By David Ross. Every ten years or so Jeff Beck emerges from manorial seclusion to prove why he’s the fifth best guitarist in history (so says Rolling Stone this month). His most recent groundhog cameo was his 2007 live set at Ronnie Scott’s in London, which the BBC, making itself useful for once, preserved for posterity. The highlights are Beck’s pair of unlikely duets with the arty poetess Imogen Heap. Always at his best with a strong vocal foil – Rod Stewart being the original case in point – Beck found his match in Heap. She’s as melodically sly as he is, and there’s something weird and entrancing about her great height and beauty – her regality – as it were stooped to the earthly traffic of the blues chestnut “Rollin and Tumbling” (above).
Beck and Heap radically reverse themselves on Heap’s own “Blanket” (here). Seeming to grow darker with each listening, the song is a confession of decadence in the nineteenth-century vein, a confession of forlorn and weary compensation for the loss of something irreplaceable. If music is the only possible sanctuary–the blanket of the song’s title–the song’s dreamy washes of electronic sound evoke the kind of world from which sanctuary is necessary: a floating world of pattern recognition and virtual light (to borrow phrases from William Gibson), of Calatravian airport terminals and glass needles spiring above Asian cities. The song’s irony is that the narrator can express her alienation from this world only in the tonality of its ennui; if music is a sanctuary, it’s a compromised one.
Posted on December 22nd, 2011 at 11:17am.
That was absolutely awesome — haven’t seen it in a while.
Thanks
Blanket is quite beautiful.