ALISON BOSHOFF pays tribute to Jeff Beck

For 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 quitting bands just before they made it big, or missing out on opportunities that would have brought him fame, fortune, and musical fellowship. As Clapton said: ‘He likes to be left alone.’

The reclusive Beck was invited to join the Rolling Stones, but he didn’t care. Nick Mason was asked to sound him out about joining Pink Floyd, but he couldn’t muster the courage to ask, such was Beck’s reputation.

So how ironic that Jeff Beck is remembered, along with his status as a great guitarist, for his very public and highly unlikely friendship with actor Johnny Depp.

Beck, who died suddenly after contracting bacterial meningitis at age 78, was the only man to stand shoulder to shoulder with Depp during his long years of public disgrace over allegations of domestic abuse. Their unlikely bond was so deep that they both described it as family.

Depp, 59, called Beck his “brother” and adored him like a hero. “As Jimmy Page said, there are a lot of great guitar players, and then there’s Jeff Beck,” Depp said just two months ago. He continued: ‘When you’ve connected on some kind of level, it becomes so tight that you don’t particularly have to say anything. Just one look at the eyeball and they’re both on the floor laughing.

For his part, Beck observed, “I haven’t had a creative partner like him in a long time.”

This from a man who played with all the greats of popular music’s golden age, 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 to himself.

Beck and Depp met in 2014 when the actor was filming in Tokyo at the same time the guitarist was on tour. One night, 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 concert, Beck said: “He knocked on my dressing room door about five years ago and we haven’t stopped laughing ever since.”

Their friendship turned into an artistic collaboration even as Depp found himself ostracized amid domestic abuse allegations and two blockbuster court cases with ex-wife Amber Heard.

Depp dropped the second case, which he won, before the verdict was reached 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 were joking about how we felt at 18 again,” Beck explained.

The actor’s friends confirmed yesterday that Depp was such an important part of Beck’s inner circle that he had traveled 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 that his health was failing.

‘She spent time with him just before he passed away. Johnny is wracked with grief, devastated. In 2016, when their marriage collapsed, the friendship became particularly valuable to Depp, who rose to fame as an actor but was a longtime guitarist with musical ambitions.

They performed together for the first time in 2019, at a charity event organized by Eric Clapton.

Depp spent much of the lockdown living with Beck and his second wife Sandra, an artist, in their 16th-century country house near Wadhurst in East Sussex. Friends confirm that he was there for months and was seen several times in the Middle House pub in nearby Mayfield. Depp also toured Folly Wildlife Rescue, of which Beck was a sponsor, and was photographed cradling an orphaned badger named Freddie Mercury.

“There was a couple that really helped me stay alive and sane and happy in that moment through the weirdness, and that was Jeff and Sandra,” Depp said.

Of course they were very different. The vegetarian Beck had no taste for anything fancier than prosecco, and he was deeply interested in gardening and history. Meanwhile, Depp is famous for his financial and narcotic excesses, admitting in court that he had spent £50m on a hard life. His former managers said he spent £4m to blow writer Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes into space and £25,000 a month on wine.

And while Depp was a standout actor, thanks in no small part to his role as Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, Beck deliberately chose the road less traveled.

“Luckily, I’ve never been successful,” Beck told Rolling Stone. “When you look around and see who’s made it huge, it’s a really rotten place to be.”

Raised in suburban Wallington, Surrey, Geoffrey Arnold Beck was a famous innovator and master of the guitar, but notoriously clumsy.

His biggest chart hit, the upbeat 1967 pop anthem Hi Ho Silver Lining, he utterly despised, comparing it to a pink toilet seat around his neck.

He was such a perfectionist that he once called Beatles producer George Martin to ask him to redo a solo, only to be told that months after the session, the record was already in stores.

But then, as Aerosmith’s Joe Perry noted, it was “far above everyone else.”

Beck, the son of an accountant, first heard an electric guitar on the radio when he was six years old and decided, ‘That’s it for me.’

He tried making guitars at home out of cigar boxes and tobacco tins, eventually buying one on installments with the help of a friend who posed as his stepfather and acted as guarantor.

He went to art school in Wimbledon and married, at 19, Patricia Brown, an animal-loving blonde from Crawley. The first thing they bought was an Afghan hound, and she commented that she had a hard time keeping him even on food with the fee 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 that he didn’t want to be there either, since he missed his wife. Other accounts suggest that he was fired for not showing up and because of 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 fights and line-up changes.

After Brian Jones’ death in 1969, he was asked to join the Stones and went to meet the band in Rotterdam. Beck said he waited days without seeing them and finally decided to go home rather than stay longer.

His marriage had already ended and he lived with model and animal activist Celia Hammond.

In the 1980s he struggled with tinnitus and registered less. He also lost the tip of one of his fingers while cutting carrots, though it was reattached. Then his fingers and thumbs were insured for a million dollars each.

In 2005 he married for the second time, with Sandra Cash, in the gardens of his house in Sussex.

They lived in a menagerie that included a pet crow and, at one point, a sheep.

Neighbors fondly said that the couple were involved in local life, particularly charities.

Beck will be missed by many. And few more, he feels, than his soul mate Johnny Depp.