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They say Jeff Beck can be an awkward character, so I start with an easy one. Tell me about the feverishly anticipated upcoming shows, I say. “You mean without spoiling them?” He smiles. Well, ahm, yes.

“Impossible! I can’t talk about it, because there’s two major things that I hope are going to happen, and I don’t want to spoil them for anyone. Seriously, it’s like a story line from Coronation Street...”

He leans back and laughs, and now I laugh too, mostly at the thought that his whole career reads a bit like a soap plot. When thousands trek out to the O2 Arena on Saturday for the first of two shows featuring Beck and fellow Yardbirds alumnus Eric Clapton, most will go knowing more about the Armani blues of the latter — which is a terrible shame, because Beck’s musical odyssey is by far the more interesting one. If anyone can ever be said to have rivalled Jimi Hendrix for mercurial brilliance as a guitarist, it’s him. Not for nothing did Hendrix make a point of playing with Beck whenever he could.

At this distance, it’s hard to credit the fact that three of the beat boom’s great guitarists passed through the same group. Beck replaced Clapton in the Yardbirds’ lineup in 1965, joining Jimmy Page, later of Led Zeppelin, on lead guitar. They had a string of hits, such as Shapes of Things and the catchy For Your Love; and, perhaps more memorably, feature in one of the key scenes from Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic film of Swinging London, Blow-Up. In it, Beck, unable to make his guitar work on a nightclub stage, smashes the instrument against his amp: watch closely on YouTube and you’ll see that he looks a little sheepish, as if he has already realised that this scene isn’t going to be enough for him in the long run.

Beck grew up in Wallington, Surrey, tuning in to Radio Luxembourg on a Tuesday night (“It was the absolute oxygen of life”), hoping to catch the latest single by Gene Vincent or Little Richard, or from Motown or Stax. So it’s no surprise that, when a rift with Page forced him out of the Yardbirds in October 1966, these became key influences on his new band, the Jeff Beck Group. Along with introducing Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood to the world, the Beck Group left behind two decent albums, Truth and Beck-Ola, not to mention a fearsome live reputation, especially in America. A last-minute decision to pull out of Woodstock on the grounds that his group wasn’t ready (something Beck confesses to regretting) strained his already fragile relationship with Stewart, who promptly left for the Faces, taking Wood with him. Beck assembled a new line-up, then another, then formed a supergroup with Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice, from Vanilla Fudge — all with steadily diminishing returns.

Between 1972 and 1975, he released no records under his own name and had entered a musical and commercial crisis, during which he was forced to watch old bandmates such as Clapton, Page, Stewart and Wood become global stars. A painful split with his girlfriend, the model Celia Hammond, completed the picture. Things were about to get interesting.

Discussing Beck’s “wilderness years” is a strange experience, because, although record companies and promoters might not have been beating a path to his door, his reputation as the guitarist’s guitarist was unassailable. During this period, he played the final Ziggy Stardust show with David Bowie, who had reportedly wanted him for the Spiders from Mars before settling on Mick Ronson, and had described Ronson as “my Jeff”. It has since also emerged that Pink Floyd had dreamt of Beck joining them. In the words of their drummer Nick Mason: “None of us had the nerve to ask him.”

The guitarist also played on Stevie Wonder’s breakout album, Talking Book (Wonder originally wrote Superstition for Beck) and was asked to join the Rolling Stones as a replacement for Mick Taylor, but turned them down. Beck laughs a whole range of different laughs as he describes these events, by turns amused and frustrated with the perfectionism of his younger self.

Sometimes, as in the case of Bowie, he only faintly understood what he was dealing with. “Oh, yeah. I just felt so out of my depth... all these girls screaming their heads off, then I start playing and they were screaming some more. I thought, ‘This is good!’ I’d never played that audience.”

The glorious downside was Bowie’s failure to tell Beck that the show was being filmed, meaning the guitarist wore “the most disgusting pair of dirty-white stack-heeled shoes you’ve ever seen”. For a while, he actually refused to allow the footage to be used. “And Bowie rang me about 10 times and said, ‘Look, man, I understand about the shoes, ’cos I didn’t like what I was wearing either...’”

The Stones were another thing entirely. Asked to travel to Rotterdam to record with the band, Beck found that they were auditioning guitarists. An air of dissolution surrounded them. “I told them, ‘No, I don’t do auditions. Seeya.’ And they said, ‘No, no. We’ve told the others not to come now you’re here.’” So he jammed with the Stones. Every musician’s dream in 1974, right?

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