Jeff Beck

“I like the wildness of Buddy Guy.”

“I play the way I do because it allows me to come up with the sickest sounds possible. That's the point now isn't it?”

“Nothing is more annoying than a great singer getting drowned out by a loud guitar.”

“It's easy to hurl abuse at those awards ceremonies like the Oscars and all that, which we tend to do. We tend to vent our anger at things which we feel are unjust or undeserving. But when you're the recipient, it makes it a lot different.”

“You stop anybody on any street, around the world, and they know who Eric Clapton is. They don't know who I am!”

“When you get guys coming up to you in clubs or restaurants or somewhere, and they say how much they've enjoyed your playing on records, then that pays off dividends every day; every time they say it, you think, 'I'm glad I did that.'”

“My first wife said, 'It's either thatguitar or me,' you know -- and I giveyou three guesses which one went.”

“The right time to record is when you're not quite ahead of yourself.”

“I have to have people around who are of a certain strain of humour. I can't deal with people who have no humour.”

“A lunatic lifestyle on the road doesn't permit you to get too hip to stuff as you should.”

“It wasn't the muso thing that got me recognition in the beginning. It was doing 'Wild Thing.'”

“I play purely from the heart, y'know, and so if it doesn't work the first couple of hours, forget it.”

“If you were to plot my success or failure, it goes, it very seldom stays on a high plateau.”

“I was really small when jazz broke through in England and I can still remember sneaking off to the living room to listen to it on the radio - much to my parent's disapproval.”

“I like an element of chaos in music. That feeling is the best thing ever, as long as you don't have too much of it.”

“Listen to the great guitarists of the Fifties. They didn't do that nasty sort of industrial distortion. They played musical compositions as solos - Scotty Moore, Cliff Gallup, Django Reinhardt. There wasn't a bad note in any of those solos. I listened to that and stayed with those rules.”

“I cherish my privacy, and woe betide anyone who tries to interfere with that.”

“The fun that I've had needs to be seen on the screen. I like the thought of a bunch of people laughing at what I laughed at - because my life is surreal, completely wacko.”

“If the song makes it and people like it, then I guess that's all that matters, really.”

“Cliff Gallup is one of my heroes; I'd dearly love to meet him.”