Who wants to be a guitar hero?

Jeff Beck is one. Perhaps the greatest. But what place, wonders Charles Shaar Murray, do virtuoso axemen have in modern pop?

When Frank Zappa's son Dweezil showed up in London recently toting – or touting – the Fender Stratocaster torched by Jimi Hendrix at the 1968 Miami Pop Festival and subsequently refurbished by Dweezil's legendary father, observers could be forgiven for concluding that the golden age of guitar heroics was long over and that the electric guitar, once so central to the iconography of pop, was something which properly belonged in a museum, or on an auction block.

Nowadays, the major guitar companies, like Fender and Gibson, seem to specialise in detailed reissues of their Fifties and Sixties models, some – like Fender's Relic series – even artfully distressed to mimic the look and feel of instruments which have spent the past few decades being kicked around in Texas roadhouses. However the guitar has not, as some once suggested, been displaced by synthesisiers and turntables. The two more-or-less happily co-exist, sometimes on the same records, but most contemporary guitar music is defiantly retro, harking back to the sounds and styles of long ago, to the Beatle Sixties or the punk Seventies. Well, where we live it seems this way.

British pop consumers are, in general, less guitar-friendly than their American cousins, who don't share the European fondness for synth-powered dance singles. "Most [American] songs are guitar-driven," according to Neville Marten, editor of the British magazine Guitarist. In the UK, Marten opines, "a guitar solo in a song is a ticket to not getting played on the radio – except on Radio 2." There are, he says, "a lot of half-decent guitar players around": apart from the grizzled veterans of the Sixties and Seventies guitar scene, the younger acts favoured by his readers are the likes of Radiohead and Muse. The primary schools of popular modern guitar playing in the post-millennial age are the acoustic-based singer-songwriters of bands like Coldplay and Travis and soloists like David Gray; the grungy, down-tuned seven-string textures favoured by nu-metal biggies like Blink182 and Linkin Park, themselves following in the footsteps of pioneers like Rage Against The Machine and Korn; and the neo-garage movement headed by The Strokes and The Hives. And, of course, the traditional heavy-metal twiddlers are still blasting away in their own little corner, happily oblivious to the outside world, though it's worth noting that the one-time heavy-metal bible Kerrang! ("because life is loud") is currently the UK's top-selling music magazine.

So is there still a place in the poptastic music universe for the six-string titans of yesteryear? One good place to find out this weekend will be the Royal Festival Hall, where the man considered by many, including Queen's Brian May and Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, to be the greatest living rock guitarist will be holding court for a three-night stand. The reclusive virtuoso Jeff Beck, who recently celebrated – if that is the appropriate term – his 58th birthday, will be making one of his rare forays beyond the bounds of his 16th-century country mansion to preside over a retrospective survey of his four-decade career and demonstrate why he is held in so much greater reverence than many of his contemporaries who, like Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, have sold many more records and achieved far greater fame.

In fact, all three emerged from the same hallowed mid-Sixties band, The Yardbirds. Though Beck was preceded in their line-up by Clapton and succeeded by Page, it was during Beck's 20-month tenure in their ranks that the band scored most of their hit singles. His unique combination of delicacy and aggression, sonic ingenuity and eclectic unpredictability, emotional nuance and satirical wit made The Yardbirds instantly stand out from the pack. With influences ranging from Les Paul and Gene Vincent's great sideman Cliff Gallup (to whom he later dedicated the tribute album Crazy Legs) to Buddy Guy and Elmore James, not to mention the subsequent absorption of numerous ethnic musics from India, Eastern Europe and North Africa, his music was as notable for its breadth as for its depth. "That was what people wanted," Beck shrugs. "They didn't want to hear me play definitive blues, they wanted this nutter with this guitar doing these weird noises. And that was all right with me."

It was with The Yardbirds that Beck – for the last 30 years a non-drug taking, moderately drinking vegetarian – established a reputation for a personal turbulence which matched his "schizophrenic nutter" guitar style. He became renowned for tantrums, walk-outs, abrupt changes of band personnel and wild, screeching switches in musical direction. His distinctive haircut – unchanged since the Sixties – and truculent demeanour provided the model for Christopher Guest's Nigel Tufnell in This Is Spinal Tap, though Tufnell is a musical charlatan and Beck anything but.

His next venture, rather unimaginatively entitled The Jeff Beck Group, created the template for Page's Led Zeppelin project and introduced two major stars of the future. Singing lead was the then-unknown Rod Stewart – according to Beck, "the souliest white guy of all time: Wilson Pickett in white skin" – and playing bass was Ron Wood, both of whom subsequently defected to The Faces and worldwide fame before Stewart went solo and Wood joined The Rolling Stones. Following a few noisy and directionless years with a Jeff Beck Group Mk II and the heavy-metal trio Beck, Bogert & Appice, he struck gold, not to mention platinum, with three wildly successful instrumental jazz-rock albums, Blow By Blow, Wired and There And Back. His inspiration had been seeing British jazz-rock guitarist John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra playing in New York's Central Park. "If they could do this concert with masses of people going bananas for this extreme radical jazzy rock stuff – it wasn't jazz, it was violent."

Nevertheless, the success of his Seventies jazz-rock trilogy nonplussed the notoriously capricious Beck. "Yeah, it went right up the charts, but it dabbled dangerously with easy listening. I was getting these couples coming up to me that had conceived a child or made up some terrible rift while listening to that stuff. I thought, 'Oh dear, I smell big trouble. I smell patent-leather shoes.' See ya! Not interested! It was a horrible realisation that Epic [his record company] loved what I was doing. Whoops! We really had to think about that one. The record company liking the product was not what I wanted."

Apart from an ill-conceived pop album produced by Nile Rodgers, then riding high with successful productions for David Bowie, Madonna, Diana Ross and his own group Chic, Beck spent most of the Eighties in seclusion, tinkering with his beloved hot-rod cars and playing sessions for the likes of Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart and Tina Turner before returning in 1988 with the hip-hop-influenced Guitar Shop. More recently, he acquired a BAFTA for his soundtrack for the Australian Vietnam drama Frankie's House to set alongside his numerous Grammy awards for Best Rock Instrumental. His last two albums, Who Else? and You Had It Coming continued to explore both ethnic modes and the hip-hop connection derived from his fascination with club culture in general and The Prodigy – "They embrace everything I'm about, but without any guitars" – in particular. Even as his 60th birthday looms, he'd love his music to be heard in the clubs and is mildly miffed that the ranking remixers have yet to get their hands on his work.

"If I had just had a fuckin' small hit I'd be away. All I need is a little public appreciation that I know what I'm doing, instead of it coming from fellow players or a review. It's that immediacy of being well-received live that we all want."

He should have little to worry about on that score when his gigs roll around this week. Though plans for old comrades like Rod Stewart and Jimmy Page to join him onstage have fallen through, he'll still have various combinations of John McLaughlin, David Gilmour and current garage-blues hotshots The White Stripes by his side. Unlike great contemporaries like Page, Clapton or Jimi Hendrix, Beck has never been a singer (his oddball 1967 hit "Hi Ho Silver Lining" notwithstanding), a songwriter, a record producer or even an efficient bandleader. He is a guitarist, pure and simple, and has refined that craft to an utterly unprecedented extent.

After all, as Beck puts it, "If you've got a license to play the guitar and be involved in music, there shouldn't be any parameters or fences. It'd be like saying you can only have egg 'n' chips for the rest of your life. You're entitled to express yourself in any way you think you should. There's great stuff in all kinds of music, and it's just how you perceive it and how you present it."

Jeff Beck, plus special guests, Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 (020 7960 4242) Thursday, Friday and Saturday