The Guitarist's Guitarist

"Throughout his tenure with the Yardbirds, Beck seemed as interested in the sonic possibilities of new technology as he did in demonstrating his instrumental prowess, 'making all the weirdest noise I could'. The result was a succession of tracks that propelled the Yardbirds to the forefront of pop's avant garde: Over Under Sideways Down, Lost Woman, Hot House of Omagararshid, He's Always There. When Jimmy Page joined, briefly creating a lineup with two lead guitarists, their sound got more extreme still. The single that coupled Happenings Ten Years Time Ago and Psycho Daisies was impossibly potent and sinister, so far-out even by the standards of 1966 that it succeeded in alienating their fans–it barely scraped the charts in the UK–and the critics, one of whom derided it as an 'excuse for music'."

Alexis Petridis at The Guardian writes an appreciation of Jeff Beck.