JEFF BECK - Royal Festival Hall, London 12 & 13 September 2002

With special guest ROGER WATERS!

(Report updated 15th September - adding in updated information and a newspaper review of the show)

Last night (12th September), Roger played the first of two guest performances with legendary guitarist Jeff Beck, at London's Royal Festival Hall, which seems to be becoming a magnet for past and present members of the entity known as Pink Floyd!

Roger's part of the show was the same for both nights - short but very sweet.

The show itself is approximately two and a half hours long, with a brief intermission, and covers Jeff's career from the early days as part of The Yardbirds, to the present day and his new album.

Songs performed along the way included such classics as Beck's Bolero (which he started the show with), Hi Ho Silver Lining (which he obviously HATED to perform and deliberately messed about with the lyrics), and a cover of Day In The Life by the Beatles.

Various musicians came on for different songs - the show started with Andy Fairweather-Low backing Jeff, but he soon disappeared off the stage, not to be seen again until after the intermission. Other musicians included Terry Bozzio on drums for a number of tracks, partnering Jeff's normal drummer, who was outclassed by Terry unfortunately.

The second half also saw the appearance of Roger for his slot in the show. Striding on in his normal stage clothing (black suit etc), he picked up his black bass guitar and proceeded to run through What God Wants parts 1 and 3.

Obviously unsure of the words to part three, he sang from a sheet with the lyrics on, held up in front of him. One or two of the lyrics had been subtly altered - we are trying to get hold of a copy of the performance so that we can let you know how dramatically they were changed, and what sort of significance one can attach to the changes. If any.

Backing came principally from Jeff, Andy Fairweather-Low, and the "Waters-ettes" - PP Arnold, Katie Kissoon, and Carol Kenyon, who all sang so sweetly on his recent tour. What did impress was the way that Jeff recreated his guitar work on the album so seemingly effortlessly.

Disappointingly, once What God Wants had finished, Roger left the stage, never to return - not even for the Hi Ho Silver Lining finale, in which Andy F-L seemed to be having a whale of a time!

The second night had Roger again with the lyric sheet, this time taped to the floor, as he seemed to have less need of it. By all accounts the performance was generally better on the second night, and was boosted by the majority of Roger's touring band being in the audience, together with India, his supermodel daughter.

Review of the show from The Times, London

September 14, 2002

WITH the pre-concert publicity promising a musical journey "from the Yardbirds to the future" with "very special guests", expectations were running high for Jeff Beck’s first London show in three years.

The guitarist has previously avoided playing the nostalgia card. But now, at 58, his attitude has softened, and the tone for this lengthy presentation was set by an opening salvo of Beck’s Bolero and Rice Pudding, tracks from his first two solo albums released in 1968 and 1969 which, frankly, sounded their age.

Beck’s lustrous guitar tone and brittle, swooping technique remained intact but, perhaps in keeping with the era they sought to evoke, the backing musicians sounded sluggish and under-rehearsed. Meanwhile, back projections of spinning wheels and other examples of Sixties art were intercut with moody photographs of Beck in his youth, a naff visual distraction which further underlined the sense of stepping into a timewarp.

The first of the "very special" guests, whom Beck introduced as "my favourite all-time singer", was Jimmy Hall. Jimmy who? Formerly a member of the long-forgotten American bar band Wet Willie, Hall brought some pub-rock mediocrity to bear on performances of Muddy Waters’s I’m a Man, Tim Rose’s Morning Dew, the old Yardbirds hit Heart Full of Soul and others.

The rapid haemorrhaging of Beck’s credibility was stemmed for a while by the arrival of the drummer Terry Bozzio, who with Tony Hymas, a keyboard player, joined the lean, black-clad guitarist in a more savage display of jazz-rock bravado on numbers including Sling Shot, Big Block and Freeway Jam.

Things perked up in the second half as the band picked their way through faithful versions of Pump and Star Cycle (the theme from The Tube).

But then Roger Waters arrived to supply a predictably ponderous What God Wants, which he was so concerned to get right that he read his own lyrics off a sheet of paper. With the return of Hall for another stretch of journeyman bluster on Don Nix’s Going Down and Curtis Mayfield’s People Get Ready, the concert’s two-star fate was, regrettably, sealed.

As Beck signed off with a spine-tingling interpretation of Lennon and McCartney’s A Day in the Life, the man’s awesome musicianship was not in doubt. But his personality is too cold, arrogant and egotistical to provide the necessary enthusiasm, let alone bonhomie, for an exercise of this nature to gel. His reluctant encore of Hi Ho Silver Lining - complete with puking gestures to indicate his disdain for the song - was insulting and embarrassing.