The genre that had Jeff Beck running scared: “That really sickens me”
When Bob Dylan went electric in 1965, it sent shockwaves around the musical world. By the time Jeff Beck went electronica in 1999, it was an accepted fact of the business that an artist should be trying new styles on for size and forging new frontiers for themselves.
Thanks to the restless reinvention and creativity of artists like Dylan and The Beatles, David Bowie and Kate Bush, or even musicians as different as the Bee Gees and Leonard Cohen, it was now considered an expectation of a true artist to test themselves in new areas, push their creativity to the limits and try to bridge the gap between what went before them and what had come after, rather than to safely retread former glories and continue to churn out variations on a theme from album to album.
Sometimes these changes of gears, or changes of tune, were born from divine inspiration or else simply from restlessness. Sometimes they were born from a feeling of having explored everything that the artist had to say or try out in a particular style and by the need for a fresh impetus to express themselves. Sometimes there was a material element, a lack of resources that meant the artist needed to get creative to work around the roadblocks. Sometimes, their fans had simply had enough of hearing the same tired treads as an artist spun their wheels into the second, third and fourth decades of their careers.
For Jeff Beck, there was something of a blend of all of these and maybe more that inspired him to not so much change direction in 1989 but to slam on the brakes altogether. Speaking about his album from that year, Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop, he has said: “I put a lot into the last album and it didn’t do much, and then the band folded, so I thought that would probably be the end of me. And then whole waves of new bands came in. And you know, one reflects and delves into the inner spirit and thinks, well, is there any point in carrying on really if that’s what you get for doing so much work on a record?”
It was ten years until he’d release his next album of studio originals, which turned up in the shape of 1999s Who Else?, but in between the two releases there was a compilation, a soundtrack album and a tribute record to Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps (all that was missing to complete the set for An Artist Who Had Run Out of Ideas was a live album, or maybe an appearance on MTV Unplugged) to keep his fans somewhat satisfied that their guitar hero was still an active member of the musical world.
When Beck was back with Who Else?, it was noticeable from the very first song that things had changed. Following hot on the heels of the equal parts midlife-crisis-driven and electronically inspired Earthlings album from David Bowie and the bonus track single ‘Wrong Number’ by The Cure of 1997, Beck’s 1999 album is full of electronic energy from the outset.
Blending his crunching, angular, lilting and drifting guitar with the relentless beats of the drug-fuelled days, Beck explained that while most electronic music turned him off and tuned him out, there were some acts that had been his inspiration to get back to making music in the first place.
“From time to time I peek inside some of these weird clubs that we’ve got in London. It’s just like going to another planet—some of the sounds coming out that people don’t seem to be fazed by, which would have sent me running for miles at one time. I’ve had to realise that’s what people have become accustomed to—heavy beats with very little else,” he explained.
“I don’t like stuff that purports to be music which isn’t and gets jumbled up in some kind of mixing machine and comes out on general radio and other media as being music, and it’s just a very scanty melody and no melody at all, and a techno beat that really sickens me,” he added. “But you get things like Prodigy and Propellerheads, they’re doing stuff with it. And I suddenly heard my guitar welded on top of that stuff, and thought, ‘Hey! That’s a way to do something. That’s a way back in the business again’”.
