Jeff Beck: 10 guitars that shaped a legend

Jeff Beck discovered his genius and his purpose at a young age — which was a great stroke of good fortune for him, and for rock music. From his teens he was obsessed with guitars, and travelled miles to take a peek at a Fender catalogue owned by some distant acquaintance. He would skip school to catch the train up from Wallington, on the southern fringe of London, to the guitar shops of the Charing Cross Road. He wasn’t buying, just looking, but sometimes that meant he could take down a guitar and play.

A second piece of luck: his older sister knew of another guitar nut at her college, and introduced the boys to each other. This was Jimmy Page, future founder member of Led Zeppelin. He lived a few stops away on the same line that led to central London and guitar heaven, and had a record collection that introduced Beck to eclectic and diverse sounds from Indian sitar music to Chicago blues.

If Beck had not found his métier, he might well have become a full-time mechanic. All his life he loved automobiles, and when he wasn’t making music he was under the bonnet of a hot rod. He saw cars, particularly early Fords and Chevys, as beautiful machines, and he expertly built many from the ground up — both originals and replicas — diligently hand-making every part.

He brought the same modding spirit to his guitars: like any machine, they could be engineered to be better. Many of his favourite guitars were at some point disassembled, stripped back, modified and put back together in different configurations. The more he liked a guitar, the more likely it was to undergo alteration and repair. That was partly because Beck was not always kind to his instruments. He was not an onstage wrecker like Pete Townshend, but he played hard — they were tools to him, rather than precious objects. He once said that his face was sure to be on a wanted poster at the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Guitars.

And Beck was never a guitar collector. He owned dozens of guitars, not hundreds, and most of those were presents rather than purchases. In 1980, he told Guitar Player: ‘I’ve hung on to every guitar. I never sell guitars, really… I used to have just one Strat, because all the others had been ripped off. I had other guitars at different times, but they were all stolen, and I wound up with one guitar… This was back in 1972 or 1973. And then, all of a sudden, I looked around my front room the other day, and I’ve got about 70 guitars.’

People seemed to relish gifting him instruments. Guitar dealers and luthiers regularly presented him with good instruments, and so did fellow musicians such as Page, a lifelong friend, as well as Steve Marriott and later Billy F Gibbons and Johnny Depp. It was as if they were aiming to do a favour both to Jeff, and also to any guitar that found its way into his hands.

Here, we look at some of the highlights from Jeff Beck: The Guitar Collection, taking place on 22 January 2025 at Christie’s in London.

Gibson Les Paul ‘The Oxblood’

All Beck fans know ‘The Oxblood’ from the cover of Blow By Blow, his first solo instrumental album. The artwork by John Collier shows Beck in action, seemingly rocked back on his heels by the power of the guitar he is playing.

This distinctive Les Paul has a peculiar history. It started life as a Gold Top, and belonged to a guitarist in Tennessee. That owner asked Strings & Things, a workshop in Memphis, to make some fundamental modifications: shave the neck, replace all the nickel parts with gold, install full-size humbuckers, and then repaint. The new finish was particularly eye-catching — a deep brown, dark and lustrous as good gravy — but when the owner came to collect, he didn’t like it. So the guitar stayed in the shop until it was acquired by Buddy Davis, a local musician.

Late in 1972, Beck was on tour in Memphis, and Davis was asked to show him round the city’s music shops and car-spare stores. Davis thought Beck might like to see his ‘chocolate Gibson’, so he put it in the back of his car. Beck did indeed like it, and Davis said he could have it for the $400 that he had paid. Jeff, pleased that Davis had not attempted to turn a profit, gave him $500 for ‘The Oxblood’ — a name coined by Beck himself — and made it famous.

Jackson Soloist ‘Tina’

With a headstock that looks like it could slice sushi, the pink Jackson Soloist is a dangerous-looking guitar. And an actual knife is part of its story. Beck used the Jackson when he worked with Tina Turner on the album Private Dancer. He had been in awe of Turner since the 1960s, when he briefly toured with the singer and her husband Ike, but at that time he was too shy to speak to her.

At the end of the Private Dancer session in 1984, Beck asked Turner to sign the guitar. She first autographed it in felt pen, but it was clear that it would not last. So instead she produced a knife from her bag and carved her name into the pink finish. She then rubbed green nail polish into the jagged letters to make them visible and permanent.

The ‘Tina’, as it became known, can be heard on Beck’s duet with Rod Stewart, ‘People Get Ready’, on the 1985 album Flash, produced by Nile Rodgers. It was Beck’s first reunion with the singer he had introduced to the world in the Jeff Beck Group in 1967, along with a young Ronnie Wood. Beck memorably appears in the video, breezily riding an open boxcar and miming the Jackson solo on a Fender Telecaster.

Gibson Les Paul ‘Yardburst’

This 1959 Les Paul is one of two which Beck owned, and the one he played while in the Yardbirds. That, and the fact that it originally had a sunburst finish, accounts for its slight misnomer of a nickname.

In the mid-1960s, it seemed to Beck that everyone was playing a Les Paul: ‘Peter Green from Fleetwood Mac was using one… as was Eric [Clapton]. So the Les just seemed the way to go. Playing it through a combo or bigger amp, it just sounded so rich.’

Bought in early 1966 from Selmer on Charing Cross Road, it was used to record many tracks on the Yardbirds album Roger the Engineer, and appeared briefly in the cult film Blow-Up. It was also played on stage by Jimmy Page after Beck left the Yardbirds in the middle of their tour of North America in August 1966.

The guitar features on one of the most revered Beck tracks — the Ravel-inspired ‘Beck’s Bolero’, co-written with Page and recorded with what could have been an iconic supergroup consisting of Beck, Page, Keith Moon on drums, John Paul Jones on bass and Nicky Hopkins on keyboards. The track was not released until the following year, as the B-side for Beck’s solo recording ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ — a song that he never liked. He is said to have compared its success to ‘having a pink toilet seat round your neck for the rest of your life’.

Beck began gradually modding his Les Paul soon after leaving the Yardbirds, first removing the black pickguard and switch surround in 1967, then taking off the pickup covers to reveal its double-white humbuckers, and by early 1968 he had completely removed the sunburst finish, creating its natural blonde look.

Beck continued to use the guitar after he formed the Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood, taking it on their first tour of America. Jimi Hendrix is known to have played Beck’s stripped ‘Yardburst’ in June 1968, while the band played a week-long residency at The Scene club in New York, with Jimi joining Jeff on stage for the encore each night, the two of them playing each other’s guitars.

The battle scars of this guitar are an integral part of its history. Having already suffered one neck break during Beck’s tenure in the Yardbirds, the guitar was damaged again in 1968, and underwent further restoration in the early 1970s, when the headstock was replaced with the current L-5-style larger shape, inlaid with ‘The Gibson’ and a flower-pot design. The guitar would be restored again shortly after, when the repairman not only replaced the neck, inlaying Beck’s initials on the 22nd fret, but also removed the original PAFs, replacing them with the double-black humbuckers that are still on the guitar.

VALCO Supro Dual Tone

The VALCO Supro Dual Tone is a fabulous piece of mid-century Americana. The creamy body looks like a milk popsicle on a stick, while both the black headstock and the curly scratchplate have the whiff of an Elvis quiff.

The guitar was launched in 1954 and, priced at $135, quickly became a favourite of players looking for a good-value instrument with a strong character. Blues players in particular loved its tone. Later, in the 1970s, vintage models were sought out by experimental rockers such as David Bowie and Frank Zappa. David Gilmour had one in his vast collection, and so did Mark Knopfler.

Beck acquired his Supro Dual Tone some time around 1990, and used it mostly for slide guitar. He was, of course, an absolute master of slide. Beck had an uncanny ability to find the right pitch anywhere on the neck. Sometimes he would slip the glass tube off his middle finger and, holding it like a pencil, play high notes by lightly touching the strings directly over the pickups. It was as if the fretted neck had ceased to exist for him, and he was working with pure vibration.

Beck can be seen playing this guitar in the 2003 documentary Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: Red, White and Blues. He is not performing, but quietly riffing over a recording of Ray Charles’s ‘Hard Times’ — thinking out loud, in other words. He also took the Supro Dual Tone on stage while touring America with Imelda May in 2011. He used it for one song — a cover of Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Poor Boy’ — perhaps because Howlin’ Wolf was also known to favour VALCO guitars.

Fender ‘Tele-Gib’

The ‘Tele-Gib’ was constructed by famed American guitar engineer Seymour W. Duncan. It started out as a ‘butchered Telecaster’ that ‘had been through some unearthly modifications’. Duncan bought the guitar in Cincinnati, and took it to London in the early 1970s. In his luggage were other cannibalised parts, including two humbucker pickups that came from a Gibson Flying V formerly owned by the singer-guitarist Lonnie Mack and bridge saddles from a Telecaster that had belonged to Roy Buchanan.

Seymour got a day job servicing guitars at the Fender Soundhouse. While he was there, he rewound Mack’s vintage pickups with ‘a spool of ’42 and a spool of ‘44’ that he sourced from a local motor-repair shop. He chopped back the bridge piece on the beat-up Tele so that it could accommodate the breadth of a humbucker, and he re-boarded the neck in rock maple and equipped it with Gibson jumbo frets. He hand-cut the chocolate-brown pickguard and used a knob taken from a telephone switchboard for the end of the pickup selector switch.

Duncan knew that Beck was rehearsing in studios nearby on the Tottenham Court Road, so he went over with the ‘Tele-Gib’ and offered it to him. Beck took the guitar, and in exchange Seymour received the 1954 Esquire which Beck had played when he was with the Yardbirds. Beck almost immediately regretted parting with the Esquire, and spoke ruefully of it for years after. But Seymour’s ‘Tele-Gib’ was a perfect fit, and came to him at exactly the right moment. It is the guitar he played on two of the best-known and most influential tracks from Blow By Blow: ‘Freeway Jam’ and ‘Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers’.

White Fender Stratocaster ‘Anoushka’

The ‘Anoushka’ is named after Anoushka Shankar, who played with Beck at Sting and Trudie Styler’s Rainforest Benefit Concert in New York in 2002, and afterwards signed this guitar to mark the occasion. Her autograph has rubbed away over the years, but the name remains.

The neck of the ‘Anoushka’ has a history of its own. It was custom-made by Fender Custom Shop master builder J.W. Black in 1990, and in the early 1990s it was paired with a surf-green Strat body known as the ‘Little Richard’. The neck was transferred to this body — also the work of J.W. Black — when ‘Little Richard’ was retired in early 1999.

After ‘Little Richard’ was retired, Beck returned almost exclusively to white Strats. While ‘Anoushka’ was his main and favourite guitar for more than 15 years, on tour in the 2000s he carried several others — both as spares and in different tunings, depending on the setlist — including some that had been made by J.W. Black in the 1990s and others made to his particular specifications by Fender Custom Shop master builder Todd Krause from 1999 onwards.

From 2014 up to his last gigs, Beck often played white Strats with a left-handed neck, likely inspired by Hendrix. Jeff had first taken delivery of a reverse-headstock neck in the mid-1990s, but from 2014, coinciding with when ‘Anoushka’ was retired to avoid any further damage to his favourite performance guitar, this neck became the main guitar. Flipping the neck meant that the tension of the strings was reversed, which allowed for more extreme bending of the top B and E, and gave the low strings a more percussive ring — Hendrix-style.

Gretsch Duo-Jet

Beck’s fondness for Gretsches was rooted in his love of Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps. He idolised their lead guitarist, Cliff Gallup, and when he was planning Crazy Legs, his album in homage to Vincent and the band, he invested huge effort into finding an original Gretsch 6128 Duo-Jet to replicate Gallup’s sound perfectly.

Having managed to track down a 1955 model with a swivel-arm Bigsby tailpiece in 1984, Beck finally found a 1956 model with a fixed-arm Bigsby like the one Gallup had played, just after the recordings for Crazy Legs had finished.

Beck was also drawn to the acoustic Gretsch Rancher that the Blue Caps rhythm guitarist Paul Peek played in the movie The Girl Can’t Help It, where they perform ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’. When Beck saw the film as a teenager, he was fascinated by the unusual soundhole, an inverted triangle like Vincent’s beautiful face.

In some photographs of Peek’s guitar, there appears to be something like a bullet-hole in the body. That damage was caused by a ‘cherry bomb’, a kind of firework that a member of the band had put inside the Rancher as a prank. Beck joked that he planned to get a similar hole put into his own 1990 Rancher, so that it would be exactly like the one played by the Blue Caps. Mercifully, he never acted on the idea.

Ibanez Signature Prototype

There are in the sale several prototypes for a Jeff Beck Signature Ibanez, dating from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Each one is a curious rarity, because the guitar never went into production.

Like many great players, Beck found himself imagining a guitar that combined the best aspects of a Fender with the outstanding qualities of a Gibson Les Paul. In a sense, he had a guitar that did that job — the ‘Tele-Gib’ — but from the late 1970s Ibanez had been trying to woo him into a collaboration, and from then through the early 1980s, he was talking to the firm about an organically designed hybrid that would be tailored to his way of playing.

The shape of the Ibanez prototype, with its two horns, is distinctly Fenderish, while the array of humbucker pickups is pure Les Paul. An unexpected feature of the guitar is the profusion of knobs and switches. They seem to run counter to Beck’s minimal ethos, whereby the sound is the outworking of the player’s technique rather than a function of in-built gadgetry — not to mention that they added to the weight of the instrument. Ibanez sent Beck numerous versions of the guitar, each one a successive attempt to meet his elusive specs and needs. Eventually, when it became clear that the experiment was not going to bear fruit, Beck and Ibanez went their separate ways.

Fender Telecaster ‘Workhorse’

Beck loved the plain honesty of the Fender Telecaster. ‘It’s such a simple thing,’ he once said. ‘No trick bridges, but you can play anything on it. It reveals all your failings and all your plus parts.’

This Tele is more unprepossessing than most: the body is scratched and pitted, and the white finish is in places worn to the wood, like a painted door that has been kicked shut way too many times. Part of that wear is the result of Beck’s sometimes aggressive manner of playing, and so should be seen as patina, an aspect of the guitar’s pedigree. ‘It’s just a great workhorse,’ Beck said. ‘It’s got a spanky sound that not many guitars have.’

There is an element of chance — or fate — in the story of how he came by it. While on the ARMS tour in 1983, he went to his road manager Al Dutton’s room and saw a guitar case under the bed. He asked what it was, but Dutton said it was for someone else. Beck took a look all the same. ‘It played great. When I picked this up it was like an old friend coming back.’ Beck said he wanted it, and paid Dutton $600 for it.

For the two New York shows of the ARMS tour, Beck lent the guitar to his former bandmate Ronnie Wood when he backed Eric Clapton on rhythm guitar for his part of the set, before taking the guitar back to play with his old friend Jimmy Page on an instrumental version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’.

Fender Stratocaster — Steve Marriott

A number of Beck’s guitars came to him as tokens of respect and friendship. One such is a Fender Stratocaster that was a gift from Steve Marriott of Humble Pie and the Small Faces. One day in 1976, Beck went to visit Marriott at a recording studio in London. Marriott invited Beck to try out his sunburst Stratocaster, a guitar which Beck thought looked ‘just like the Buddy Holly Strat’, although at the time it had a Telecaster neck on it.

The image of a sunburst Strat had been in Beck’s mind since he saw the Crickets play at the Davis Theatre in Croydon in 1958. Marriott’s Strat had the serial number 0062, meaning it was one of the first ever to go on sale and was surely at least as old as Holly’s. That night, after they had played some more and had a few drinks, Marriott told Beck he wanted him to have the guitar. Beck left the instrument at the studio and went back a few days later to check that Marriott was sure about his generous offer — that it was not just the beer talking. The guitar was still there, and Marriott insisted he meant it: the guitar was Beck’s.

He swapped the Tele neck for a well-worn maple neck — most likely dating from around 1958 — which had been on a stripped Strat with a distinctive broken pickguard ‘horn’ used by Jeff extensively for both live and recorded work from 1967 to 1976. The combination became Jeff’s favourite, most treasured Strat. ‘It weighs a ton, and it’s difficult to play,’ Beck said. ‘It goes out of tune and all that, but when you use it properly it sings to you.’

Spanning Jeff Beck’s almost six-decade career, from joining the Yardbirds in 1965 to his last tour in 2022, Jeff Beck: The Guitar Collection presents more than 130 guitars, amps, pedals, cases and ‘tools-of-the-trade’ used by the late, great guitar legend. The sale takes place on 22 January 2025 at Christie’s in London, with viewing from 15 to 22 January

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