His guitar playing might have been distinctive, but not everyone recognised Jeff Beck when they met him in person - Imogen Heap, for example.
Given that Heap actually ended up working with Beck this might come as a surprise, but her first meeting with him wasn’t as auspicious as you might think.
This came in 1997, when Heap was just 19 and attended a songwriting camp at Police manager Miles Copeland’s castle in the Dordogne. “I was much younger than everybody else and socially awkward so I got pretty drunk,” she says in a reader Q&A with The Guardian, which may go some way to explaining what happened next.
“I was sitting outside playing guitar very badly to myself and [the person who turned out to be] Jeff said: ‘Let me show you some shapes.’ I said: ‘Wow, you’re good!’”
Heap would continue to enjoy her evening - “Later that night I ended up drunkenly driving a golf caddy around the estate and crashing into Miles’s mum’s prized terracotta pots,” she says - and probably didn’t give much thought to the mystery man who was good at guitar until her manager got in touch.
“A week later I got a message from my manager asking: ‘Did you meet Jeff Beck?’” Heap recalls. “He told me he was this really famous, legendary guitarist – I had no idea! – who wanted me to sing on his record.”
Heap would end up singing on two tracks on Beck’s 2000 album, You Had It Coming, and went on to tour with him in 2004.
“I sang his gorgeous Nadia as best I could and did some shows with him,” says Heap. “He was a sweet man and I loved him so much. A lot of people from that generation are just so grateful to have been able to do what they loved all those years, and their egos are very small in comparison to the amount of fame they had.”
Small enough not to care too much when someone doesn’t recognise them, it turns out…
