Fatherhood has made Beck restless. Our correspondent joins him house
hunting in . . . Southampton
By Pete Paphides

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.

Copyright 2008 "The Times."

Jaime