A SOLID-BODY ELECTRIC GUITAR, STRATOCASTER

This guitar was evidently customised specifically for presentation to Jeff Beck by a fan who understood the profound impact that 50s bombshell Jayne Mansfield and her movies had on the young Beck. Jeff has often cited seeing the 1956 Mansfield vehicle The Girl Can’t Help It in a dark cinema, aged twelve, as a defining moment in his life and career. ‘The Girl Can't Help It was the life-changing film,’ Beck told Mojo in 2004, ‘the consolidation of everything I wanted, Jayne Mansfield and everything. For nine-pence you could get your life sorted out! My dreams are real! There it is! The film’s cameo performances by early rock and roll stars Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, and Gene Vincent and the Bluecaps lit the flame of rock and roll for the young Jeff, in the same way it did for John Lennon and Paul McCartney, sparking a lifelong obsession with the guitar. ‘That movie completely did me in,’ Jeff told Brad Tolinski in 1999. ‘It started me wanting my own guitar. I just remember being fascinated by the shape of the guitar and by the sounds that came out of it.’ Interviewed by guitar historian Tony Bacon in 2005, Beck reflected: ‘we didn't understand what the guitars were… that film was the first real pictures I saw of those guitars, tantalizingly short, a few seconds… The most pivotal film in my career, and my life, really.’