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You’ve been performing since the late 80s. What keeps you going? AmongstTheWaves
It’s a good question. I don’t really know any other life. I’ve spent a lot of my time trying to create a body of work, and out of that, maybe there’s a few songs at the end that are not bad. So I just keep going down into the mine, trying to come back with a couple of things worth keeping. It’s a lot of digging. If I had to stop and get a job painting houses or something, I would still make songs just for myself, because that’s how it started.
You tend to alternate between styles from album to album. What do you feel is closer to your intrinsic self, funky Beck or lonesome Beck? Mazzini
Probably lonesome. But the other side of things gets me out of my shell, stops me from being a little too ponderous, which I’m apt to do. The other side of what I do – Loser or Odelay – was more of a fluke. At the time that was what people liked. Now it’s kind of reversed – they prefer the more introspective, quiet songs, and stuff that’s a little more genreless. I don’t have any songs that they play at weddings, like Uptown Funk. I remember telling Mark Ronson, “Hey, you made a wedding song.” He was like, “Yeah, finally.” That’s a very elite category of song.
Your interview with Thurston Moore on MTV in 1994 is one of the most gloriously ramshackle interviews ever. Were you both doing a bit? LoftyDog
We filmed a bunch of things they wouldn’t air because they thought they would get in trouble or get sued by people. I’d brought an old-fashioned telephone and at one point we pulled out some baseball bats and destroyed the phone. I don’t remember what the bit was – who was calling us? Whatever it was, we decided to smash the phone in reaction to a call. We were kind of doing performance art. I met a lot of resistance and ridicule for being like that on my first album. I would do interviews and say wild things because so much of it was boring, just rote questions – and I thought if my friends are reading this, they’d be bored to death.
A lot of the things on TV were just going through the motions. As a kid, every once in a while I’d see something that jarred me. Like, wow, there was a glitch in the system and something real broke through. Something genuine that reminded us that this is all a construct, this smooth oiled machine that provides content for us. It was a very youthfully exuberant attempt to try to disrupt everything that was very pre-programmed and uninteresting. Thurston and I both came from underground art backgrounds, so it was preposterous to be allowed on mainstream TV. We were like, let’s seize the moment and do something.
Given how productive you were right from the start of your career, how did you feel about being tagged with the “slacker rock” label? SalfordianBlue
I thought it was a reductive term. There was this influx of all this underground music that had been bubbling through the 80s and early 90s, and it all hit the mainstream at once. One day it was Vanilla Ice and hair metal and Whitney Houston, and then the next day it was Nirvana and all the stuff that you would see at your local dive bar. The 80s had been very curated and airbrushed and brightly coloured – I remember the first time I went to a record label, they told me I looked messy and rough, and it would never work. Whoever that was missed the point. We were reacting to how cleaned up everything was, and going back to something a little more raw and real.
To many, Loser felt like a classic one-hit wonder. Did you always have faith that you’d have a long career in music? StayPositive
I never had any expectations. I think the thing that supersedes everything is whether you are writing good songs. The people I came up with who wrote good songs – they’re the ones that are still around and playing arenas and stadiums. And it was tricky when I was coming up, writing a catchy song was frowned upon. If you had anything that was too poppy or catchy, you were selling out, it wasn’t real art. What’s funny is the catchiest, poppiest songs from that time are the ones that everybody loves now.
What would a devil’s haircut look like, and have you ever seen someone sporting one? StayPositive
It’d probably have a little bit of a rockabilly edge. Somebody showed me a video once of these proto-punk type people in Australia called sharpies, and they had a bizarre version of a mullet. It was really short bangs and kind of draped in the back. Something like that, maybe. I have a book of hairstyle photos that they would use in 80s hair salons – there are a lot of devil’s haircuts. I think any haircut that has a lot of architecture to it, with wild flights of fancy.
In their 1998 hit You Get What You Give the New Radicals threatened to kick the asses of Hanson, Courtney Love, Marilyn Manson – and Beck. Did they ever catch up with you? Dave_Rowlinson
I ran into [New Radicals songwriter Gregg Alexander] in an Erewhon [health food supermarket] at the time, and he said: “I’m a big fan. We should write together.” And I just looked at him like, “What do you …? What’s happening here?” I thought the song was a little corny at the time, but it’s probably a classic now. It’s pretty catchy. I think the chords, to me, were a little too fancy for the aesthetic of the time.
Are you still in touch with [producer duo] the Dust Brothers? You’re one of the last artists who worked with them, on Guero in 2005, before they vanished into thin air. I genuinely wonder what happened to them! Coopertapes
I did actually see them about a year ago. I see them from time to time. We have unfinished records that were never put out, so who knows? Maybe there’ll be something down the road. I’ve never asked, but I’m guessing they don’t really need to work in music, they’re doing other things. They worked with Hanson right after Odelay – people thought we were related [Beck’s surname is Hansen]. I remember they were working on that, the Rolling Stones and the Fight Club soundtrack. So that’s why my next two albums were not fully produced by the Dust Brothers, after the success of Odelay they became too busy.
Looking to the future, do you see yourself sharing the stage with a chain-smoking alcoholic robot? AKA how did you come to be a guest star on Futurama? vammyp
They wrote a script and sent it to me, and I said no. Through that whole era, I said no to pretty much everything. I was asked to do the theme for Austin Powers 2 and 3, and Shrek, and I was even saying no to, like, Amores Perros and Y Tu Mamá También and Run Lola Run, all these classic movies. They wanted me to act in High Fidelity and Ghost World, and I just decided that I didn’t want to “go Hollywood”.
They sent me this cartoon and I thought, well, if I did something like this it would be The Simpsons – a lot of people have done that, Sonic Youth have done that. The script was sitting on the tour bus, and my band got a hold of it on a long drive and said, “What is this?” And I said, “Oh, it’s this show, Futurama. I’ve never heard of it, but they want me to do this ridiculous thing.” And they said, “You have to do it!” They all ganged up on me so I did it.
Beercan is my go-to “shake your ass” number. What is yours? TeeDubyaBee
I would say anything from the early 80s funk era. Anything Sly Stone, James Brown – and early 80s Prince era, Talking Heads. Classics.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of my favourite films, and your recording of Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime is a sublime part of it. How did you get involved with the film, and why that song in particular? Cybillservice
I did a music video with Michel Gondry, the director, and we became pals. I was having dinner over at his house one night, and he described this convoluted plot that I couldn’t quite follow. I said, “I don’t totally understand what this is, but when you make it, I want to see it.” Three or four years later, he called me up and said, “I made the movie.” My buddy Jon Brion was doing the score. It’s one of the only things, again, that I said yes to. But it was because it was a personal relationship. It’s become one of my songs that people love the most. I had just done Sea Change, which I think is one of the reasons they called me. That album had met so much shock from my fans that I swore to never make a record like that again. And now it’s beloved. It’s probably the main thing that people care about. I don’t think anybody’s mentioned Odelay to me in years, it’s all Sea Change and Midnite Vultures.
