‘Not my time’: The only artists Jeff Beck liked in the 1980s
It only took a few notes to establish Jeff Beck among the greatest guitar heroes of the 1960s. Everybody who heard The Yardbirds’ 1965 single ‘Heart Full of Soul’ immediately recognised the genius of the guitarist, and his infallible quality never seemed to waver throughout the following decades. While the band’s other guitarists, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, later found mainstream success with Cream and Led Zeppelin, respectively, Beck was always searching for something much more experimental and profound.
After the dust settled on the cultural revolution of the 1960s, it was jazz fusion that grabbed Beck’s attention. Providing him with ample opportunities to exercise his complex, awe-inspiring talents, his extensive body of work speaks for itself. However, this complex jazz fusion sound rarely achieved the same mainstream or commercial success as his 1960s comrades. Admittedly, Beck never really chased commercialism; he was a true artist. This did mean, though, that the pop-centric landscape of the 1980s tended to alienate the legendary guitarist.
The 1960s might have been the ground zero for pop records, but by the 1980s, the industry was virtually unrecognisable. Beck’s youthful days in The Yardbirds, experimenting with influences of blues rock and psychedelia were long gone, and record company executives placed ultimate focus on tired-and-tested methods to reach the singles charts rather than the music experimentalism which drove artists like Beck.
As you can imagine, Jeff Beck didn’t particularly fit in with the plans of the record industry during the 1980s. Indeed, if you look at the three solo albums he released throughout that decade, none of them achieved much commercial success despite their clear and pioneering quality. It was these apparent failures that caused Beck to neglect his solo career for a while, taking a ten-year break between Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop and Who Else. Outside of his own career, the guitarist couldn’t find much to praise the music scene of the decade for, either.
Speaking to Classic Rock, Beck once shared his distaste for the era while also highlighting the select artists he would willingly listen to during that time. “The 80s weren’t my time. I liked Prince and ZZ Top’s Eliminator and that was about it,” he revealed. It should come as no surprise that Beck had an appreciation for Prince and ZZ Top. After all, ZZ Top usually stuck to the kind of defiant blues rock that had first inspired Beck back in the 1960s. Prince, meanwhile, was the definitive guitarist of the decade, and his quality was virtually unmatched within the world of pop.
Referring to Prince solely as a pop star feels needlessly reductive; the songwriter was a tireless and enigmatic artist who always operated by his own desires. He was never afraid to experiment with sounds and styles, and his undeniable quality was obvious to a fellow guitar hero like Jeff Beck.
Continuing in his dissolution with the music industry of the 1980s, Beck shared, “I wasn’t going to try to sell anything about me, whether it was old, new, or surreal, tomorrowland music, because it was hopeless. The whole musical playground was a joke.”
He took aim at the executives of the industry, saying, “The record label execs were more important than the acts; even the bloody retailers were snorting coke and telling you how to play guitar. Bollocks to that.”
Thankfully, Beck wasn’t so alienated by the music industry to abandon it forever. His 1989 album Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop, while initially viewed as a failure, went on to become incredibly influential on a wealth of different guitarists and his subsequent material during the late 1990s formed a notable highlight within his extensive discography.
