(Credits: Far Out / Klaus Hiltscher / Helge Øverås)
Wed 21 January 2026 17:00, UK
It’s probably fair to say to a certain extent that Jeff Beck gave Rod Stewart his career, but not so much that he wouldn’t have been able to flourish without his input.
It was his involvement in the Jeff Beck Group in the late 1960s that first turned Stewart into something of an exciting prospect in blues and rock music, but while this project didn’t necessarily survive for a long time or have any mainstream success, it was ultimately the move that Stewart made next that propelled him further into the spotlight.
Alongside Ronnie Wood, Stewart departed from the group to become a key component in the Faces, who had just gone through a transformation of their own from being the Small Faces, and were lamenting the loss of their frontman Steve Marriott, who had moved on to form Humble Pie. In a swift and literal game of musical chairs, Stewart had exchanged his place in Beck’s group for something that had more potential to be lucrative.
However, while the attention that he received as the frontman in this project was slightly better, it wasn’t in this band that he truly found himself rising to the top of his game, and his decision to begin pursuing a solo career from the mid-1970s onwards led him to the revered status he finds himself in today.
While Stewart has undoubtedly always been good enough to perform at the highest level, you can still see that it was his involvement with the Jeff Beck Group that caused this domino effect, with the rapid succession of projects coming afterwards being what took him from being a talented yet unheard of blues singer to a worldwide phenomenon.
However, after their time working together in the late ‘60s, Stewart and Beck ceased to communicate with each other in the same way as they had done when they first knew each other, and Stewart appears to still regret that this is the case to this day.
Speaking to Billboard about the release of his 2013 album, Time, he ended up discussing his fractured relationship with Beck, and claimed that the two parties hadn’t really successfully communicated for almost 45 years, following the release of Truth, despite it not being the final Jeff Beck Group album that Stewart appeared on. Given that the album’s anniversary was on the horizon, questions were raised about the potential of a reunion, which Stewart hinted was very unlikely due to how they rarely talk.
“Whether Jeff would want to do it, there’s two chances — slim and none,” Stewart confessed. “When Jeff’s angry at you, he stays angry for a long time. We were going to do a blues album before Time, a modern sort of Beck-Ola, maybe, but we couldn’t agree on a great many things. I sent him a Christmas card, or e-mailed him a Christmas card, the year before last and never heard anything back.”
While it sounds like a bit of both parties being awkward for the sake of it, there’s a certain sense of hurt in what Stewart says about the strain on his and Beck’s relationship, and while there were moments where they were together after Truth was released, they’d never collaborate in the same way again, which remained true until Beck’s death in 2023.
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