Creativity Quote by Noel Redding

A single sentence, and Noel Redding manages to do three things at once: declare taste, signal belonging, and avoid starting a war.

On the surface, "My personal favourite is Jeff Beck" reads like harmless fan chatter. Coming from Redding, though, it carries the weight of a working musician naming a peer. Redding wasn’t a critic perched above the scene; he was inside the machinery of 1960s British rock, where guitarists became mythic figures and ranking them was practically a blood sport. Saying Beck is his favorite isn’t just praise, it’s a subtle calibration of values: Beck as the player’s player, the technician with feel, the one whose brilliance isn’t merely loud or iconic but textural and inventive.

Then comes the diplomatic kicker: "All the others are wonderful as well". That second sentence is doing PR work. It acknowledges the tribal nature of guitar fandom and the professional reality that these circles overlap. Redding likely knew (and felt) how quickly a preference can be weaponized into an insult, especially in an era where Clapton, Page, Hendrix, Beck, and company weren’t just musicians but symbols of competing styles and scenes.

The subtext is classic band-and-industry etiquette: I’m giving you a headline, but I’m not giving you a feud. It’s modesty as strategy, admiration without hierarchy hardening into a takedown. In a culture that loves hot takes, Redding offers something rarer: taste expressed with care.