Def Leppard’s Phil Collen on Jeff Beck: “We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him”

Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen is paying tribute to Jeff Beck in a new interview with Guitar World.

“Jeff Beck has always been one of my idols because he’s unique. No-one sounds like him, no-one plays like him, and you’ve got to respect that more than anything else,” Cpllen says of Beck, who passed away in January. “We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him. No-one was able to get anywhere close to that.”

Collen goes on to praise the days of the Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart singing, noting they “could have been a huge band.”

“They were supposed to play Woodstock, but Jeff had to fly home, so they never got to do it,” Collen says, noting that Beck went on to launch a successful solo career and Stewart went to Faces. Collen adds, “so everyone gained from them not doing Woodstock, even though if they’d done it they could’ve been as big as Led Zeppelin.”