SHAPES of THINGS

They had Eric Clapton. They had Jeff Beck. They had Jimmy Page. In the late '60s no other band could get close to them. And without the Yardbirds there would be no Led Zeppelin.

- MICK WALL

IT WAS A SIMILAR sort of quest that brought JeffBeck and Jimmy Page together when they were both about 16 or 17, around 1960 or 1961. Beck’s sister, Annetta, told him about a kid at her art college in Epsom who played a “funny guitar” like his, and she decided they should meet. As it happened, Page lived all of about 10 minutes away. “There was a knock on the door, and there was Jeff’s sister, and there was Jeff holding his homemade guitar,” Page recalled in a 2019 video for Fender. “We just bonded immediately.”

Page would soon launch his career as a session musician, a move that would bring him success, money and some small measure of fame. Beck, meanwhile, would work his way through a string of groups, from the Deltones to the Tridents. But while the latter act was keeping busy on the local scene, Beck knew there was little future in it. “The Tridents had built a great following,” he said in Alan Clayton’s book The Yardbirds. “But there was no way I could exist — they weren’t paying me anything.”

As luck would have it, Page’s friendship would bring him an introduction to the Yardbirds, the group that would launch him on his way. The Yardbirds were so much more than the Tridents. They had always been fantastically flash, inscrutably cool and fabulously out of reach. Their early shows were self-described as “rave-ups” — wild, hair-down, knickers-off parties for the willfully far out, the fashionably “fuck you.” They weren’t dirty rockers or poncey mods, but they dressed to the nines, part King’s Road, part proto– Haight–Ashbury chic.