The Rolling Stone Interview: Beck

You gotta do the chicken thing again." Beck's manager interrupts the 26-year-old singer's lunch on the set of the British pop-music TV show TFI Friday and shuttles him out a backstage door. It's a typically drizzly London afternoon, and Beck is here to perform his latest single, "The New Pollution," to a gallery of screaming English teens. But first, he has to go outdoors to retape a skit in which he's been asked to scale the side of a massive soup vat and drop a whole raw chicken in it. There's no rhyme or reason to the routine — just one of those wacky British-comedy things. But Beck rises to the challenge. And the performance is Oscar-worthy as he stands at the rim of the vat, a shit-eating grin on his face, and plops the soggy bird into the gooey yellow stew.

Later, after a few other similarly bizarre segments, the show's bumbling host turns to the studio audience and announces, "Ah, heck, it's Beck!" Whereupon the singer, dressed in his familiar snug-fitting blue polyester suit and black dress shoes, appears on the stage, moonwalking, high-jumping, hip-shimmying, tambourine-shaking and head-bobbing to the tune's cool "Taxman" bass line and sax-drenched melody.

"I love British humor," Beck tells me later as we begin the first of two 2-hour interview sessions in a room at the Royal Garden Hotel, high above London's Kensington Palace. "It's just so — surreal." He gazes out the window with an intensity that belies his youthful features — rosy cheeks, pouty lips, fine, wind-swept blond hair and doe eyes, which today have faint circles under them. The past three days have been pretty surreal for Beck, beginning with the two Grammys he won back in New York — for Best Alternative Music Performance and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance. The following day, he took the Concorde to England for the TFI Friday gig, as well as a Top of the Pops appearance and a concert performance later in the week.

"I feel lucky," Beck says of his Grammys coup. "It probably hasn't sunk in yet; it's only been a couple of days." When he speaks, Beck does so in slow, measured tones punctuated by long, thoughtful pauses. "I never had any expectations of winning a Grammy," he continues. "It wasn't something I was set on, that I was hoping and praying and starving for." He looks up with a gleam in his eye: "But it is incredible!"