Jeff Beck and pop music pioneer Imogen Heap worked together on a number of successful collaborations. Not only did they share the stage and studio together, Heap joined Beck for a track on his Live at Ronnie Scott's album – a performance that has racked up 5.6 million views on YouTube.
It was a fairly comical start to the pair's working relationship, though: when they first met, Heap had no idea who Beck was – even after he gave her an impromptu guitar lesson.
The meeting in question took place from 1997, 10 years before that classic show at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in Soho, London. Heap was still a teenager at the time, and the aspiring musician had attended a songwriting camp at Police manager Miles Copeland’s castle in the Dordogne, Southwest France.
“I was much younger than everybody else and socially awkward so I got pretty drunk,” she recalls of camp in a Q&A with The Guardian readers. The extent to which she relied on Dutch courage to get through the event was typified by her actions after the sun had gone down.
“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 laughs. But before that, a private playing session was interrupted.
“I was sitting outside playing guitar very badly to myself and [who turned out to be] Jeff said: ‘Let me show you some shapes.’ I said: ‘Wow, you’re good!’”
Beyond being impressed by his knowledge, she didn’t think much of it.
“A week later, I got a message from my manager asking: ‘Did you meet Jeff Beck?’” she says. “He told me he was this really famous, legendary guitarist – I had no idea! – [and he] wanted me to sing on his record.”
Her contributions to two tracks on Beck’s album, You Had It Coming, were released in 2000. That came two years after her debut album, I Megaphone, which she'd started writing aged 15, was released by Almo Sounds.
Though the record struggled commercially, largely due to the label doing little to promote it – it had shut down before Heap had a chance to ready a follow-up – Beck's backing of her talents went far. She released her second album, Speak For Yourself, in 2005, a year after touring with Beck.
Her unique approach to vocal harmonies and production, particularly on the haunting A Capella Hide and Seek, has since gone on to influence Sleep Token, with Fall For Me the most obvious reference point.
“I sang his gorgeous Nadia [a cover of Nitin Sawhney's 1999 track] as best I could,” Heap says on her collaboration with the Strat-wielding guitar maverick.
“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.”
Jeff Beck’s widow, Sandra, made the difficult decision to auction off his gear last year, so his guitars could enjoy new lives in the hands of players who would adore them. The auction, which raised $10.7 million, was headlined by the record-breaking $1,315,708 sale of his Oxblood Les Paul.
Meanwhile, his Yardburst Les Paul was bought by a vintage guitar store in Paris, and has since been loaned out to Lenny Kravitz's foil, Craig Ross, to keep its spirit burning. It's the same store that has been putting Steve Jones' Sex Pistols Les Paul into the hands of punk and rock legends.
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