(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Thu 5 February 2026 16:00, UK
This entire piece is surely a huge act of irony, or else it collapses into complete hypocrisy on Jeff Beck’s behalf.
We used to see this all the time. In the age before social media meant any interview could be plastered everywhere, and the tiniest comment could be nitpicked in online forums for eternity, artists seemed to have a sense of ease and freedom when talking to the press. Before the modern age brought in a plague of media training, meaning that famous people always choose their words incredibly carefully, they seemed to just be saying whatever they wanted to.
Sometimes that led to complete gold, like some of the most full-of-personality interviews around that gave real insights into icons. Sometimes it led to disaster as one wrong comment could spark life-long feuds. Or, in this case, it simply leads to a laugh as Jeff Beck’s fickle mind was made evident.
In 2009, Beck spoke to Classic Rock and got on the topic of some of his peers. Reflecting back on the 1960s, his days in The Yardbirds, and how he looked towards the future after that, he seems to be missing out on one vital bit of information when he starts talking about a band he was always curious about joining.
“I used to get mistaken for him all the time in ’61,” he said, recalling the start of it all as simply a tale of lookalikes as he explained, “I’d pull up along somebody in a car and they’d go, ‘Mick!’ And I’d be thinking: ‘Who the fuck is this Mick?’ Then I realised it was this guy in The Rolling Stones called Mick Jagger.”
Already, we have to take all of this with a pinch of salt, given that The Rolling Stones didn’t even form until 1962, meaning that in ‘61, Jagger will have simply been a pretty boy walking around London town.
But while that lapse in recollection might just be a mere mess-up of a fact, what he said next surely can’t be. “I was always thinking, ‘I wonder if I could play in that band?’ I seemed to fit the style, loved the blues and all the rest of it. I kept my eye on them,” he said, adding with what seems like genuine excitement, “Lo and behold, Mick calls me up and wants me to do an album.”
The album he’s talking about is She’s The Boss, Jagger’s debut solo album in 1985, but Beck’s memories seem to be completely and utterly blocking out the moment in the mid-1970s when he was quite literally invited to join the band.
Beck didn’t need to wonder if he could play with The Stones, because he tried it out, and he turned them down, and after Brian Jones died, and after Mick Taylor quit, the band were auditioning a cast of all-star players to step in… Beck was their frontrunner and then pretty infamously turned them down, branding their music as “just playing three chords,” stating that they didn’t ”do anything too challenging”, and so wouldn’t have been able to keep him entertained.
Seemingly, though, by 2009, Beck’s memory of that whole audition and rejection was wiped. Instead, he simply said, “I thought Mick was charming. He treated me really well.”
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