Quotes from Jeff Beck

I like the wildness of Buddy Guy.

I've tried to become a singer with the guitar and not let any technological licks run my life. Just write the licks and play them as best as I can as a part rather than ad libbing.

I thought there couldn't be a better backdrop for some kind of powerful music than a big orchestra. My wish to hear how a guitar would sound in front of an orchestra has always been there.

I cherish my privacy, and woe betide anyone who tries to interfere with that.

When you get guys coming up to you in clubs or restaurants or somewhere, and they say how much they've enjoyed your playing on records, then that pays off dividends every day; every time they say it, you think, 'I'm glad I did that.'

A lot of solos I hear sound so incredible, but they sound like somebody practicing. They sound a bit soulless - fiery, but at the same time, lacking in spirit and soul.

If the song makes it and people like it, then I guess that's all that matters, really.

I'm not committed to putting myself up for a blues guitarist, even though I love playing the blues.

When they said there was gonna be about 100,000 people at Woodstock, and it went up to 200,000, I just blanked off and thought, 'I don't want to do this.' If they're filming it, it's too nerve-racking.

I would have loved to have been two people, but I was determined not to devote my entire life to my career.

Cliff Gallup is one of my heroes; I'd dearly love to meet him.

The only way you can get Scotty Moore's tone is with a big hollowbody guitar.

Nothing is more annoying than a great singer getting drowned out by a loud guitar.

I was really small when jazz broke through in England and I can still remember sneaking off to the living room to listen to it on the radio - much to my parent's disapproval.

I couldn't not play a Les Paul guitar. Les always used to point to my Strat and say, 'Why do you have that piece of crap around your neck?' I'd say, 'Yours are too heavy. I had to drill holes in it.'

Sometimes when I do an overdub solo, they'll keep four or five of my attempts and then mix the bits that they like to make a solo up out of them. It's not against the rules, really - I can learn my own solos, then. But that's the whole beauty of multi-track recording, isn't it?

London is a dead duck, as far as innovative new music is concerned, unless you want to have your head blown off with some outrageous, rubbish, pounding dance music.

I play the way I do because it allows me to come up with the sickest sounds possible. That's the point now isn't it?

I loved Motown. I loved the musicality and the sound.

I try to become a singer. The guitar has always been abused with distortion units and funny sorts of effects, but when you don't do that and just let the genuine sound come through, there's a whole magic there.

Listen to the great guitarists of the Fifties. They didn't do that nasty sort of industrial distortion. They played musical compositions as solos - Scotty Moore, Cliff Gallup, Django Reinhardt. There wasn't a bad note in any of those solos. I listened to that and stayed with those rules.

I do a very poor man's pedal steel on the Stratocaster.

I'm a very emotional person. If I've got something on my mind, that would stop me from giving my best.

I have to have people around who are of a certain strain of humour. I can't deal with people who have no humour.