“I turned up at George Martin’s office with a diabolically bad demo – but he could see there was something there”: How Jeff Beck’s Blow by Blow triumphed against the odds to change instrumental guitar forever

A black-and-white photo of Jeff Beck playing a white Strat in 1975.

Jeff Beck’s Blow by Blow shouldn’t have been a success. By all accounts, it was a huge risk, even in the heady, more musically adventurous era of the mid-’70s. It was an instrumental album – an instrumental jazz album.

Perhaps oddest of all, it was an instrumental jazz album by a rock guitarist, which meant that it ran a highly possible risk of alienating rock and jazz audiences alike. And even though Epic Records released separate singles of three songs from the album in Japan, the U.K. and the U.S., none of the songs became hits.