The hit song that Jeff Beck always regretted: ‘It’s a bit embarrassing, I hated singing it’
There aren’t many guitarists as deserving of their widespread praise as Jeff Beck. He was truly one of a kind. Though that is a hyperbole saved for a whole range of performers, for Beck, it was actually true.
“For six decades he would reinvent himself every decade and come up with something that I’d go, ‘Oh, man. I wish I thought of that’,“ Joe Bonamassa said of Jeff Beck on Detroit radio’s WRIF. “To me, he was the greatest rock guitar player of all time,“ he asserted. However, there was a degree of happenstance behind this need for reinvention, all stemming from an unfortunate start to his solo career.
In one of those strange pub quiz question quirks of history, it just so happens that the song Beck was probably most proud of served as the B-side to the one that pained him with embarrassment. And yet, in Britain, they are both as iconic as each other.
Any song that can be chanted on the terraces of a football stadium has hit upon a melody that taps into the old folk aim of being so seamlessly catchy and simple that people can recount it without having to hear the record. Beck achieved this with his debut solo single ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ in 1967. The problem was that although the chanted tenets of the track hinted at his knack for melody, it was miles away from the moodiness he was going for to launch himself as a new entity of note amid the ever-darkening 1960s.
“I just hated singing it,“ Beck admitted in reflection when talking about his ironically begrudged solo hit. “It’s just a bit embarrassing, when you’re trying to play your moody guitar. Mickie told, he said: ‘You’ll be hearing this for a long time.’ We did it as a joke, I think it was for the Prince’s Trust, and it really got the crowd going. But I’m never going to sing it again.”
When you consider the level of guitarist Beck was, the track was an albatross around his neck. Think David Bowie’s ‘Laughing Gnome’ level of embarrassment. Here, Beck, the greatest stylistic strummer the world has truly known,is forced to sing a truly shameful novelty track.
Unfortunately, he would also be hearing it again for the rest of his life; any time he flicked on Match of The Day, he’d hear it bellowed by Wolverhampton Wanderers, Sheffield Wednesday and a slew of other clubs. Thankfully, for his sake, the song was not only a commercial success, but when the folks who snapped up the single flipped it over, they’d be greeted by ‘Beck’s Bolero’.
The B-side became a staple, and while Jimmy Page may have claimed to have written it, the instrumental typified the guitar work that would crown Beck a king. And yet, the fact it was a B-side is also typical of the star. For all Beck is an undoubted master, ticking the boxes of tastefulness, attitude, innovation, technical proficiency, and a clear style of his own; he is in some ways more a guitarist’s guitarist owing to the fact that his constant reinvention was often undertaken in a rather haphazard manner.
With this in mind, it speaks volumes of his erratic ways that although the embarrassing ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ might have launched his career, the song didn’t even make it onto his debut album, Truth, while ‘Beck’s Bolero’ was promptly in its place.
