Jeff Beck, one of the most influential rock guitarists of all time, has died at the age of 78.
The British musician rose to fame as part of the Yardbirds. Where he replaced Eric Clapton, before forming the Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart.
His tone, presence and, above all, volume redefined guitar music in the 1960. Influenced movements like heavy metal, jazz-rock and even punk.
Beck’s death was confirmed on his official Twitter page.
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“On behalf of his family, it is with deep and profound. Sadness that we share the news of Jeff Beck’s passing,” the statement said.
Jeff Beck: British guitar legend dies age 78
“After suddenly contracting bacterial meningitis, he peacefully passed away yesterday. His family ask for privacy while they process this tremendous loss.”
Describing his playing style in 2009, Beck said. I play the way I do because it allows me to come up with the sickest sounds possible.”
“That’s the point now, isn’t it? I don’t care about the rules.
“In fact, if I don’t break the rules at least 10 times in every song. Then I’m not doing my job properly.”
Born Geoffrey Arnold Beck in Wallington, south London. The musician fell in love with Rock and Roll as a child, and built his first guitar as a teenager.
Jeff Beck: British guitar legend dies age 78
“The guy next door said, ‘I’ll build you a solid body guitar for five pounds’,” he later told Rock Cellar Magazine. “Five pounds, which to me was 500 back then [so] I went ahead and did it [myself].
“The first one I built was in 1956, because Elvis was out, and everything that you heard about pop music was guitar. And then I got fascinated. I’m sure the same goes for lots of people.”
After a short stint at Wimbledon Art College, he left to play with shock-rocker Screaming Lord Sutch and the Tridents.
When Eric Clapton left the Yardbirds in 1965, Jimmy Page suggested hiring Beck – and he went on to play on hits like I’m A Man and Shapes Of Things, where his pioneering use of feedback influenced musicians like Paul McCartney and Jimi Hendrix.
That [technique] came as an accident,” he later told BBC Radio 2’s Johnnie Walker.
“We played larger venues, around about ’64-’65, and the PA was inadequate. So we cranked up the level and then found out that feedback would happen.
“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 and afterwards, this guy says, ‘You know that funny noise that wasn’t supposed to be there? I’d keep that in if I were you.’
“So I said, ‘It was deliberate mate. Go away’.”
The guitarist stayed with The Yardbirds for nearly two years, before declaring he was quitting music altogether… then releasing his first solo single Hi Ho Silver Lining.
Recorded in just three hours, the song was his only top 20 hit in the UK, charting in both 1967 and 1972. But the singer was famously ambivalent about it.
He was persuaded to record the song by producer Mickie Most who, Beck said, “wasn’t the slightest bit interested in recording my sort of music”.
“I couldn’t say to him, ‘Look, you don’t know what’s going on,’ because he had 20,000 gold disks on the wall saying ‘I do know what’s going on’,” he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1971. “So for a couple of years I wasted my career doing junk tunes.”
When he left the studio after cutting the track, the receptionist was already singing it. “That,” he said, “was when I knew it was a disaster”.
He went to describe the song as a “pink toilet seat around my neck. But eventually made his peace with it, even performing it on Jools Holland’s TV show in 2015.