Jeff Beck Is Back in Action

"It was when I was convalescing that Jimmy Page joined the Yardbirds. He was the one that got me in the band in the first place as they approached him before me. He said no, but recommended me. Anyway, I really wanted Jim Page on lead guitar with me because I knew it would sound sensational. We had fun. I remember doing some really nice jobs with page. It lasted about four or five months, then I had this throat thing come on, inflamed tonsils, and what with inflamed brain, inflamed tonsils and an inflamed cock and everything else ..."

Just before the final split, Beck vented his revenge in Antonioni's Blow Up. "When Antonioni said that he wanted me to break my guitar I had a fit. I said, 'Wait a minute, that's Townshend's thing.' I didn't mind playing a very wild number with lots of violence in it, lots of chords smashing away, but I didn't actually want to destroy the guitar. What a cheat, the first part shows me playing a Les Paul and in the second part I'm smashing up a cheap old $35 Japanese model."

So what did he think when he saw the flick? "I was thoroughly embarrassed I had fucking hard-on in the picture, man! This chick I was going out with at the time said, 'Oh my god, don't go see that film, it's so embarrassing, I didn't know what to do, I took my mother to see it and there you were ... this horrible, sinister thing hanging down the side of the screen.' It gets hot under them lights, after all, rupturing myself with those tight trousers."

A rock and roll star in what Mickie Most wanted to be. "I was like the Elvis of South Africa," he acknowledges. "I had 11 Number One records down there."

Understandably, the kind of rock-flame neo-Buddy Holly act he was doing that transports you to the top down there, didn't work in Beatle-struck London, and in 1964, after a series of bill-bottoming debacles, he began producing. His first assignment, lucky enough, was that half-hour session in which the Animals turned out "House of the Rising Sun." The luck began, the hits began, the Product began.

As a "popcorn producer" (Beck's term), Most was incomparable. Whether doing the Yardbirds or Lulu, he used his own restraint and rarely got lost in the excess: heavy or arty. It was later, however, upon release of two relatively bland Terry Reid albums (bland when considering the talent), that Most's ability to keep up with the times was sometimes questioned.

Most built Donovan a heady musical image. He got rid of the old scruff Dylan image and gave him a new up-to-date Folk Rock image. "Donovan was a song-writer, and he'd sometimes write up to 30 songs a week, all of which he wanted recorded. I just picked the hits out, such as I picked out 'Mellow Yellow' and I selecte 'Sunshine Superman.' Don was surprised at these choices, but they were hits. When we began to grow apart was after his California trip. I wanted to keep building him, make him more powerful, more melodious. He wanted to go backward, into more personal music. You know, flutes and things."

One of the last things they did together was the Donovan-Beck Super-session. "The Jeff Beck Group at that time were a bunch of gigglers. Donovan was, and is now, very serious about things. It was like a monk amongst a load of playboys."

Most's first production of Beck, apart from the Yardbirds, was "Hi Ho Silver Lining," a single of unimpeachable pap, which broke across the airwaves, heading for certain chart success ... all during the 1967 summer of love. Avant-Beck. He had formed his band with Rob Stewart, Ron Wood and Mickey Waller, but his next record out was a cover version of "Love Is Blue." Which, to this day, gives Beck the blues.