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With the deluxe reissue of Beck's groundbreaking 1996 album Odelay, here's part of a revealing Dazed and Confused interview from the time, a window into the fine mind of a true maverick. Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

Beck Hansen, pop colossus at five foot six, is striding purposefully toward Cardiff University's canteen in a vain quest for five minutes of hassle-free browsing for confectionery. His pipe-cleaner frame, wrapped inside a charcoal grey Ivy League suit, carries him forward with the nervous energy you'd expect of someone who, until recently, hadn't had a day off from global colonization for eight months. MTV-authorised wunderkind and creator of the dazzling sleaze-hop-country-fried gospel of Odelay, Beck has made himself, by some significant margin, the newest and brightest star in pop's solar system.

It's been quite a week, and it's still only Monday. Having accepted awards at both the Grammys and Brits, sold out a Madison Square Garden show and zipped back over on Concorde to London to play a star-spangled show in London, he's entitled to something if it can't be a break it may as well be a Kit Kat.

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PM: You're currently quite some flavor of the month. Do you a feel a little like the host of a party you had no intention of holding?

Beck Hansen: I dunno, all the attention's weird. I'm just doing the same thing I was doing two years ago, and two years ago I was very uncool. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with me. So I just focus on what I'm doing. I expect that kind of patronage to fluctuate, y'know? I would expect it to come and go. It's nice when it's here, but when it's gone I'll still be working...

PM: You've said that people like Bob Dylan aren't necessarily your primary influences. Is it the outlaw appeal of characters like Woody Guthrie and Serge Gainsbourg which attract you?

BH: I identified with them, y'know, because they just said something to me. I was a small, skinny guy, y'know? I guess if I was a strapping handsome brute, then I would identify with something else. You tend to be attracted to the things you can relate to, people who were outsiders. I think real working class people respect Woody Guthrie, he was an outcast to the corporate music industry in America, and that was very rare at that time. He was brave: he took chances. You don't see very many brave people any more in music...

PM: Has the honesty of the blues got lost in contemporary music?

BH: The interchange between black and white music doesn't seem to have continued. It has in hip hop, and in the dance world, but as for alternative bands there doesn't seem much of an understanding left. I recognize that things are headed in a certain direction: I just hope to attempt to preserve some things that are lost, some of the old sensibilities. Like the way we looked at the world before machines ran our lives...

PM: Is it a question of us needing to rediscover our own history?

BH: Only in bringing it to a certain place and time. I don't ever want to release a record that's seen as a novelty, but at the same time I want to avoid sounding contemporary because then it's already dated, if you see what I mean. So I'm trying to get to this place where you can stand outside the parameters of what's possible. If you can get outside there, out of the designated standards, then you'll preserve yourself...

PM: Is that why you make such an effort to have as theatrical a stage show as possible?

BH: I just feel that the music has to be alive. When my music's playing and I'm signing, I feel electrified somehow. Music's all about a release. It's about letting go of the hand of our day-to-day existence. Not really being escapist, but more of it being a ceremony...

PM: Are you someone else on stage then?

BH: No, not at all. I'm not a character on stage. It's me; me playing my music. And I feel fully electrified. If I just got up and rendered my songs it would be as if I was putting tracing paper over the original and just making a copy of it. I want to get up there and let people know that this music's live. That wherever they were that day, if they were at work, or having a fight with their spouse, or losing their money in the subway, whatever the trifles of the day have been, that this is the time to take off the burden. We don't get that in our lives. I think that's why people are so addicted to dance culture. That's where music is functional: it's not even art at that point. It's just primitive and functional, it just provides a service...

PM: Do you think the music industry, by its very nature, dilutes the power of music?

BH: Well, it's not just the industry. You can't float away in to the clouds too much, because people and gravity want to suck you back down to earth, that's just the way it is. The first thing I learned when I put out a record was that people do want to suck you back down to earth as quickly as possible. Art is like oxygen, it's very weightless, and it's not something you can grab on to, so people think of ways to grab it...

PM: Is cool the curse of the age?

BH: As in being reserved? Yeah, I think it deadens the party. It makes people more reserved and self-conscious. Truly cool people aren't afraid of making an ass of themselves, not at the expense of others at least. The same thing applies with irony. It's a good device, a humorous device, and in such a straight, unimaginative time it's sometimes the only way to get some oxygen, y'know, but it can be over-indulged. It can be another mask, it's very easy to latch onto that, it's much harder to break through the stifling normalcy that's around. But y'know, there's a real American spirit still alive, where people really communicate, that's a real old school thing. But a lot of the time all people can do is look at a screen...

Read more Beck articles – and hear an audio interview with the man – at www.rocksbackpages.com. Over 12,000 articles by the greatest writers from the finest rock publications of the last 40 years.