The record was a huge hit in the spring of ’65 and Eric was replaced by Jeff Beck who had been playing in a band called the Tridents. Jeff was totally different in personality and style of playing to Eric. When he first turned up to audition for us at the request of Georgio, he had shoulder length long hair and was covered in grease and garage oil from working on cars. He had a much greater range of sounds and effects and it greatly suited the direction we wanted to go as a band, trying all the time to develop our blues sound into something original and far-reachingly futuristic !!!

At Jeff’s first show with us at Fairfield Hall, Croydon, I used to mess around a lot and I said something stupid to the rather stocky and bearded Georgio, who got upset with me and in his temper started to chase me around the grand piano – I think Jeff wondered what he was getting into! But he told me some years later he had found that very amusing, and I think this sums up Jeff and my relationship really well – joking around quite a lot in order to relieve the tension of the hectic schedule which then became more and more extreme as we became a very well known band and perhaps eventually which began to become a real problem for all of us in our different ways!!

With this line-up we went on to do our very best work in my opinion, recording songs such as “Heartful Of Soul”, “Evil Hearted You”, “Still I’m Sad”, “Shapes of Things” and  “Over, Under, Sideways, Down”, all of which were major hits, the last three we actually wrote “in house” as it were. We travelled extensively, our best audience was really in the US, where I think I can say we became known as the archetypal ‘garage band’.

Our experimental sounds made us very different from other bands of the time and we found that we had many imitators. It was great fun experimenting with different sounds and rhythms, especially from a drummer’s perspective. We would never find ourselves playing the songs in the same way from one show to another, similar to jazz musicians who improvised. One of my favourite things to do was to take the sound right down into a quiet level before building up into a huge crescendo. The only disadvantage of this way of playing was that the band earned its living touring, rather than from record sales … and this pressure was beginning to get to various members … the first of whom was Paul. He decided to leave in order to try his hand at producing – very successfully as it turned out!  

Georgio Gomelsky knew Jimmy Page, who was one of the foremost session musicians at that time, and who had been asked previously to join the group when Eric left. At that time he declined and had, himself, recommended Jeff. Jimmy kept in touch with the band and I remember having a conversation with Jeff on the phone when we decided to ask Jimmy to join. By that time he was keen to join us even if it meant coming in on bass, which he did. This arrangement didn’t last too long and Jimmy and Chris swapped instruments so that we then had two fantastic lead guitar players. 

The shows during this line-up were very hit or miss as there was a lot going on from the lead guitars. What I mean by this was it either worked really well and we experienced some extraordinary revolutionary moments, or it didn’t work at all and it was just a cacophony of sound!!! Jimmy was very organised in the way he played, he was used to playing sessions in which he did what people had asked him to do. Jeff was the opposite and played totally intuitively without really working anything out.

There was a certain amount of competition going on, but more than that a clash of styles …  this was getting to Jeff as he was becoming quite ill and he started to miss some of the shows. It was evident that Jeff needed to leave and become master of his own sound and destiny. He left the group in the autumn of 1966 and we carried on as a four piece. 

We continued to do extensive touring again mainly in the US but also in Europe and Australia where we did a tour with Roy Orbison and the Walker Brothers. This line-up seemed to be a lot more organised, it was easier to have four people than five and by then we had already changed management to Simon Napier Bell, followed by Peter Grant. I didn’t feel that this group had quite as much creativity as the one before with Jeff and Paul and we were struggling to write new original songs. Peter Grant had a company linked with Mickey Most and it was thought that Mickey would be a good producer for us. However, the songs that Mickey suggested came from outside the band and were not in my opinion as good as the original Graham Gouldman ones. The sound of the band seemed to become heavier than before and the style of the music very subtly changed.  Even though we still built on our former successes and wrote songs like “Think About It” and “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor”, it was frustrating not to be able to write new hits. We played with a folk singer, Jake Holmes, in New York and he played a song called “Dazed and Confused” which I thought had a great guitar riff and would suit us. I went to Greenwich Village and bought the album and we worked out our own arrangement of it. This song really suited Jimmy’s style of playing at the time and it became a great addition to our repertoire.  

Culturally at this time the emphasis was changing ...