Estate agents looking for a glamorous client might care to take note. Beck is
looking to move. He has decided that Los Angeles is no place to bring up his
two young children. And with that in mind, he is even using a string of UK
dates to inspect a few likely locales. All of which explains why, a few
hours before his show in Southampton, the 38-year-old pop polymath took a
long, leisurely stroll through the city centre. What he saw there seems to
have unsettled him. “There’s this huge shopping mall, with all the stores
you see in America: the Borders and the Toys ‘R’ Us,” he says. “It just
seemed wrong. We really romanticise things in the UK because we’ve been
corporatised and homogenised for so long. And I was just walking through
there wondering, ‘What was out there before?’ That’s the thing I’m
interested in. That’s the thing I’ve been chasing half my life.”
So much, then, for Southampton, with its paved thoroughfares and free
station-to-mall shuttle bus. Beck was so disheartened that he retreated to
the tour bus for a nap. As he walks into his dressing room at the Guildhall,
his bleary blue eyes and messy shoulder-length locks make it clear that he
hasn’t been awake for long. As befits someone who isn’t entirely comfortable
with life in 21st-century LA, his new album, overseen by the producer Danger
Mouse, is called Modern Guilt. Disorientation seems to be a recurring
theme in the songs, from the crumbling surroundings of Walls to the
dystopian spook-pop of his new single Chemtrails.
Beck rapidly seems to be coming to the conclusion that his aversion to
California isn’t merely cultural. It might be in his DNA. “When the desert
wind blows, you feel like you’re not really made for it. I mean, my ancestry
goes back to England, Scotland, Scandinavia. I remember when I was a kid I
used to get taken to all these grown-up movies – there weren’t too many
babysitters back then. There was one film with John Cassavetes in it. It’s
about this guy who has just had it, so he’s moved the whole family to some
remote part of Greece. And, of course, the teenage daughter is miserable,
but they find some other qualities of life. The urban pace slows down and
they find some kind of equilibrium.” He laughs the sheepish laugh of a man
who may be making his family step into line with his own naive idealism.
“Like I said, I have yet to convince my family that this is a good idea.”
Eleven years ago, when I met him in Los Angeles, he was talking about “using
music to reconnect with that agrarian or nomadic part of us that has
shrivelled away” – an utterance that seemed at odds with the
freestyle-rapping, cowboy-Otis, disco-Elvis. His second major-label album, Odelay,
had made him a household name. His trousers were made of leather and his
short hair accentuated his youthful features. With hits such as Where
It’s At and Devil’s Haircut, he seemed to personify
everything that was modern and magnificent about great pop.
Looking back now, he depicts this period as a lonely time. “I was cooped up on
the road for two or three years, between the summer of 1995 until the summer
of 1998 for 10 or 11 months out of the year. I don’t know how I didn’t go
crazy. I’d retreat to the hotel, turn on the TV and the first thing I would
see was some soda or chips commercial that was apeing one of my songs. So I
felt that whatever I was doing at that point had just become watered down.”
His immediate reaction, he says, was to make an album that trumpeted: “Just
you try and put this in your soda commercial!” Looking back on the R.
Kelly-style “slow jams” of Midnite Vultures, Beck thinks
the ploy worked – although he adds now that songs such as Get Real
Paid or Hollywood Freaks were pyrrhic victories: “I’m not proud
of what we did there, put it that way.”
Years later, he says, he found out that his management and other bands would
refer to him as “the kid” – an allusion to his youthful looks, for sure, but
Beck adds that he also felt like a kid. “A few years later, I remember, when
the White Stripes came along, it seemed incredible to me that, with Jack
White, you had this character who knew exactly what he wanted to do. I met
him when they were just taking off and him telling me that he was gonna stay
at home for eight months. He said: ‘We’re getting all these offers, we could
do anything we want.’ But he just went off and wrote another record. That’s
what I wanted to do, but I just didn’t have the confidence.”
Perhaps it simply boils down to character. Artists such as Jack White and Thom
Yorke aren’t afraid to fly off the handle. What strikes you about Beck is
his timid demeanour. “I’ve seen other people, y’know, just flat out tell a
photographer to f*** off and my first reaction was shock. Like, ‘Wow! How do
they get away with that?’ ”
What’s even more surprising is that Beck comes from a family more than capable
of telling people to f*** off in the name of their art. His mother, Bibbe
Hansen, was active in Andy Warhol’s extended “family” at the Factory, while
his maternal grandfather, Al Hansen, was a member of Fluxus, the
experimental 1960s art movement that numbered Yoko Ono in its ranks. “He was
the life and soul of the Fluxus party,” Beck has recalled. “He would get
drunk and insult the gallery owner’s wife and get banned. He was the
Bukowski of the scene.” His grandfather’s influence is “unforgettable”, he
says, not least for the time he asked the young boy to collect a few hundred
cigarette butts for a collage of naked women he was working on.
“He was a man you admired, no doubt about it. But I’m a different kind of
person. For better or for worse, it all gets channelled into my work.” Work
that, depending on which camp you fall in, has never again quite scaled the
peaks of Odelay, or has rewarded those who don’t want to hear Beck
turning into his own tribute act. Still, arguably his most appealing quality
remains intact: he sounds as though he makes music because he is still a fan
of it.
He tells a touching story about Nick Drake. So keen was he to understand how
some of his favourite Drake songs were made that, two years ago, he set
about recreating them exactly. Then, with no clear idea of what he should do
with the finished results, he posted them up on his website. Recently, in
another show of artistic curiosity, he went to Nashville for a couple of
days and made an entire album of favourite covers, which he has no plans to
release.
Of Beck albums that do get released, it sounded to these ears as if The
Information, in 2006, was his best in a decade. But, though abundant in
big choruses and moreish beats, it passed through the charts like a ghost.
Now that Beck had come out as a Scientologist, detractors have had a field
day with his lyrics. “When the information comes, we’ll know what we’re made
from,” he sang on the title track. It might have been an allusion to
Scientologists’ views that the souls of long-dead aliens cling to the bodies
of depressive human beings. Or it could just have been a fruitful day with
the William Burroughs fridge magnets.
Either way, on much of Modern Guilt Beck sounds as if his soul can’t
get out of bed for all the long-dead aliens clinging to it. Take, for
instance, Volcano, on which the singer muses: “I’ve been drifting on
this wave so long, I don’t know if it’s already crashed on the shore.” Or Soul
of a Man. So what is the soul of a man? “I don’t know,” he smiles,
“That’s why I’m asking the question. We see manifestations of it, but we
can’t necessarily pinpoint it.”
What, if anything, is the thing that people misunderstand about Beck? “I’m not
sure people think about me long enough to misunderstand what I do. But it’s
not all about thunderbolts and inspiration. It’s quite simply about showing
up every day and being open to everything.” Even living in Southampton?
“Even living in Southampton,” he smiles, not altogether convincingly.
Modern Guilt is out on Monday (XL). Beck plays the 02 Wireless Festival
tonight
Beck used to be interesting, with a direct tap from his soul to his work, now he's just a scared, frail man desperate to be taken seriously but outputting the most soulless work of his life.
Brett, Sydney, Australia
Without question, whether he intends to be or not, he's the most fascinating musician alive today (to this fan, anyway). God bless him for making music that acts as a soundtrack to my life.
Nick Ocheltree, Rapid City, USA