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  4. Oh – I didn’t see that one coming. A superb guitarist and all round decent bloke by all accounts. A friend of mine was working in a petrol station years ago when a guy with rock star hair came in to pay. ‘You don’t half look like Jeff Beck’ he said. ‘Just as well. I am Jeff Beck.’

  5. Terrible news. One of my lifelong heroes. Just the greatest player in all his guises. I saw these clips when the show was broadcast in 1974 (it was called “Five faces of guitar”) and became a fan for life and it opened my eyes to truly different and out there guitar paying. Of course he just got better, even up to the present day. Also, where others at school wanted to be David Bowie or Rod Stewart, I wanted to be Jeff Beck (I have photos…). I mean, that’s that a guitar hero looks like, isn’t it? I saw him live a few times and he was always brilliant. So long maestro.

  6. I have to add one of my favourite clips on YouTube, Jeff kicking a slightly lazy Eric Clapton in the ass and taking outrageous pleasure in it with some shameless showing off, going where no one goes. To be fair Eric looks like he enjoyed it too.

  8. FFS. I’ve loved this man’s playing since Blow by Blow, this is terrible news. Saw him live in Manchester five or six years ago and it was just brilliant. A true genius on the guitar

  9. How very sad. I last saw him in Glasgow in 2018. He didn’t say a lot, just did wonderful things with his guitar in varying ‘styles’. Blues? Jazz? Fusion? Rock? Beckola. He seemed to be a regular guy who liked building hot-rods and, by the way, played guitar. One fond memory is him segueing into Little Wing which is a huge, huge favourite of mine. There was dust.

  10. Just seen this news and it is a massive shock especially as he seemed in rude health. For me he was without doubt one of our very best guitarists. I have most if his solo output and Wired is my favourite but still I go back to Shapes of Things which lead the way in inventiveness.
    I got to see him twice – first time as Beck, Bogart and Appice which is loudest live concert I ever saw and then with his own band maybe about 10 years ago. His version of A day in the life is just superb..
    Would like to have seen him on his most recent tour with Johnny Depp but sadly missed out.
    RIP Jeff

  11. They keep on coming, or going rather, but this is one of the greats I think. I only got into him in recent years when I started buying secondhand LPs and bought Blow By Blow and a compilation of 60s stuff, plus I watch live shows on youtube like Ronnie Scott’s, a brilliant performance.

    I think he showed how to do covers, similar to jazz acts. I find that kind of instrumental, improvised cover works very well. That was a strength. I’m thinking She’s A Woman or Cause We Ended As Lovers. There are more.

  13. My favourite guitarist from the first time I heard him. Like Bradman at cricket, he was a couple of standard deviations above his peers and was one of the few musicians who was still improving as he got older. He quite simply found notes on his guitar that others couldn’t find.

    My favourite guitar of the last 30 years has been a 1991 Jeff Beck strat in Surf Green.

  14. Shocked that Jeff is the first of the Yardbirds triumvirate to go…there was a point where I’d have put money on him being the last man standing.

    His sound with the Yardbirds is one of the big reasons I wanted a Tele/Esquire – but, having said that, I’m off to listen to Wired, my gateway to jazz-rock when I was young and stupid.

    RIP, Mr Beck

  15. A guy on the Jeff Beck FB group posted this.
    It may interest guitarists

    . From a NY Times, July 21, 2016 concert review: “There was something particular, specialized and unusual about pretty much every individual sound [Jeff Beck] produced: his chords, struck roughly with his thumb, framed with strange temporal relations to the beat, and then clipped off; his sparing and startling use of fast legato flourishes; his almost constant patrolling of microtonal areas, all the pitches between the notes, through the careful use of his tremolo bar in his right hand and the fingers of his left hand; his ways of making a phrase sound physical, falling and rising and pulsating. Mr. Beck is virtuosic, he’s dramatic, and he’s in a permanent musical state of controlled volatility, and he doesn’t ever go out of tune.”

  17. I find this the saddest rock death since David Bowie.
    I had only been watching a few clips of him on YouTube yesterday morning.
    This is probably the best showcase of his amazing technical ability.

  20. Always my favourite of the 3 Yardbirds axemen. I particularly liked his ability to make his guitar sound like it was vomiting. Saw him in the Yardbirds and JBG, although the latter was spoiled by sound problems I seem to remember.

    RIP HHSL hitmaker.

  22. Seventh, in some poll or other? “Up there with the best” says some twerp? Pshaw. What nonsense.

    By far the best electric guitar player of his generation, more sonically inventive than anyone else, bar none, sweetly melodic when it was called for, stunningly outrageous whenever he saw fit to rattle our cages. I was knocked sideways to hear that he had passed. We have lost a giant.

    Condolences to his family and friends, and be sure to know that he will be sorely missed by a great many people.

  24. I’ll throw my tattered hat into the ring.
    Technically, Jeff Beck was without doubt one of the best rock/blues guitarists ever.
    Realistically, he was a one – hit wonder .
    Would any of his records gain a Top Ten Spot in the AW “Albums You Must Own” poll?
    Desperately sad he has died, especially as he was but a few years older than me, but I’m struggling with all the retrospective adulation. An adulation for most folks he simply doesn’t deserve
    Ry Cooder or Jeff Beck? No contest. Both are technically brilliant, only one has the ability to lift one’s soul

    • The Archie argument Lodes.
      Blow by blow might well be on my list.
      It is about exceptionalism and I think he was more exceptional in his field than Ry is in his.
      Truth and Blow by Blow engage me emotionally and musically.

    • Not a one hit wonder at all – he had major hits with the Yardbirds. He shunned stardom and ploughed his own furrow. He apparently turned down Live Aid as he hated crowds.

      Many great players and influential artists have had no or relatively few ‘hits’…Neil Young, Ry Cooder, Nils Lofgren, Warren Zevon, Jackson Browne, Richard Thompson, Nick Drake, John Martyn…loads of our faves on here.

      • Single hits not many, but e.g. Neil Young has had (checks) 46 top 40 albums in the UK apparently. Blimey! Jeff Beck has had 7, but you are right, no indication of the quality of their discographies

        • I meant “one hit” to refer to the public’s general knowledge of Jeff Beck. Very few would say “Ah, best rock guitarist ever.”
          My opinion remains that whilst many of us so-called musos professed reverence very few of us bought more than a small handful of his records.

            • Obviously I don’t but despite his prowess he didn’t actually sell shed-loads, did he? A mere 5 million I believe, 90% of which was Wired …
              (And once again, his untimely and unexpected death is very, very sad)

              • Blow By Blow was 4 on US billboard and sold a million. Not bad for instrumental jazz rock. In the 70s such types of music were pretty popular of course. There are obviously many acclaimed practitioners in all areas of the arts, many of whom don’t depend on commercial success to the same degree as rock acts and their value isn’t measured by sales yet they are considered outstanding at what they do and get the glowing obits just the same. As for Jeff’s music, I think it can be thrilling and pleasing to listen to and that can be enough without it being full of soulful emotion all the time, though it can be that as well. I think it can be compared to what jazz does in that you hear the imagination, thoughts and ideas of the musician in the way it is played and that is absorbing and interesting.

              • This explains your struggle. You equate record sales with musical worth. Think about the multiple Grammys, the Ivor Novello, the sell out tours, the Best of polls, the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame (twice), the respect of his peers.

                • I have no struggle. I, and others like Archie, think Beck was a virtuoso but somehow his records mostly lack, for want of a better word, soul. IMHO of course. Hence his relatively poor career sales? Others disagree and think I’m completely Wrong. They may well be right

                    • Without dragging this out endlessly I’ll just repeat that IMHO technically he way well have been at or near the top of Best Guitarist list but the majority of his records lack that certain something

                    • @Twang, here’s an example of something that obviously doesn’t warrant any ‘retrospective adulation’ that he simply doesn’t deserve, as it’s just completely without any soul:

                      Some people just throw ignorance out there unreservedly.

                    • @vulpes-vulpes why the aggressive “some people throw out ignorance”? As I have repeatedly said this debate is all about personal opinion. I don’t like much of Jeff Beck. I have every album Ry Cooder has made. Which one is better, has soul is down to me.
                      My opinion is just as Right, just as Wrong as yours and in the great scheme of things means precisely nothing.
                      I’ll happily buy you a pint and discuss likes and dislikes. We might even agree to disagree. But there’s no fucking need to get belligerent…. it’s only rock n roll.

                    • Sorry if you felt put out by my remarks. Maybe, just maybe, this thread, full of tributes from those who have loved the man’s playing for several decades, wasn’t the best place to advertise your considered lack of appeciation for his artistry. There’s no need to express any opinion in a thread where it is irrelevant or even, dare I say it, inappropriate.

                    • As I have discovered in the past, if you don’t think all that much of someone who’s being eulogised here, it’s best to just skip that thread and go on to another one.

                    • Of course you are Lodes. Freedom of speech etc. But everyone else is also free to express their opinions about someone popping up and choosing that moment to announce but but he’s a one hit wonder and there is something suspect about this retrospective adulation. If someone died from a band I don’t care for but I knew many here did, I might think twice about announcing, the day after they passed, that I always thought they were crap. But horses/courses.

                    • It’s Sunday lunchtime, we’re all in the pub having a drink. I hear a bunch of you over in the corner saying “Jeff, best ever.” I walk across and say “not sure bout that”. You start calling me names and saying I’m ignorant. I say “It’s a fucking pub for godsake, we can say what we like ”
                      Hey ho and a silver lining

  26. Purely for balance I have listened to most these clips, as in much the same way I have listened to his records. Phenomenal technique. Soulless. Sorry. Love Hi Ho, mind.

  27. At this point I’m going to risk posting the only concert clip of Jeff with John McLaughlin, from 2002. The Mahavishnu Orchestra (an unrecorded 9-piece version) and a Jeff Beck 4-piece toured the US for two months in 1975, swapping positions on the bill most nights and with a Beck/McL jam on something at the end.

  29. A guitarist (all guitarists… and RIP to Jeff) is to Pop Music what a plumber is to my kitchen sink.

    I want my plumber to do the business suc’sink’ly with his plunger, and then remove himself from the premises sharpish.

    When I’m cleaning my plates, I do not want ever again to see or hear my my plumber or his plunger.

  31. Re soulless. This was posted on Facebook. And I have never seen so many tributes from top flight musicians.

    “Jeff Was larger than life. Growing up we could only learn about him through his music and magazines for so many years. Never did I think that later in life Jeff Beck would use something I/we created.

    To know that the Archer was used on his last album ever is surreal. Having the opportunity to make the very special Archer JM just as an experimentation and to have Jeff love it and use it is beyond belief. Jeff Beck was an anomaly in the world of guitar in the fact that aside from the Yardbirds he just did what he did with no concern for anything other than the music. He is a rare breed who managed to stay relevant for so many years without ever being popular so to speak. He kept with his career and somehow later in life became THE most legendary, inspirational and loved player probably in guitar history. You will be hard pressed to meet another guitar player that does not bow down to Jeff Beck and his abilities.

    Jeff came to Nashville in concert and I knew that I would be going to see him, hang out with him and just talk shop with him so I was reluctant to invite my wife. She did end up going, however, she had only ever heard of him but was not familiar with his music at all, she reluctantly went. At a certain point in the show when he played “Scared for the children” I looked over and watched how it brought my wife to tears, this is someone who had never heard him. That was the power of his playing. There has never been a player ever IMHO that could emote through his instrument like Jeff Beck. He was a virtuoso musically through his delivery of every note. Those his loss is a hard pill to swallow, the death of Jeff Beck feels like we have been robbed of a greatness that will never be witnessed again. R.I.P. Jeff Beck……your passing, no matter when it happened, would always be too soon.”

    – Chris Van Tassel

  32. It’s probably only to be expected that folks here would pile on Lodes [Load on piles? – Ed.), as if his opinion of Jeff Beck’s music were equivalent to some kind of mad marginal flat-earther woo, but here isn’t out there. When I posted the following on Twitter it got 25 likes – which is approximately 25 times more than my opinions on Twitter usually get – with nary a single contrary response taking me to task for it.

    Jeff Beck was 10 times the guitar player Keith Richards has ever been, so why have I enjoyed his music ten times less? Astounding virtuosity, sure, but shouldn’t music inspire emotion, not just technical admiration?

    Considered objectively and from a purely technical point of view, the most proficient pop singer the UK has produced for decades is probably Jessie J. And good luck to her, but … well, see what Lodes and I are trying to say? For most people outside online ultraspecialist bubbles like this one, listening to music isn’t about nodding and chin-stroking in appreciation at someone’s incomparable chops; it’s about feeling something in response.

    Heart not head and all that.

    • There’s a big assumption there about how listeners in our online ultraspecialist bubble react to Jeff Beck’s playing. Are you sure it’s correct?

      For the record: my own view would be “let all shades of opinion be heard” – so gouge away, dear boy! I have no problem reading views from you and Lodey in this thread – let’s face it: what you think isn’t going to affect my feelings about Jeff Beck, built up over many years, is it?

    • There’s some questionable views there masquerading as objectivity. I think it’s more a case of something you get or you don’t. I used to not get it (Jeff Beck) but now I do. I thought it was cold technique then I realised it’s full of meaning and expression. Many don’t get early Roxy Music or Steely Dan, but never say never.

      • Oh, sure. Horses for courses, innit. All I was saying was that Jeff Beck’s music leaving people cold is clearly the majority view among the general music-lervin’ public, not some kind of weirdass outlier as suggested by the responses to Lodes’s posts slapping him down for being Dead Wrong or Too Soon or both.

        • Yes it’s not unusual to have that view I would think but this is here. I often find myself at odds with the AW consensus, what the hell am I doing here, I don’t belong here, but on this question I go with the flow. The AW world is a funny place right enough.

        • I’m not on Twitter, Archie, so this query is from a standpoint of complete ignorance:

          If you got 25 “likes” for your comment above, can you reasonably extrapolate that to “Jeff Beck’s music leaving people cold is clearly the majority view among the general music-lervin’ public”?

          Asking for a friend who doesn’t do the social media…

          • Not necessarily clearly the majority view on Twitter as a whole, and my tweet was in response to my timeline being filled with tributes when his death was announced, but the responses I got all amounted “thank god someone is saying what I’m thinking”, and I was left with the impression that while many people admired what he did, very few actually cared for it much.

    • I’m really not a fan of chip pissing. If people are together and enthusing about something then dropping in to pronounce “well, I don’t like it” is pretty tedious.

      That said, it has always always always been part of the culture of this blog. Try posting anything enthusiastic about post-70s pop music and see what happens. It’s like an uncontrollable reflex action. And that’s OK – people are allowed a view, and they’re also allowed to woefully overestimate the extent to which their view is of interest/value to others.

      In the context of the above, it seems a bit odd that Lodestone can’t express his lack of appreciation for Jeff Beck (confession: I have never heard a note of Jeff Beck’s music beyond the obvious tune). I guess you could argue it’s distasteful on an obituary thread, but I’m not sure that’s ever been a rule round these parts either, and the conversation had pretty clearly moved on from discussion of the human being to the artistic output of Beck the Lesser.

      Let he who has never snarked the music taste of another cast the first stone, is kind of what I’m saying here. If such a person can be found on this thread. I would quite gladly live in a blogworld where we all skip happily round the tree agreeing that music is joy and everything is wonderful, but I don’t think that’s a majority view round these parts, so maybe we all have to occasionally watch our darlings get a slap.

      On the rest, I think there’s a really quite interesting comparison to be made between the response to virtuosic guitar playing and virtuosic singing. Melisma by strings seemingly more acceptable.

        • I try not to naysay (keeping tightlipped even about prog), but I did once respond to Mojoworking’s posts about Jeff Beck. He said, if I remember right – “Everyone’s got a strong opinion about Jeff Beck”. I wrote “I don’t”, which I think resulted in an icy “Thanks for that” response – probably deserved.

          Like Diddley, I don’t really belong here – a Gen Xer stuck between the Boomer patriarchs and the cool kid Millennial sk8ers, but I’ve been here too long to leave now.

          • Course you and Diddley belong here, Sal – you can check out any time you like…etc.

            Anyway, music isn’t age-limited. Some of the relative youngsters on here like a bit of ’60s, while one or two cool rocking’ grand-daddios wax lyrical about …er…Taylor Swift. Then there’s Tigger…

            • Aw, thanks, FT! I didn’t say that to have my tummy ticked (oder?) but it’s lovely of you to say that. I’m actually getting into an 87 year old Lebanese singer at the moment – Fairuz has released over 80 albums in her life, so there’s quite a lot to listen to, and it’s all in Arabic. But I like a challenge.

      • On Bingo’s final paragraph: That’s what I was referring to by citing Jessie J. up there somewhere. For the same people to enthuse about both Jeff Beck’s or John McLaughlin’s guitar playing and, say, Ian Curtis’s or Lou Reed’s singing is … interesting. But such people are legion, and there’s nowt wrong with that. Call me a centrist dad, but I just don’t happen to enjoy either end of the spectrum: the technically impeccable but somehow soulless or the technically inept but somehow affecting.

  33. Just as a personal footnote to the discussion on people ‘getting’ Beck, or moving from from not doing so to doing so, my position is perhaps an odd one… I used to love Jeff’s music – I bought several of his albums as a teenager in the 80s – the live one with the Jan Hammer Group was a particular fave (and still is). I saw him for the first time in concert around 2010 at the Ulster Hall but felt nothing – it was like an out of body experience. Obviously it was brilliant but I felt nothing – though that’s very largely because I was mentally in a bad place at the time. Since then, though, I’ve still got a head appreciation of Beck but somehow his magic has gone for me. An odd trajectory, I know, but there it is.

  34. Interesting spat on Twitter between Rolling Stone magazine (“Beck had no signature tune”) and Joe Bonamassa (“Rolling Stone proves once again their days as a serious music publication are behind them”). Inclined to think they are both correct but interesting to see how badly RS took it.

    I follow a lot of musicians on Facebook and Twitter – it would hardly be worth being there otherwise – and the reaction to Jeff’s passing is of a scale and sentiment beyond anything I’ve seen before. Personally I think the albums he made in the 1970’s were peerless although after Flash I found them less to my taste.

    We met for a chat twice. Well, I say we met, we both used the same petrol station just outside Wadhurst in East Sussex where he lived. On both occasions I was able to complement him on the Ford Hot Rod he was driving to which he said “Thanks”. It was possibly the loudest car I’ve ever heard start up.

  35. I am with Didds. Just have a bit of class in your critique.
    Mojo cracked it coz he would do these long form quality pieces and he would just get these narky quips , guitar porn he still alive yet, blues rock is awful etc. so he thought fuck it and left.
    As many know he now his own blog with quite a lot of followers.
    I am fine with contrary views , even in an obituary column. Guitar wank , dinosaur etc are just plain rude but surely the time of their passing is an appropriate time to talk about their contribution.
    Remember the great debate ,at the old place, on his death, about whether Michael Jackson was the most influential artist in modern music? It was great.

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