He began with bubblegum pop in the Yardbirds, then moved on to psychedelia, funk, jazz fusion, even techno – but no matter what the genre, Beck was always ahead of the curve
Of all the career opportunities that could present themselves to an up-and-coming guitarist in the mid-60s, the offer of replacing Eric Clapton in the Yardbirds was one you might think twice about accepting. It wasn’t just that Clapton was talented; it was that – uniquely for British rock at the time – he was the Yardbirds’ star attraction. His presence so obviously overshadowed that of their frontman, Keith Relf, that one of their peers wrote a song about it. Manfred Mann’s The One in the Middle affectionately mocked Relf as “just a pretty face”. (Curiously, Relf could never be talked into performing it.) Trying to replace Clapton, you might assume, was a hiding to nowhere: anyone who tried was being set up to fail.
But Jeff Beck, who had been recommended for the job by his friend Jimmy Page, didn’t just replace Clapton. He transformed the Yardbirds, from blues purists struggling to square their love of Buddy Guy and Freddie King with the necessity of having pop hits (Clapton had walked out in protest at the band recording and releasing Graham Gouldman’s For Your Love as a single) to a band at the vanguard of British pop’s relentless forward progress. The first single he recorded with them, Heart Full of Soul, was another Gouldman confection, enlivened by Beck mimicking the sound of sitar – some months before the Beatles first deployed the instrument on Norwegian Wood – with a guitar played through a distortion pedal called a Toneblender.
