Guitar legend who walked out on the Stones… and saved Johnny Depp: ALISON BOSHOFF pays tribute to Jeff Beck
To many of the biggest names in music — Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood and Eric Clapton — Jeff Beck was the ultimate loner.
He had a knack for leaving bands just before they made it big, or for failing to jump at opportunities which would have led to fame, fortune and musical companionship. As Clapton said: ‘He likes to be left alone.’
Reclusive Beck was invited to join the Rolling Stones, but didn’t care to. Nick Mason was asked to sound him out about joining Pink Floyd, but couldn’t summon the courage to ask, such was Beck’s reputation.
So what an irony that Jeff Beck will be remembered, along with his status as a guitar great, for his very public and very unlikely friendship with actor Johnny Depp.
To many of the biggest names in music — Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood and Eric Clapton — Jeff Beck (pictured with Johnny Depp) was the ultimate loner
Beck, who has died suddenly after contracting bacterial meningitis aged 78, was the one man who stood shoulder to shoulder with Depp during his long years of public disgrace over claims of domestic abuse. Their unlikely bond was so deep that both described it as familial.
Depp, 59, called Beck his ‘brother’ and hero-worshipped him. ‘Like Jimmy Page said, there’s a lot of great guitar players, and then there is Jeff Beck,’ said Depp just two months ago. He went on: ‘When you have connected on some sort of level it becomes that tight you don’t particularly have to say anything. Just an eyeball glance and you are both on the floor laughing.’
For his part, Beck observed: ‘I haven’t had a creative partner like him for ages.’
This from a man who played with every great of the golden age of popular music — including David Bowie and Stevie Wonder, who wrote Superstition for Beck only to be told by his record company that it was too good and he should keep it for himself.
Beck and Depp met in 2014 when the actor was filming in Tokyo at the same time the guitarist was touring. One evening, Depp knocked on Beck’s dressing room door. A friendship developed, based on a common, surreal and very British sense of humour plus a shared love of guitars and cars. Depp joined Beck on his UK tour last year.
Introducing his friend during a gig, Beck said: ‘He came knocking on my dressing room door about five years ago and we haven’t stopped laughing since.
Their friendship blossomed into an artistic collaboration even as Depp found himself ostracised amid allegations of domestic abuse and two blockbuster court cases with ex-wife Amber Heard.
Depp left the second case — which he won — before the verdict came in so he could prepare for his tour with Beck. Last year they released an album called 18. ‘When Johnny and I started playing together, it really ignited our youthful spirit and creativity. We would joke about how we felt 18 again,’ Beck explained.
Friends of the actor confirmed yesterday that Depp was so much a part of Beck’s inner circle that he had travelled to East Sussex to be at his bedside in his final days.
One said: ‘They were very close and Johnny needed to see him when he found out he was declining in health.
He had a knack for leaving bands just before they made it big, or for failing to jump at opportunities which would have led to fame, fortune and musical companionship. As Clapton said: ‘He likes to be left alone.’ Pictured: Beck with Mick Jagger
‘He spent time with him just before he passed. Johnny is just torn apart with grief — devastated.’ In 2016, as his marriage crumbled, the friendship became particularly precious to Depp, who found fame as an actor but was a long-time guitarist with musical ambitions.
They first performed together in 2019, at a charity event run by Eric Clapton.
Depp spent much of lockdown living with Beck and his second wife Sandra, an artist, at their 16th century farmhouse near Wadhurst in East Sussex. Friends confirm he was there for months at a time and he was spotted several times at the Middle House pub in nearby Mayfield. Depp also toured Folly Wildlife Rescue, of which Beck was a patron, and was photographed cradling an orphaned badger named Freddie Mercury.
‘There was a couple that very much helped to keep me alive, sane and happy at that time through the weirdness — and that was Jeff and Sandra,’ Depp said.
Of course they were very different. Vegetarian Beck had a taste for nothing fancier than prosecco, and was deeply interested in gardening and history. Depp, meanwhile, is famed for his narcotic and financial excesses, admitting in court that he had blown £50 million on hard living. His former managers said that he spent £4 million on firing writer Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes into space and £25,000 a month on wine.
And while Depp was an A-lister, largely thanks to his role as Jack Sparrow in Pirates Of The Caribbean, Beck quite deliberately chose the road less travelled.
‘I’ve never made the big time, mercifully,’ Beck told Rolling Stone. ‘When you look around and see who has made it huge, it’s a really rotten place to be.’
Raised in suburban Wallington, Surrey, Geoffrey Arnold Beck was a famed innovator and guitar master, but notoriously awkward.
His biggest chart hit — the cheery 1967 pop anthem Hi Ho Silver Lining — he utterly despised, likening it to a pink toilet seat around his neck.
He was such a perfectionist that he once called Beatles’ producer George Martin to ask to re-do a solo, only to be told that, months on from the session, the record was already in the shops.
Reclusive Beck was invited to join the Rolling Stones, but didn’t care to
But then, as Aerosmith’s Joe Perry noted, he was ‘head, hands and feet above all the rest of us’.
Beck, the son of an accountant, first heard an electric guitar on the radio when he was six years old and decided: ‘That’s for me.’
He attempted to make guitars at home out of cigar boxes and tobacco tins and eventually bought one on hire purchase with the help of a friend who pretended to be his stepfather and acted as guarantor.
He went to art college in Wimbledon and married, at 19, Patricia Brown, an animal-loving blonde from Crawley. The first thing they bought was an Afghan hound, and he remarked that he struggled to even keep it in food with fees as a session musician.
Another session man, Jimmy Page, introduced him to the Yardbirds, whom he joined, replacing Clapton. A tour of America in 1966 convinced him he didn’t want to be there either, as he was missing his wife. Other accounts suggest he was fired for not showing up and for his temper.
After recording Hi Ho Silver Lining he formed the Jeff Beck Group, which included Rod Stewart on vocals and Ronnie Wood on bass. Two albums were well received but again there were fallings out and changes of line-up.
After the death of Brian Jones in 1969, he was asked to join the Stones and went to meet the band in Rotterdam. Beck said he waited for days without seeing them and eventually decided to go home rather than hang about any longer.
By now his marriage was over and he was living with model and animal activist Celia Hammond.
In the 1980s he struggled with tinnitus and recorded less. He also lost the tip of one of his fingers while slicing carrots, though it was reattached. His fingers and thumbs were then insured for a reputed $1 million apiece.
In 2005 he married for the second time, to Sandra Cash, in the gardens of his home in Sussex.
They lived in a menagerie which included a pet crow and, at one time, a ewe.
Neighbours said fondly that the couple were involved in local life, particularly charities.
Beck will be missed by many. And few more keenly, one feels, than his soulmate Johnny Depp.
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