Spin And Groove

Jeff Beck made a lot of great records, but There & Back has always felt to me like the one where all the pieces actually came together at exactly the right moment. Released in July 1980, it followed two landmark jazz-fusion albums — Blow by Blow in 1975 and Wired in 1976 — and somehow managed to build on both of them while still sounding like its own distinct thing. I pulled this copy off the shelf recently and it reminded me all over again why Beck’s playing during this period was so completely singular. There’s nobody else who could have made this record sound the way it does.

About the Album

There & Back is Jeff Beck’s fifth studio solo album, released on July 4, 1980, through Epic Records. It’s an entirely instrumental record — no vocals, no concessions to radio-friendliness — and it sits at the intersection of rock and jazz fusion in a way that still sounds fresh. Beck and co-producer Ken Scott recorded it at a time when Beck was genuinely invested in the fusion direction he’d started on Blow by Blow, and the album reflects that commitment fully. Eight tracks, about 40 minutes, and not a second of filler.

The album performed well commercially, reaching #21 on the US Billboard 200 and a very respectable #10 on the Billboard Jazz Albums chart — impressive for a record with no vocals and no obvious singles. Outside the US it also charted in the UK, Australia, and several European markets. More than the chart positions, though, what There & Back did was cement Beck’s reputation as one of the few rock guitarists capable of operating at a genuinely jazz level. His tone, his phrasing, his sense of space — it’s all there. You can read more about the album’s background at the Wikipedia entry for There & Back.

Two tracks from the album took on lives of their own outside the record. Star Cycle became the theme tune for British music television programme The Tube and was also used in American wrestling broadcasts. The Pump appeared in the 1983 film Risky Business, where it soundtracked what became one of that film’s most memorable scenes. Neither of these uses was necessarily what Beck had in mind, but they introduced the album to audiences who might never have encountered it otherwise.

Jeff Beck: The Guitarist’s Guitarist

Jeff Beck was born Geoffrey Arnold Beck on June 24, 1944, in Wallington, Surrey. He came to public attention as a member of The Yardbirds in the mid-1960s, replacing Eric Clapton — a transition that tells you something about the confidence the band had in him even at that early stage. After leaving The Yardbirds in 1966, Beck formed the Jeff Beck Group, which became the launching pad for Rod Stewart’s solo career and introduced a rough, improvisational rock style that influenced an enormous range of players who came after. You can find a thorough overview of his career at his Wikipedia page.

What set Beck apart from the other guitar heroes of his generation was his refusal to stay in one place. Clapton stayed in the blues; Page stayed in hard rock; Beck kept moving. By the mid-1970s he was working with jazz and fusion musicians, and the results — Blow by Blow, Wired, and then There & Back — stand as some of the most technically accomplished and musically interesting guitar-led albums ever recorded in rock. His tone control, his use of the whammy bar as a melodic tool rather than just a vibrato effect, and his ability to imply chords while playing single-note lines made him genuinely difficult to categorise.

Beck passed away on January 10, 2023, at the age of 78. His death prompted an enormous outpouring from musicians across every genre who cited him as a primary influence — which tells you something about the reach his playing had across different musical worlds.

The Musicians

The ensemble on There & Back is compact and exceptional. Keyboardist Jan Hammer plays on the first three tracks — his synthesiser work has a density and energy that perfectly matches Beck’s guitar. Hammer had previously collaborated with Beck on the Wired album and the subsequent live recording, and the musical shorthand between them is obvious. Tony Hymas handles keyboards across the full album, bringing a more harmonically complex, jazz-influenced approach that serves as a counterweight to Hammer’s more percussive synthesizer style. Drummer Simon Phillips plays with a technical precision and rhythmic intelligence that would later take him to Toto and a long career as a studio favourite. Mo Foster holds the bottom end on bass — steady, melodic, and perfectly placed. Most of the compositions are credited to Hammer, Hymas, and Phillips, with Beck contributing to the closing track. It’s a collaborative record in the best sense of the word.

The Recording Setup

This vinyl session was recorded through the Thorens TD125 — a West German belt-drive turntable from 1968 built around a suspended subchassis design. The platter is a 3.2kg dynamically balanced zinc alloy unit, and the AC synchronous motor gives the whole thing a speed stability that’s hard to fault. It’s one of those turntables that was built to last — the engineering is visible in every detail — and it rewards the investment in good cartridges and downstream equipment by staying completely out of the way and letting the music through. A good read on what makes these machines special is available at Tone Publications.

The cartridge is the Shure V15 Type III — a moving magnet unit with a 0.7 by 0.2-mil elliptical stylus, recommended tracking force of ¾ to 1¼ grams, and a frequency response of 10–25kHz. For a record like There & Back — which has a lot of high-frequency guitar material and dense synthesiser textures — a cartridge with good high-end extension and tracking ability is important, and the V15 III delivers on both counts. Stereophile’s original review noted that it measured better stereo separation than any cartridge previously tested, and that translates into a genuinely three-dimensional soundstage on the right pressing.

The phono stage is the Yamaha HA-5 Natural Sound Phono Equalizer, an MM-compatible preamp with RIAA accuracy to ±0.5dB. It’s a compact, honest unit that handles the equalisation cleanly without drawing attention to itself — exactly what you want at this stage of the chain.

The signal is captured at 24-bit/96kHz by the Zoom H4n via XLR input. The high sample rate and bit depth preserve the full dynamic range of the analogue chain, which matters for music like this where the dynamics are a big part of what Beck and the band are doing. You hear the attacks cleanly and the decay properly, without any sense of compression or artefact.

Track Listing

Watch the Full Album

The full album is on the YouTube channel — forty minutes of Jeff Beck at the absolute peak of his fusion period, played through a Thorens and Shure setup on a proper vinyl pressing. If you haven’t spent time with this record before, it’s a good place to start.