In a wide-ranging conversation about the albums that changed his life, Simmons listed Abba’s Greatest Hits, and said the band – like the Bee Gees – wrote songs that “are forever”. This, he argued, was the mark of greatness.

“Yes, we like death metal, and yes, I like The Killers and I like Tame Impala – I like all kinds of things,” Simmons said. “But what is it that rises to a level of greatness no matter the musical genre, it’s the ability to craft songs that are forever. I was going to say the Bee Gees, but it pisses off a lot of people, but those songs are undeniable. So if I’m riding in my car and ABBA music comes on, I turn it up and that’s the sign of greatness.”

Sure, he might anticipate some people not seeing the link between KISS and disco-pop, but then who are these people, and where has I Was Made For Lovin’ You been all their lives? 

For Simmons, the appeal of these bands, are the songs. It was instructive that he picked Abba’s Greatest Hits, because that, in essence, is Abba. The cultivation of hits has been their raison d’être since Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid first formed the band in 1972.

“Undeniable songwriting. You just can’t touch it,” continued Simmons. “That’s why I have to pick ABBA because it’s just undeniable. I could have said The Four Seasons or The Beach Boys because there’s a wealth of great material.”

As you would expect from the man who joined Marshall Chess and others in delivering a eulogy at Chuck Berry’s memorial service, Simmons referenced the history of rock ’n’ roll, from the early trailblazers such as Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino, and he discussed the impact they had on a young kid who had emigrated to the US from Israel in the ‘50s. But none made the list on this occasion. 

If the likes of Abba and Patsy Cline might raise an eyebrow, it was no surprise to read Simmons citing Led Zeppelin’s eponymous debut and the Jeff Beck Group’s Truth/Beck-Ola – the latter a record Simmons has bought on more than one occasion, and for his money, would just about figure higher in his estimation than the first two Led Zep albums.

“For me, if I had my druthers, playing the first two Led Zeppelin records or the first two Jeff Beck Group records, it’s the Jeff Beck Group, hands down,” said Simmons.

Luckily, Simmons, or anyone else for that matter, does not have to choose. In questions such as: Led Zeppelin or the Jeff Beck Group? An acceptable answer – the correct answer – is both.

When Simmons sat down with MusicRadar to discuss the 10 songs, not albums, that changed his life he said the early Jeff Beck Group was unbeatable, and credited Beck as an innovator without equal – one who take blues guitar and ran with it. He couldn’t just pick one track from Truth. He picked the whole album.

“What a line-up!” he said. “Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart on vocals, Ron Wood on bass – Ronnie’s a much better bass player than he is a guitarist. There’s a rumour that Jimmy Page played on some of this, too. Even before Led Zeppelin and Cream, Beck took the blues and turned up the volume. But it wasn’t just decibels; Beck was pushing the envelope in all sorts of directions. Nuanced little jazz licks that caught you off guard… sophisticated, delicate melodies.”

Simmons says all kinds of music can turn up on the KISS stereo before showtime. But Truth was the album he played just before going out, and it is remains fresh. “Even if it came out today, it would grab your attention,” he said. “What do you Brits say? Best thing since sliced bread!”

As for Led Zeppelin, they brought “steam hammer balls” to the party. Communication Breakdown was the song that hit him the hardest, and was one that KISS would occasionally cover.

“Once they get rollin’, there’s nothing that can stop them,” he said. “Even before the song starts, you’ve got that machine gun riff. What the fuck is that? Woah!”

And Simmons tells Goldmine that what set Led Zeppelin apart was how they replicated that sound live.

“That first Zeppelin record is undeniable,” he says. “The fact that the band had one guitar player, one bass player and drums and were able to sound like that live, that says a lot. Undeniable.”

Among the many tributes paid to Jeff Beck by his peers and collaborators, after his death on 10 January, Rod Stewart’s stood out. Perhaps it was because this was a singer looking at Beck from a singer’s point of view, a different perspective.

Where we guitar players watch Beck and wonder in awe at how he manipulated his guitar in the way he did – did anyone ever make more use of the Fender Stratocaster’s design? – Stewart had the benefit of sharing the stage and bouncing off Beck, of being in the conversation with him.

“Jeff Beck was on another planet,” Stewart wrote. “He took me and Ronnie Wood to the USA in the late ‘60s in his band the Jeff Beck Group and we haven’t looked back since. He was one of the few guitarists that when playing live would actually listen to me sing and respond. Jeff, you were the greatest, my man. Thank you for everything.” 

We rightly think of Jeff Beck as this singular presence on electric guitar, the instrument an extension of himself, but when he performed, he was similarly attuned to what was going on elsewhere on the stage, in the mix. He was as good a listener as he was a performer. 

Watching clips of Beck playing is always mind-blowing, no matter the context. Most recently, Beck shot a promo clip for Fender’s American Vintage II Series, and turned Link Wray’s Rumble into this thing of rare anarchy, revising the original bad boy rock ’n’ roll instrumental a new sense of danger for the 21st century. 

Here we’re watching a different side to Beck; this is Beck the collaborator. Go on YouTube and you’ll find dozens or more of these, occasions in which Beck joins a one of his peers and the magic just happens. 

But it doesn’t just happen. It’s a gift. As Stewart says, that was a big part of what made Beck special, for many people’s money the best there ever was. And here he is with some of the best.

With the White Stripes 

It was the 14 September 2002, and the night opened with the Jeff Beck Group performing Beck’s Bolero. A slow dance with the audience at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s Southbank, you could not find a more appropriate introduction to a career retrospective of Beck’s work. 

All of the hits – and the deep cuts – kept coming. Still I’m Sad served notice that those in attendance were entering the Yardbirds era, and there were some special guests in attendance, with the White Stripes joining Beck for seven tracks that draw the aesthetic parallel between the two bands for anyone who had failed to notice it before. Yardbirds standards such as Heart Full of Soul – written by Graham Gouldman, later of 10cc – and Evil Hearted You were mother’s milk to Jack White. 

Beck also played with John McLaughlin that night, the pair joining forces for What Mama Said and a cover of Django, the song written in 1954 by John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet in tribute to Django Reinhardt who died in ’53. 

But with the White Stripes? That was an inspired collaboration. What Beck and White could have done on record would have been something worth hearing.

With BB King

“Go ahead, Jeff. Go ahead,” says BB King, his tone even and encouraging, and Jeff does just that, he goes ahead with a guitar solo that’s been teased throughout the first verse and does not disappoint. 

This performance of Key To The Highway is truly a two-hander, with the King of the Blues radiating warmth and charisma, and it is further evidence of what Rod Stewart said about Beck, about him being a guitar player who listened to the singer and reacted accordingly. This here is a conversation here. The best collaborations almost always are.

Perhaps it was a function of Beck recording so many instrumentals that his phrasing and style would evolve to become so talkative. We can look at how he brings the volume controls in play, in concert with the whammy bar, and talk about it in very player-centric terms, such as dynamics and so forth, but you don’t need to play the instrument to glom onto what Beck is doing here, he’s talking with the thing. At any rate, this Charlie Segar and Big Bill Broonzy, standard has scarcely sounded better.

With the Rolling Stones – Going Down

This was the cold winter night in London on the 50 And Counting Tour when Jeff Beck had his Marshall head wheeled out onstage to turn up the heat on the Stones, a three-guitar jam on the Don Nixon / Alabama State Troupers track, featuring Beck on his Strat, Ronnie Wood on a Les Paul Standard and Keith Richards with his 1959 ES-355. 

Mick Jagger is brilliant here, the way he stretches out contemporaries into eight syllables. Pure Jagger. Beck adds weight and a quasi-metal power to the Stones. These are the occasions during a set when it’s time to turn it up, time for the late, great Charlie Watts to hit them just a little bit harder. 

Beck’s solo is brilliant here. If you have tuned in for fireworks and a little showing off, you’ve got it – some two-handed tapped trills, harmonics that just fly off the guitar, as though on command – but while he brings the heat to the jam he never overcooks it. 

There will be many watching this and will be of an opinion they are watching the greatest guitarist ever jamming with the greatest drummer ever. They might not be wrong.

With Eric Clapton and Doyle Bramhall II

This is a great clip from Eric Clapton’s Crossroads festival, particularly thanks to bonus intro from Slowhand talking about his old pal and fellow Yardbird, and what makes him the guitar player he is. 

Clapton is right; they are two sides of the same coin, radically different styles and yet somehow co-existing on the same plane. And yes, who could ever get close to Beck’s mastery of the Stratocaster’s complement of controls, that whammy bar an extension of his arm. 

Clapton suggests close observation might yield reward some insight into how all this is performed, but if anything seeing it puts it further out of reach. These are the sorts of techniques that are developed over the years, each building upon the last. 

Clapton’s solo confirms what he was talking about earlier, complementing Beck perfectly, and so too Doyle Bramhall II, the southpaw on the Strat, whose solo heightens the drama for the denouement of the jam.

With Buddy Guy and Billy Gibbons

Here we have two different players, two different styles, on the same night, right after one another, and with each Beck is totally at home. It is as though they have all played together for years. 

In a sense, they already have. It was the likes of Buddy Guy that Beck and Clapton drew inspiration from; those were the cats who gave them their vocabulary.

To see them on the stage together was not altogether unusual. Beck and Guy jammed together on a number of occasions. But it is always instructional, like a two-way conversation between teacher and student.

As a peer, Billy Gibbons approaches things from a different POV, and how apt that they should join forces on a Jimi Hendrix track that Gibbons had the great chutzpah – and by goodness the talent – to play while actually touring with Hendrix back in the day with the Moving Sidewalks. Gibbons, Guy and Beck, these are birds of a feather, players happy to play in any company. Credit also to the awesome Tal Wilkenfeld for holding it down on bass guitar and anchoring the jam.

• 5 songs guitarists need to hear by Jeff Beck

Brian May has released a video to Instagram discussing his deep sadness at the passing of guitarist Jeff Beck, who died on 10 January aged 78. He also paid tribute to the fellow player he was "in awe of". 

"I guess I'm struggling today," explained a visibly moved May to his Instagram followers in the video and explained why he's not ready to accept the requests he's received from the media to talk about Beck in interviews yet. "I guess I don't feel ready, this is such an extraordinary loss, and he was such an extraordinary person," he continued.

"Jeff was completely and utterly unique, and the kind of musician who is impossible to define and I was absolutely in awe of him. He's only a couple of years older than me and came from the same area where I came from but he was a hero to me all along – doing thing that I only dreamed of doing, when I was in school even he was already up there in the Tridents and then in The Yardbirds. Doing extraordinary things and a major, major inspiration for me to try and do the same. Not that I did the same, but to give myself a voice the way he had."

May also had some advice to newcomers on what he considers a Beck masterwork.

"If you want to hear his depth of emotion, and sound and phrasing – the way he could touch your soul, listen to Where Were You off the Guitar Shop album… sit down and listen to it for four minutes. It's unbelievable  . It's possibly the most beautiful bit of guitar music ever recorded, probably alongside Jimi Hendrix's Little Wing. 

"So sensitive, so beautiful, so incredibly creative," May said of the track. "Unlike anything you've ever heard anywhere else. "Of course he had his influences too but he brought an amazing voice to rock music that will never, ever be emulated or equalled."

"He came from my area, so he was like a local boy," continued May. "I saw him play so many times, always with my jaw on the ground, thinking, how does he do that? I often think it must have been like being around Mozart and seeing that incredible genius at work and wondering where it could have possible come from? How could he be that great?

"And if you were with Jeff, if you were around his house, he'd come out from the garage, having been under one of his cars for the last few hours, his fingers all covered in grease and muck looking like he'd just crawled out from a ditch somewhere. Then he'd pick up a guitar and this beautiful sensitive music would come out. 

"I think I was very shy," admitted May. "I didn't really know how to talk to him… maybe because I was in such awe of him, but I was never at ease. I wrote him a song, well I wrote a song about him called The Guv'or for one of my solo albums and he came over to my place here in the studio and played it with me. We had a laugh, and again he played some incredible stuff. My jaw dropped. I couldn't really pick up a guitar when he was in the room because he was so incredible – I just wanted to watch and listen."

May's honesty about how he viewed Beck and his regrets then become even more striking. 

"So he played on the track and I don't think I could ever put into words how much I did revere him," he revealed. "I hope I gave him a picture – I don't know if he knew. But I feel like I wasn't a good enough friend to him and that's one of the things that happens I suppose, but particularly in this case. I feel like there was so many times I could have rung him up and I wish I had been a proper friend.

"But Jeff Beck is so unique, so influential on every guitarist I've ever met in my life," continued May. The loss is incalculable. It's so sad not having him int he world anymore. I still can't compute it in my head so this is as far as I can get at the moment I'm afraid. But I was listening last night to my old Yardbirds albums and this was the first time when he started to put out there what he could do; Over, Under, Sideways, Down – have a listen to that. And Shapes Of Things – oh my god when you get to the solo in the original Yardbirds version of Shapes Of Things it's like something takes off like a space rocket. No one had ever heard something like that before.

"Before a guitar sounding like a guitar it suddenly sounded like something between a sitar and some strange wind instrument – just listen to it. It blew my mind at the time. It was one of the major things that made me want to play the guitar and take it up as a career. But that will always, always stay in my mind - Shapes Of Things and Where Were You from the Guitar Shop album. But so many things he did [too]. He was wild, he was unquantifiable and extraordinarily difficult to understand, but one of the greatest guitar geniuses the world has seen and will ever see. God bless you, Jeff."

The guitar world pays tribute to legendary guitarist Jeff Beck

It has been confirmed that guitar legend Jeff Beck passed away on 10 January. He was 78 years old. 

A statement from his representative reads as follows:  “On behalf of his family, it is with deep and profound sadness that we share the news of Jeff Beck’s passing. After suddenly contracting bacterial meningitis, he peacefully passed away yesterday. His family ask for privacy while they process this tremendous loss.”

The former Yardbirds guitarist recently completed a tour in support of his album 18 with John Depp. 

"The six-stringed warrior is no longer here for us to admire the spell he could weave around our mortal emotions," said Jimmy Page in tribute to his friend and former Yardbirds bandmate." Jeff could channel music from the ethereal. His technique unique. His imaginations apparently limitless. Jeff I will miss you along with your millions of fans. Jeff Beck Rest in Peace."

Jeff Beck was the ultimate players' player – a towering giant in the guitar world and an inspiration to the heroes of the instrument, including his peers Eric Clapton and Page.  

He leaves a legacy as one of the most expressive and original talents to ever play the instrument. From his work with The Yardbirds and alongside Rod Stewart in the Jeff Beck Group, he was one of the great trailblazers of heavy blues-infused rock. But that was only the beginnings of his musical journey as a Grammy Award and Ivor Novello-winning maverick who took the Fender Stratocaster into unexplored realms. 

“My Strat is another arm, it’s part of me," he told Total Guitar in 2016. "It doesn’t feel like a guitar at all. It’s an implement which is my voice. A Les Paul feels like a guitar and I play differently on that and I sound too much like someone else. With the Strat, instantly it becomes mine so that’s why I’ve welded myself to that. Or it’s welded itself to me, one or the other.”

Inspired by original electric guitar firebrand Les Paul and the early rock n' roll style of Gene Vincent guitarist Cliff Gallup, Beck would later fuse their pioneering spirit with the soulful influences of players including BB King, Lonnie Mack and Steve Cropper.

As a teenager he would meet fellow budding guitarist Jimmy Page and go on to cut his teeth with early sixties band including Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, the Tridents and the Rumbles. Then in March 1965 Beck was recruited to replace Eric Clapton in The Yardbirds on the recommendation of his friend Page.

“I know he didn’t like the fact that I took over from him in the Yardbirds and we did great," Beck said of Clapton in a 2021 Classic Rock interview. "The general buzz of the band was that they thought they were finished when Eric left. At my debut with the Yardbirds at the Marquee I showed them what was what and I got a standing ovation, so that was the end of that."

Page joined the ranks ahead of US dates, first on bass and then switching to guitar alongside Beck, with the 1966 single Happenings Ten Years Time Ago a portent for things to come from the guitarists. When Beck left the band in 1966, Page remained as sole lead guitarist. 

Beck then made his move as a solo artist, recording the Scott English and Larry Weiss song Hi Ho Silver Lining just days after English band The Attack had tracked it. But it was Beck's version that became a hit – his biggest charting song in his home country. And while it saw the guitarist taking the mic, it wasn't something he had ambitions for. 

 “It’s so difficult because I didn’t sing," Beck admitted to Total Guitar in 2016. "Eric [Clapton] said, and it was words of great wisdom, ‘Get used to the fact that you hate your voice, because I did.’ And I went, ‘But you sound good, I sound unbearably bad. I loathe it. I would never enjoy it even if we had another single like [Hi Ho] Silver Lining, I just couldn’t bear it.’"

Instead Beck's voice became the guitar, even though it would inevitably deny him the household name hit single status of his peers.

“It was tough," continued Beck. "But then I can turn around and say, Blow By Blow, put that in your pipe and smoke it, mate.’ But he’s right, if I did come up with a song and everybody loved it, it would instil confidence automatically and I might even get to like what I sound like but letting that out there is more than I can bear."

But Beck did find himself a singer for his music and developing Motown influences, for a while at least. And their meeting would come at a low point for the renaissance man.

“Let’s not beat around the bush, I was pretty down at the time - I’d lost my girl, Hendrix had come and smeared everybody across the floor… it wasn’t looking too rosy," Beck reflected to Total Guitar. "I’d fallen out with the Yardbirds - whatever happened I was out, and I’m facing a Monday morning just outside London thinking, What’s the point? It’s all gone against me. So I went to the Cromwell Inn, which was my last hope of preventing anything silly happening."

There he got talking with young singer Rod Stewart, who had already made a name performing with Long John Bawdry. 

“Then I heard that he might be free, and as luck would have it, he was the last, dying ember in this club I was in, and I’m glad I went! It’s always a good idea to go out somewhere, because you’re not going to have anybody knocking on the door, are you?”

The Jeff Beck Group's 1968 debut Truth, featuring future Faces Stewart and Ronnie Wood on bass, with Micky Waller on drums plus guest appearances by Keith Moon and John Paul Jones. It even featured Page's Yardbirds-era composition Beck's Bolero but it also predated Led Zeppelin's 1969 debut with its revelatory heavy blues rock sound. Something that didn't escape Beck.

"When I first heard what he’d done with Led Zeppelin I thought, 'That’s a little bit more than inspired by the Truth album,'” noted Beck to Classic Rock. "When I finally got over that I realised I needed more than I had. I needed a frontman with girly appeal. Plant certainly had that in abundance – the bare chest, golden locks and all that. We had Rod Stewart [laughs]."

The album Beck-Ola would follow in 1969 but by the Woodstock Festival the guitarist would break up this iteration of the band. 

Late the following year Beck formed the next iteration of the Jeff Beck Group but by 1972 and two more albums the band disbanded and Beck moved on to adventures new. But after much speculation, Beck and his old friend Rod would at least have one last reunion playing their old songs, at the Hollywood Bowl in 2019.

“Things took a funny turn in the early '70s," Beck remembered in 2016. "It all turned out well when I heard John McLaughlin, because his performance on the Miles Davis Jack Johnson album and with Mahavishnu Orchestra said, ‘Here’s where you can go’. And every musician I knew was raving about them. I thought, ‘This is a little bit of me, this. I’ll have some of that.’ The mastery of the playing, it was unequalled."

Beck took that baton and spent the rest of his life running with it, following his heart. The early part of the decade saw him collaborating with Stevie Wonder on Superstition during the Talking Book album sessions.  He would go on to record his own version of the song alongside Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice in their 1973 project together. That project dissolved in 1974 before the trio could finish their second album, but in 1975 Beck would make one of his most powerful musical statements. 

The album Blow By Blow surfaced in 1975 and saw a meticulous Beck pursue a jazz-rock instrumental vision with Beatles producer George Martin. The album allowed Stevie Wonder to return the favour of Beck's contribution of Superstition with the songs Cause We've Ended As Lovers and Thelonius. The former would become a staple for Beck and is rightly heralded as a guitar-playing masterwork. 

Beck worked with keyboardist Jan Hammer and ex-Mahavishnu Orchestra drummer / composer Narada Michael Walden on the 1976 follow-up jazz-rock fusion album, Wired.

While the 1981 Secret Policeman's Ball saw Beck and Clapton share the stage for performances, he would be reunited with his former bandmate Stewart on a 1985 cover of Curtis Mayfield's People Get Ready as part of the album Flash, featuring a range of vocalists.

The guitarist began to suffer from tinnitus in the 1980s and would take break from music before his instrumental album comeback Jeff Beck's Guitar Shop in 1989 where he showcased his fingerstyle playing.  

The next decade saw a more prolific Beck with contributions to other artist's albums including Jon Bon Jovi (Blaze Of Glory), Kate Bush (The Red Shoes) and Hans Zimmer (the Days Of Thunder soundtrack). The Yardbirds were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame in 1992 (he was inducted as a solo artist in 2009) which resulted in Beck making one of its all-time most memorable acceptance speeches…

Beck continued to push the envelope musically and 1999's Who Else! album saw him experimenting with fusing electronica and guitars, an approach that 2000's You Had It Coming would continue. 

Beck's willingness to showcase emerging musical talent paid dividends with the addition of 21-year old virtuoso bassist Tal Wilkenfield to his live band in 2007, with the same lineup touring the world in 2009 with a memorable live performance filmed at Ronnie Scott's in London. 

Loud Hailer in 2016 also saw him collaborate with guitarist Carmen Vandenberg and vocalist Rosie Bones of the band Bones UK. Recent years saw him record and perform alongside friend Johnny Depp, with their album 18 emerging last year.

One of Beck's last released collaborations was a guest appearance on the title track of Ozzy Osbourne's 2022 album Patient Number 9 and the song A Thousand Shades. 

Jeff Beck 1944-2023: The guitar world reacts

There are gear demo videos and there are gear demo videos in which a former Yardbird and bona-fide guitar legend take an electric guitar and put it through its paces with one of the most iconic tracks in rock ’n’ roll history. 

Jeff Beck on a Seafoam Green Fender American Vintage II Stratocaster is the latter, and it really is remarkable footage – a bit of Friday night six-string inspiration head of 'Straturday' and, hopefully for all of us, an uninterrupted weekend of guitar playing.

Kudos to the Fender production team for maxing the budget on a well-lit stage that brings out that Seafoam Green in all its glory, and makes Beck look as he really is when you think of it, a man whose talent on the instrument is not of this Earth.

The tone on this rendition of Link Wray’s Rumble is reference quality, a scratchy Strat bite treble that screams ‘Add to cart’, but should come with the caveat that not all players can make a Strat sing like this, not matter how well put together it is.

• Learn 4 Jeff Beck guitar chords

The American Vintage II Series, as the name suggests, sees Fender digging through the archive to reproduce some choice models as per their original specs – an upscale and more retro-accurate US-built analogue to what it is presently doing with the Mexican-built Vintera range.

It comprises the 1957 Strat, as wielded by Beck, Strats from ’61 and ’73, Telecasters from 1951 and 1963, a Thinline Tele from ’72, a Telecaster Deluxe from 1975 – enter the CuNiFe – and a 1977 Telecaster Custom. A 1966 Jazzmaster, 1954 and ’60 Precision Basses and a 1966 Jazz Bass round out the collection. 

And when we say “from” said year, that is to say that Fender, in, Executive Vice President of Product, FMIC, Justin Norvell’s words, is making a “near 1:1 comparison with their original predecessors”. 

You can read more about the American Vintage II Series here. You can find out more at Fender. And you can watch and listen to how good the ’57 Strat will sound once you learn how to play like Mr Jeff Beck above.

Jeff Beck is the guitar players' guitar player. He has been a staple in the guitar scene since bursting into the '60s British blues revival scene. He’s known for his huge catalogue of solo work alongside his work with the Yardbirds and Rod Stewart.

Beck is an extremely expressive musician. He digs in and makes his Strat scream and whisper in ways that many other guitar players struggle to imitate.

Underneath the onslaught of aggressive bends, whammy bar movements and trills you’ll also find some killer chords. We’re going to check out four here from some iconic Jeff Beck tracks.

D/F#

This unusually stacked triad is featured in the song People Get Ready. In the song, Jeff also pulls the 3rd fret on the B string off to the 2nd which revoices the chord to an F#m triad.

This is an interesting way to play a triad because you get the root as the highest note and the third as the lowest. You could also transpose this shape up the neck to get other inversions of major triads.

Jeff Beck: classic interview

Daug

Beck’s 2020 collaboration track Isolation with Johnny Depp features a Daug chord in the intro of the song. An Augmented chord is when the 5th of the chord is raised a semi-tone. 

Augmented chords are not chords you’d want to use all the time, but they are great for setting a sense of tension in a riff. In this riff, the Daug follows a Dmaj chord.

Use these sparingly, the same way you’d use a diminished chord.

5 songs guitarists need to hear by… Jeff Beck

Gadd9

This Gadd9 chord found in Beck’s version of Greensleeves is a very melodic chord. It’s played across three strings, the Low E, G and high E. The Low E covers the root note, the G covers the major third and the high E the add9 note.

This is a great, and transposable, shape for adding some melodic chord work to your finger picked patterns.

Fm11

The very first chord you hear in the track Led Boots is this Fm11 chord. This is a great, jazzy chord to add to your songs.

The min11 is a complex chord voicing that works great as the 4 or 5 chord in a 12-bar blues progression. It adds a jazzy feel to that progression which is great if you want to experiment with some more harmonically complex chords or note choices over a typical blues progression. 

Learn 4 Bob Dylan guitar chords 

Jeff Beck and Johnny Depp’s long-awaited studio album, 18, has finally arrived.

The duo’s 13-track LP is available on CD and digitally, with a 180-gram black vinyl version due for release on 30th September. 

Currently out on tour, Beck and Depp are scheduled to finish their highly acclaimed European run in Paris in a fortnight’s time.

Beck is also in the process of planning a tour in the United States this autumn with dates to be announced soon.

Drawn and designed by Beck’s wife Sandra, 18’s artwork depicts an illustration of the maestros as 18-year-olds.

“When Johnny and I started playing together, it really ignited our youthful spirit and creativity,” explains Beck.

“We would joke about how we felt 18 again, so that just became the album title too.”

When the pair first met in 2016, they quickly bonded over a shared love of cars and guitars and began hanging out.

Having spent a little time together, Beck discovered Depp’s talent for songwriting and performing.

Inspired by their musical chemistry, in 2019 the guitarists decided they would begin work on a collaborative album.

Over the next few years, Beck and Depp tracked a myriad of covers spanning genres from Motown to Celtic.

“We were going to call the album Kitchen Sink, because we threw everything in it,” joked Beck.

“The only game plan we had was to play songs we like and see where they took us.”

Featuring two original Depp compositions, 18 is a dynamic record that cuts across musical styles, with some inspired moments of contrast along the way.

A particular highlight is when the second track, Killing Joke’s Death and Resurrection Show, juxtaposes with Dennis Wilson’s Time.  

“The choice of those particular tracks reflects a pattern that played out across the entire album,” commented Beck.

“We suggested songs the other might not think of. It pushed both of us out of our comfort zones.

“Johnny got me excited about Venus In Furs, and I persuaded him to try Ooo Baby Baby.

“Interesting things happen when you’re open to trying something different.”

Order 18 here.

Jeff Beck may be a guitar legend now, but to get there he did the work as a pioneer; exploring uncharted territory with the instrument. But in a recent interview with Johnnie Walker for his Radio 2 show Sounds Of The '70s, the former Yardbird expressed genuine incredulity that the electric guitar has gone as far in pop culture as it has since his 1950s rock 'n' roll inspirations. 

"It was just rocket propelled from '54 until today," reflects Beck. "I never thought the guitar would be sustained for so long and everybody knows what a Stratocaster is."

Of course, part of the reason is just as Beck was inspired by players including Les Paul, Buddy Holly, Scotty Moore and Cliff Gallup, he went on to spark the imaginations of generations as one of the most expressive players to ever pick up a guitar – first a Tele and Gibson Les Paul before he found his true home; the Strat.

"It does what I want," says Beck of his favourite guitar. "It's infinitely variable in its tone and capabilities with the spring-loaded bridge. It was though it was made for me – thank you very much, Leo!"

It's hard to imagine that distorted guitar was once groundbreaking, but Beck was one of the early adopters in the rock 'n' roll scene of early '60s London. But it wasn't as calculated as some might presume. 

"That came as an accident," the guitarist tells Walker. "We played larger venues round about '64 / '65 and the PA was inadequate, so we cranked up the level and then found out feedback would happen. Pete Townshend discovered it and had it on My Generation and then I started using it because it was controllable – you could play tunes with it. 

"I did this once at Staines Town Hall with The Yardbirds," Beck remembers. "And afterwards the guys says, 'You know that funny noise that wasn't supposed to be there? I'd keep that in if I were you.' I said, 'It was deliberate mate – go away.'" 

Check out the full interview at the top where Beck also talks about working with Stevie Wonder on Superstition, and you can also see our feature on how Stevie returned the favour to Beck for the classic 'Cause We've Ended As Lovers below. 

Jeff Beck: “Stevie gave me Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers as an apology for releasing Superstition first"

We already know Ozzy Osbourne's next studio album features a wishlist of guitar heroes with Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Zakk Wylde, Tony Iommi. That's now extended with other confirmed guests including Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, Metallica’s RobTrujillo, Duff McKagan and late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins. Now we can hear the first fruits of it with the Beck-guesting title track of the album, Patient Number 9.

The former Yardbirds guitarist and current Strat maestro lends his expressive soloing prowess in the last third of the song and it elevates an already strong return from the Ozzman. We can't wait to hear the rest of the album.

And what a time to be alive for Jeff Beck fans, with music from his forthcoming collaborative album with Johnny Depp recently surfacing too. 

Patient Number 9 will be released on 9 September. Preorder here.  

5 songs guitarists need to hear by… Jeff Beck

Happy birthday to guitar legend Jeff Beck!

Though he is celebrating his 78th today, Beck's recent collaboration with Johnny Depp has made him feel 60 years younger.

“When Johnny and I started playing together, it really ignited our youthful spirit and creativity,” said the guitarist.

“We would joke about how we felt 18 again, so that just became the album title too.”

Speaking of his musical partnership with Beck, Depp said, “It’s an extraordinary honor to play and write music with Jeff, one of the true greats and someone I am now privileged enough to call my brother.”

Set for release in three weeks’ time, 18 comprises a host of inspired covers along with two original Depp compositions, namely This is a Song for Miss Hedy Lamarr and the aptly titled Sad Motherfuckin’ Parade.

When Beck and Depp met back in 2016, they quickly bonded over their mutual love for cars and guitars.

Building upon their unique chemistry the pair decided to embark on an album project in 2019.

Their debut appeared during the pandemic in 2020 with a well-timed release of the 1970 John Lennon solo track Isolation.

While the duo recorded a number of original compositions by Depp, they explored a plethora of covers spanning a diverse range of musical styles from Celtic to Motown.

“I haven’t had another creative partner like him for ages,” said Beck. “He was a major force on this record. 

"I just hope people will take him seriously as a musician because it’s a hard thing for some people to accept that Johnny Depp can sing rock 'n' roll.”

Suffice to say, Depp has no problem nailing such classics as The Velvet Underground’s Venus In Furs, the Everly Brothers’ Let It Be Me and Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On.

On instrumental tracks such as the Beach Boys’ Caroline, No from their 1966 masterpiece, Pet Sounds, Beck lets his Stratocaster do the singing.

“That entire album was great support for me in horrible times,” recalls Beck. "I’d left the Yardbirds and regretted it because I had nothing.

“I was back living with my mum and dad. I thought, right, I’m not going to sit around doing nothing. So, I bought a stereo and Pet Sounds, and I was just riveted to the spot.

“I remember it was a great big cure from losing the Yardbirds, having Jimi Hendrix stomp all over things, and losing my girlfriend. 

"All that happened in what seemed like the same day.”

Pre-order 18 here.

Legendary guitarist (Doctor) Jeff Beck has told BBC 6 Music that he would still love to play with the Rolling Stones at some point.

Speaking to Matt Everitt, Beck responded to the question "Would you join them on stage?" by saying:

"Yeah, I would. I've just put my foot well into it, but I would, it would have to be a blues [number], or something that could show what I can do. I love them, who doesn't? Even 'her highness' up front…"

Beck's clearly got The Stones on his mind, revealing earlier in the same interview that his one regret was not joining the band following Mick Taylor's departure in 1974.

"I would have loved to have been a Rolling Stone," Beck told the Beeb. "But the thought would have been better than the act, I think - the fantasy of it. I don't think I would have lasted, number one. I don't think, musically, they were on the same path.

"I wouldn't have had 'Blow By Blow', which has kept me as a solo artist… I'd have just been a member of the Rolling Stones. The biggest band in the world - how bad is that? If you can be someone on your own, then that temptation's there. I guess it's the ego thing - to have your own name on the ticket."

Jeff Beck is due to receive the Living Legend award at the upcoming Classic Rock Awards.

Image: © Paulo Fridman/Corbis

Jeff Beck has announced a rare intimate gig at O2 Academy Bournemouth on 11 June in preparation for his forthcoming European tour.

The show will see Jeff appear with his full band (Jason Rebello, Rhonda Smith and Narada Michael Walden) before they kick the tour off properly at the Isle Of Wight Festival the following evening.

The European tour follows two strong releases from Beck in the past year after he released the triple Grammy Award winning 'Emotion And Commotion' in 2010 and more recently his stunning tribute to Les Paul, 'Rock 'n' Roll Party'.

Tickets for Jeff Beck And His Band at O2 Academy Bournemouth are £26.50 and on sale on now from ticketweb.co.uk or 0844 477 2000.

Image: © Erik Kabik ./Retna Ltd./Corbis

According to the Mirror, bonafide guitar legend Jeff Beck sliced off the end of one finger while chopping carrots and had to have it re-attached in an emergency procedure.

While we're glad the guitarist is getting his five-a-day, he should also probably get his own cook. Following the incident, Beck has raised the value of the insurance policy on his hands to £7million. The new amount equates to approximately £700,000 per digit, or $1million.

Jeff Beck's new album 'Emotion And Commotion', his first studio effort in seven years, is out today. Check out the video interview with him below.

Rock guitar legend Jeff Beck has teamed up with Gibson to create the all new limited edition Jeff Beck Les Paul 'Oxblood' model.

Retailing at between £3,999 and £4,499 you need to be credit crunch immune, and the first 50 of these historic guitars have been put through an extensive ageing and wear process by the master luthiers at Gibson Custom to closely match the look and feel of Beck's original instrument (these go for £13,000 a pop).

Gibson engineers thoroughly inspected Jeff's guitar and worked closely with him over a period of months to create as accurate a reproduction as possible. An additional 100 will be prepared with Gibson Custom's pioneering V.O.S. finish, bringing the total run to just 150 rare instruments.

Each guitar comes with a specially produced Gibson Custom case with Jeff Beck's signature silkscreened on the top, a custom care kit and a certificate of authenticity.

Many great electric guitars have had their reputations elevated by the legendary artists who have played them. Jeff Beck's Les Paul Oxblood is one of the most revered, a guitar from the heart of tone history. The new run features a custom-tailored neck profile modeled precisely from Beck's original instrument.

During a trip to the US in 1973 Beck bought an early 50s Les Paul Goldtop, which had been modified by the Strings & Things music store in Memphis adding two humbucking pickups to replace the original P-90s, and a heavy dark-brown lacquer finish to the body. Beck himself called it an "oxblood" color.

This Oxblood Les Paul attained legendary status when played and then featured on the cover of Beck's groundbreaking jazz-rock album 'Blow By Blow' recorded in late 1974 with Beatles producer Sir George Martin.

"The Les Paul has a big powerful sound that no other guitar has. It just sounds rich," says Jeff. The guitar's features include a carved maple top under the aged Oxblood finish, a one piece rounded mahogany neck, vintage reissue .010 strings, aged nickel hardware and aged acrylic trapezoid inlays.