The Impenetrable Beck Hansen

Four mysterious figures in identical black shirts stand behind a draped box as the house lights at the Shepherds Bush Empire in West London go down. When the spotlights flash on, Beck Hansen—dressed in a waistcoat, with a farmer’s hat over his lank hair—storms out from stage right as the instantly recognizable opening chords of his mid-’90s breakthrough hit “Loser” ring out. The curtain over the aforementioned box is suddenly lifted, revealing a miniature theatre.

Turns out the four unknowns aren’t covert agents, backup singers or even stagehands—they’re puppeteers. On the tiny stage beneath them, six-inch-tall marionette replicas of the band members jerkily wave drumsticks, thrash guitars, pump keyboards and flail to the beats pulsing through the theater. Kneeling before them, a cameraman collects video images that are simultaneously projected on a giant stage-dominating screen.

The Beck puppet is only distinguishable from the original because of the pallor of its skin, the smallness of its eyes and the tell-tale lines on either side of the jaw that allow the mouth to open in time with the vocals. Ripples of laughter shoot through the audience whenever a difficult guitar break or drum solo is executed by tiny hands.

After a few songs, it’s natural to get wrapped up in the puppetry instead of the music, or end up glancing at the band members only to check out how well the look-alikes are imitating them. In fact, it’s not even the puppets that dominate, but a film of them projected on the screen at the back of the stage. So rather than looking at Beck, the audience is gazing at a filmed image of a puppet replica of him.

It could be that Beck is just having fun—doing it simply because he can. He does have a reputation for playful juxtaposition. Or he could be putting us on, getting the critics scrambling for interpretations, then laughing himself silly in the dressing room after the show. But I’ll take the bait: With this stage setup, is Beck encouraging a discussion about the nature of spectacle? After all, we’re already accustomed to one degree of separation when we watch stadium rock on LCD screens; how about two degrees of separation? Is this show less real because we’re glued to digital images of puppet representations, or is it more real because we’re offered two extra dimensions of the same experience?

Since he’s a studio hermit who tends to spend years rather than months on each new project, it could even refer to having to take this character—“Beck”—out on the road and dangle him in front of audiences. Maybe he feels like a puppet. Maybe he feels that he’s now mimicking himself, or mimicking the person that he’s become in the imaginations of his audience.

Clearly Beck loves making music more than he does promoting it. He spends extraordinary amounts of time in the studio trying to replicate the sounds he hears in his head. For his latest album, The Information, he estimates that 80 percent of what was recorded was eventually thrown out. It was two-and-a-half years ago that he and producer Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, R.E.M., Paul McCartney) started the first track, and when the project was finally completed, Beck says it felt as though they’d worked on five albums.

“The luxury of that time allowed us to get something that was more interesting,” he says during an evening off in London while touring Europe. “We would usually get to the obvious thing first and then, after the track had sat around for a year or so, Nigel would do something totally different with it. We would lose whatever we had in the beginning and go somewhere far more interesting. In a way, you couldn’t be precious about anything you were putting out, even if it was your heart and soul.” Beck seems genuinely unconcerned about fame and reputation. His clothes wouldn’t look out of place on an impoverished student, many of them bought in Tokyo or Kyoto because Japanese shirts and jackets fit his slender frame better than European or American ones. His hair goes from short to long and back again, due not to the dictates of fashion magazines but the sporadic availability of a hairdresser friend who’s regularly out of town styling for film shoots. Beck doesn’t need to seek anonymity. His natural look is anonymous. Which is why he can slip, nearly undetected, into Mexican restaurants and play guitar in the back—as he did at Pancho Villa in San Francisco last year—while hardly anyone in the place bats an eyelash.

He says that he never reads reviews of his shows or albums because it makes him feel as if he’s a contestant on a TV makeover show where his tastes are being weighed by a panel he feels isn’t necessarily qualified. “It’s just embarrassing,” he says. “It’s kind of… unseemly.” He has the same opinion about interviews. On the rare occasions he’s read an “Interview with Beck,” it’s been “an exercise in frustration,” not usually because of misquotation but because of selective quotation.

There have been two books written about Beck—Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity by Julian Palacios and Beck by David Quantick—yet he claims to have only read part of one of them. Most young people getting into music dream of the day that they’ll be considered worthy material for a full-length book and it seems only natural to wonder what others have said about you. But Beck explains, “I just like making music and records. I’d be happy if that was all I did.”