Jeff Beck, rock guitarist, 1944-2023

Of the three virtuoso rock guitarists to emerge from the unlikely setting of the prim English home county of Surrey in the 1960s, Jeff Beck, who has died aged 78, was the most adventurous.

According to Eric Clapton, a member of the trio, he was a “unique” guitarist and “the most devoted” of all his peers. Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, the third Surrey axeman, thought that Beck surpassed everyone. “No one has ever equalled what Jeff has done,” he said when inducting his old friend into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2009.

It was a claim that Beck would not have made for himself. Something of a loner, unable to remain long in bands such as The Yardbirds, he combined immense musical ambitiousness with diffidence and even self-doubt. He was famous for a flashy, dauntless style of playing, but the fireworks were the product of a highly sensitive personality. “I’ve never consciously tried to be a flash,” he said in 1973. “Emotion rules everything I do.”

Born in 1944, Beck was raised in Wallington, a suburban town on the fringes of Surrey and London. His earliest guitars were homemade, initially fabricated from a cigar box, and then glued bits of plywood. The latter met a violent end when his father threw it in the garden after an argument. Two characteristics of Beck’s future career had been set in motion. One was innovation. The other was conflict.

A risk-taker with a strong conservative streak, droll in manner and unreconstructed in opinion, he was a particularly English axe hero “If I do nothing at all, I’d be happy if someone saw me play and took up the guitar,” he told the Financial Times in 2010. “Job’s done really.”

The pioneering US rockabilly guitarist Gene Vincent was an important influence. Beck discovered him after his sister bought a record by Vincent; “from that point it was all over for my schooling”, he later recalled. He had one lesson in Spanish guitar but was otherwise self-taught. He made desultory efforts at painting as a student at Wimbledon College of Art. Page was a fellow student, and also a fellow guitar fanatic. The pair struck up a close friendship.

Beck made his start in music by playing in obscure blues and rockabilly bands with snappy names such as The Tridents and The Deltones. Through Page, he was introduced to London’s booming session music scene in the 1960s. In 1965, he had his first big break when he joined The Yardbirds. Recommended by Page, he replaced Clapton as lead guitarist in the rhythm and blues group, which he turned into a pioneering psychedelic rock outfit.

More experimental than Clapton, Beck pushed the electric guitar to the limits of its expressive capabilities. On the single “Heart Full of Soul”, he amazed his Yardbirds bandmates by mimicking the voguish sound of a sitar. For “Stroll On”, recorded for the 1966 film Blow Up, he struck up a series of malevolent, feedback-laden riffs and solos — a testament to the attacking intensity with which he applied himself to his Fender Telecaster.

For a tantalisingly brief period, he and Page were both members of The Yardbirds. But Beck was “thrown out”, in his words, after allegedly missing gigs on a US tour in 1966. He claimed to be retiring from music, but returned the following year with The Jeff Beck Group, joined by Rod Stewart on vocals and the future Faces and Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood. Their heavy blues-rock was influential, anticipating Page’s work with Led Zeppelin, but the band was commercially unsuccessful. After Beck fell out with Stewart, they parted ways in 1969.

Temperamentally ill-suited to life in a band, the perfectionist Beck found singers particularly trying. “They’re too poncy and they get in the way,” he said in 2010. His biggest hit, 1967’s “Hi Ho Silver Lining”, was a chirpy novelty number in which he was reluctantly persuaded to take the part of vocalist. He detested the song, which he called “the great unmentionable”.

Although his commercial success was modest, he had a profound influence on younger guitarists: The White Stripes’ Jack White was an acolyte. The solo albums Beck began releasing in the 1970s were eccentric, often inspired affairs in which he roamed around different styles, from jazz fusion to opera covers. Instrumentals dominated. He tried to make his guitar sing like a human voice, a quixotic campaign that epitomised his peerless command of the instrument’s timbre.

“This is Jeff Beck the softie and this is the one that knocks down buildings,” was how he summed up the two sides of his musical personality, which was a mix of explosiveness and deep feeling. His most recent album came out last year, a joint effort with the controversial actor Johnny Depp with whom he went on tour. The criticism he attracted for rehabilitating Depp’s besmirched reputation washed over him: he always did things his way.

His death from bacterial meningitis was sudden. He is survived by his second wife Sandra Cash.