'I just literally heard the 500th Strokes clone' - genre-hopping maverick Beck talks to Dan Glaister about keeping things fresh
Beck is rubbing his tummy and patting his head at the same time. "If I can do that I can do anything," he proclaims, perching upright on a chair in his manager's office to demonstrate.
The man-as-superman moment is revealing. Outwardly, meek, mild-mannered Beck Hansen couldn't harm a fly, let alone imagine himself capable of feats of ambidexterity and beyond. But inwardly, there must be something else going on. Beck is a star in a time when genuine pop stars seem to be a thing of the past. Since his breakthrough in 1993 with the single Loser, which had many discounting him as a one-hit wonder for the Generation X-ers, he has pursued an idiosyncratic musical path that has led him into complex and sophisticated waters. He glides across genres without a glance, seeming to thumb his nose at his audience's expectations. It must take a lot of nerve.
A scruffy, skinny guy with a timid gaze, Beck would not attract attention on the street. Indeed, he doesn't attract attention: he goes to galleries, to the movies, and probably goes shopping just like an ordinary person. His new album, Guero, has been a fair time coming, and the fanbase, to put it politely, has been wondering just what it might contain. The anxiety stems from his last release, the unambiguously titled Sea Change. Hailed by critics as the modern equivalent of one of those Dylan albums that you really had to be around at the time to fully appreciate, Sea Change found the once-quirky pop eccentric in a deep blue funk. Which would have been fine, except that both blues and funk had been barred from the recording process. Instead, listeners rushing to Beck on the back of Odelay, his breakthrough slice of pure pop elation, and Midnite Vultures, his tongue-in-cheek homage to Sly, Prince and the rest of the family, found they had been thrown into an introspective adolescent's bedroom. Song after song depicted a serious young man relentlessly pounding away at the misery of loss, heartache and heaven knows what else. It was one of those albums to file under "interesting".
Beck has said - or at least failed to deny - that the album was a response to his break-up with long-time partner, Leigh Limon. Whether or not that is the case (and you can read the lyrics any which way), the accumulated musical effect is Leonard Cohen meets Serge Gainsbourg (sans Brigitte and Jane).
But that was then. Now Beck is recently married and the father of an eight-month-old son. He has also sprouted an abundance of facial hair. "I've passed Michael McDonald and I'm heading for Kris Kristofferson," he explains with a laugh. But the boy is still visible beneath the hirsute exterior. His rosy cheeks give the appearance of someone who has spent too long on the ski slopes, although his physique suggests this is not the case. The impression of a young man trying hard to be grown up is reinforced by his conversation. Beck's answers are slow and considered, thoughtful to the point of being ponderous. He sits forward in his chair, gazing in concentration at his hands clasped before him as he searches for the precise word, often failing and trailing off in a series of ums and ahs.
Some point to his lack of formal education as an explanation for his occasional inarticulacy. Born in 1970, Beck was taken out of school at the age of 11 and educated at home by his mother, Bibbe Hansen. But this was no ordinary home schooling, and Beck's was no ordinary childhood. His mother is an artist and Scientologist. A frequenter of Warhol's Factory, she was a member of Henry Rollins's notorious LA anarcho-punk outfit Black Flag. His father, David Campbell (Beck took his mother's name when his parents divorced in the 1970s), provides an equally colourful back-story. A musician and arranger - he played viola on Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, as well as working with everyone from Aerosmith to Green Day - and also a Scientologist, Campbell produces and arranges two tracks on Beck's new album. To further embroider the picture, Campbell's father was a member of Fluxus, the New York avant-garde art movement that counted Yoko Ono among its luminaries.
Beck has recently become a Scientologist. His wife, actor Marissa Ribisi, is a member of the church-cult and some hold that Beck was brought up as a Scientologist before lapsing for a decade in his 20s.
But he hasn't led a secluded life. Beck grew up in the multicultural stew of Los Angeles, living in Latino neighbourhoods and drifting across the barriers of what remains a surprisingly segregated city. Similarly, the new album betrays, he says, an awareness of the wider world. "It's very dark. It's not a feel-good, good-day-sunshine kind of thing - it's definitely rooted in some darker, heavier stuff." Pressed, he specifies: "I wanted to comment on some things that were meaningful at the time. Personal things and the mood of the time and the passing of some friends and things that are happening in the world. You can't help but pick up and tune into things in your antenna. It's in the air now, isn't it? It's hard to escape, with the war and all that stuff."
Guero - the title means "whitey" - ties up the loose ends of Beck's previous work. It has the darkness and the earnestness of Sea Change, and many of the songs are performed just by Beck, but it marks a return to the spirit of Odelay. Take one part Latin, add some Bo Diddley-style blues, a hint of 1960s west coast guitar, a sampling of esoterica (tropicalia, Bollywood), a pinch of lo-fi electronica; stir in Jack Black, the Dust Brothers and the Beastie Boys, and voila, you have Guero.
Which is the beauty of - and the problem with - Beck's music. By crossing genres, it defies categorisation and invites comparison. Put another way, Guero is the Beta Band meet Little Ax meet Jim Morrison all to the sound of the subterranean beats pioneered a few years ago by the likes of the Mo' Wax label.
Unsurprisingly, Beck is less than tolerant of the comparisons. "I always think those are unfair to the person you're being compared to and also to yourself," he says when I remark that every article about him invokes the less-than-holy trinity of Bowie, Prince and Dylan. "Either it's somebody you don't want to sound anything like or it's somebody you'll never measure up to. It's a can't-win situation.
"I've really learned things from other musicians," he admits, "but I'm not that good a mimic really. In a way it's a kind of architecture: every house needs a roof and a front door, windows and a bathroom, and there's only 12 notes in the scale. So even if you're doing it consciously or unconsciously, there's no escape. It's not as if we're coming out of the swing jazz era and suddenly there's rock'n'roll and you get to write the book. We're dealing with some worn-out cards and trying to say something new with it, trying to kick some life into it."
He takes his music very seriously, as well he might. There is more of a sense of full-blown art project than jobbing songwriter about his work. Personas have been adopted and discarded, and he talks of his art and video work for the new album with the same intensity that he applies to the music. The cover for Guero is by artist Marcel Dzama, while Beck developed the idea - and the technology - for the video for one track, Black Tambourine, which takes the notion of using type for the pixels of a picture to new extremes.
The pursuit of ideas has earned him a reputation for running with them in the studio, for grabbing the moment. "Every once in a while you stumble on something new," he says, shifting around in his seat before contorting himself into an upright posture. "I think when we lifted up a break beat and threw in a slide guitar and a sitar, that was definitely like, OK, we've found a spot on the beach that nobody's been on before. I should have made five albums right then, explored it fully. But by the time you get back to doing it again, 10 people have alreadydone it.
"I was just driving over and literally heard the 500th Strokes clone," he says in exasperation. "When is enough enough? It's like if you came up with something and then you hear somebody else use it in a soda-pop commercial, then it just taints it. This maybe is a big reason for me shifting. You have to do something new." - (Guardian Service)
• Guero is on the Universal label