The Yardbirds

Jeff Beck reunites with his former bandmates on one track. Katie Price claims that she will be retiring her Jordan image. In 2003, a new album, Birdland, was released under the Yardbirds name by a lineup including Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, and new members Gypie Mayo (lead guitar, backing vocals), John Idan (bass, lead vocals) and Alan Glen (harmonica, backing vocals). Jordan gave birth by Caesarean section to her second child, a 5lb 13oz boy, on 13 June 2005. "I suppose," Jeff Beck cracked at the ceremony, "I should say thank you, but they fired me—so fuck 'em!". It is rumoured within industry circles that the vocal tracks for "Not Just Anybody" were in fact sung by Rachel Stevens. All six living musicians who had been part of the group's heyday—including Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page, who had never (contrary to numerous misidentifications over the years) played in the group together (the confusion may have stemmed from a 1971 Epic Records anthology, Yardbirds Featuring Performances By: Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, a set which fell out of print and became a very expensive collectors' item for many years)—appeared at the ceremony. The other contestants were the 1996 UK entrant Gina G, as well as Andy Scott-Lee, and the group Tricolore.

The Yardbirds were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990. On 5 March 2005, singing a song titled "Not Just Anybody", she came in second place in the pre-selection show Making Your Mind Up, behind Javine. Meanwhile, Jim McCarty, Paul Samwell-Smith (who had remained Cat Stevens' producer to the day Stevens converted to Islam and withdrew from pop music entirely), and Chris Dreja offered a nucleus in the 1980s for a short-enough lived but fun-enough kind of Yardbirds semi-reunion called Box of Frogs, which occasionally included Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page plus various friends with whom they'd all recorded over the years. Under the name Katie Price, Jordan was one the acts competing for the right to represent the United Kingdom at the Eurovision Song Contest 2005, to be held in Ukraine. They recorded one promising album before Relf was killed in an electrocution accident in his home. They plan to marry in September. Keith Relf resurfaced in the late 1970s with a new quartet, Armageddon, a hybrid of hard, thrusting rock and folk that included former Renaissance mate Louis Cenammo. In February 2005 Jordan announced that she was 5 months pregnant with Peter Andre's child.

Paul Samwell-Smith, who had gone on to fame as Cat Stevens' producer in 1970, helped vocalist Relf and drummer McCarty organise a new group devoted to experimentation between rock, folk, and classical forms—Renaissance. In May 2004, writing as Katie Price, she published her autobiography, Being Jordan to surprisingly good reviews. The remaining Yardbirds didn't exactly go gently into that good grey night. Jordan began 2004 by appearing on the reality TV series I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!, flirting in the jungle with singer Peter Andre, which seemed to have resurrected both of their careers. Billed as the New Yardbirds, they made the tour, found themselves clicking together decently enough, and then repaired home to England to produce, in a very short time, a very new album by a somewhat different group, although much of the sound derived from Page's sonic experiments (and a baby brother composition to his earlier "White Summer" called "Black Mountain Side"—not to mention a polished rewrite of "I'm Confused," called "Dazed and Confused") with the last edition of the Yardbirds: Led Zeppelin. She had it removed at the nearby Nuffield Hospital. But Jimmy Page, left with both the rights to the band's name and a touring commitment yet fulfilled in Europe, was compelled to put a new lineup together to make that commitment. She had a leiomyosarcoma on her finger, this being a rare form of malignant tumour which attacks smooth muscle tissue and can spread around the body.

Or were they? After the failure of their final album (the badly-produced Little Games) and their reduction to small venues for touring, the group agreed to split in early 1968. That same year, Jordan was treated for cancer. Increasing chart indifference, record company pressure (their British home label pressed hitmaking producer Mickie Most upon them in a failed bid to re-ignite their commercial success), and drug-related problems meant that by 1967 the Yardbirds' days were numbered. His condition is thought to be incurable. He also proved an adept fingerstyle guitarist, the shimmering "White Summer," an Indian-influence instrumental composition, joining his full-out hard rock grinder, "I'm Confused" as curlicues to the Yardbirds' unexpectedly forthcoming transmutation. Media coverage speculated that Jordan's alcohol consumption while pregnant might been the cause, but doctors said that it was almost certainly caused by a genetic disorder. (Almost the only pronounced examples of what the Beck-Page tandem could have been came on a single, "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago," and their half-crazed version of "The Train Kept A-Rollin'," an even crazier rendition of which turned up in the Antonioni film Blow-Up as "Stroll On".) Page was just as bent toward experimentation as Beck, particularly his striking technique of scraping a violin or cello bow across his guitar strings to induce a round of odd and surreal sounds, and his dextrous use of a wah-wah pedal. He was found to be blind, having a condition known as septo-optic dysplasia, meaning that his optic nerve hadn't developed correctly.

Jimmy Page re-entered the picture here, playing bass until rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja could become comfortable with that instrument, and then teaming with Beck for tantalising twin-guitar attacks that proved short-enough lived: Beck either quit or was fired from the group in mid-1966, and the Yardbirds continued as a quartet for the remainder of their career. Harvey was born at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton, his birth being induced when he was two weeks overdue. It was prior to the sessions that produced Yardbirds that Paul Samwell-Smith decided to quit the group for touring purposes and move behind the boards to co-produce them with new manager, Simon Napier-Bell. Harvey's father was the Manchester United footballer Dwight Yorke, although again the relationship broke up before the child was born. Jordan has said she intended to have the birth shown live over the Internet, but changed her mind later and decided to keep it private. In addition, the Yardbirds began serious experiments with things like adapting Gregorian chant ("Still I'm Sad," "Turn Into Earth," Hot House of Omagarashid," "Farewell," "Ever Since The World Began") and various European folk styles into their blues and rock rooted music, and this gained them a new reputation among the hipster underground even as their commercial appeal had begun already to wane. On May 27, 2002, she gave birth to a baby boy she named Harvey after her grandfather. in a bowdlerised version called Over Under Sideways Down), and established him as a top-rank guitarist whose experiments with fuzz tone, feedback, and distortion jolted British rock forward with a bold drop kick. In the end, Jordan won 713 votes or 1.8% of the vote.

Beck's tenure in the group, meanwhile, produced a number of memorable recordings, from single hits like "Heart Full of Soul," "I'm A Man," and "Shapes of Things" to the Yardbirds album (known more popularly as Roger the Engineer, and first issued in the U.S. As a part of her election campaign—which was intended to bring a little fun into a dull election—she promised free breast implants, increases on nudist beaches, and a ban on parking tickets. The Yardbirds in 1965 and 1966 issued a pair of albums in the U.S., slapped together somewhat haphazardly from their British recordings, For Your Love (which included a delightful early take of "Hang On, Sloopy"—they'd gotten hold of a demo of the song before the McCoys had their chartbusting crack at it a year later, and their patented doubletime "rave up" version is a treat) and Havin' A Rave Up With The Yardbirds, half of which came from Five Live Yardbirds. In the June 7, 2001 British General Election, Jordan ran as a candidate in Manchester, England (using her real name) under a slogan of "For a Bigger and Betta Future". Clapton recommended Jimmy Page, a studio guitarist he had known (and with whom he would soon cut a series of stirring blues guitar duets, including "Tribute to Elmore" and "Draggin' My Tail"), as his replacement, but Page—uncertain at the time about giving up his lucrative studio work—recommended in turn one Jeff Beck, whose fleet-fingered style and bent for experimentation pushed the Yardbirds to the direction from which they became widely credited for opening the door to "psychedelic" rock. One of her first public relationships was with the pop singer Dane Bowers, of the boy band Another Level, but they ended their relationship while she was pregnant by him, and she had an abortion. The loss could have been devastating to the Yardbirds; Clapton had already shown the striking, stabbingly virtuosic style he would later expand and deepen with Mayall and unfurl as a full-fledged virtuoso statement with the improvisational Cream. She has had a number of well-publicised relationships.

It also prompted Eric Clapton—at the time a no-holds-barred blues purist—to leave the group and join with John Mayall's Blues Breakers. Jordan's private life and wild behavior and outrageous antics have been extensively detailed by the paparazzi, much of it at European nightclubs. The quintet went from there to cut several singles, including "I Wish You Would," but it was "For Your Love," a Graham Gouldman composition that was anything but the blues, which put the band to their highest chart position yet in England—and their first major hit in the United States, when it was released there in 1965. She appeared at a number of promotional events for the similarly named Jordan Grand Prix Formula One team during this time, during a period when they were heavily promoting themselves to the youth market. ("Those English kids," Williamson said famously of the Yardbirds and other British blues groups like the Animals and the Stones, "want to play the blues so bad—and they play the blues so bad," though he had a personal affection for the Yardbirds' members and even thought of moving to England permanently, until the illness that resulted in his early 1965 death.). In 2002, Jordan was shooting a cover to run in Playboy and Hugh Hefner invited her to spend three weeks at his mansion. The group was well enough reputed that none other than blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson himself invited the group to tour England and Germany with him, a union that survives to this day on a live album memorable for Williamson's trouper-like adaptation of his deep troubador style of blues to the Yardbirds' raw, unpolished rock and roll version. Jordan appeared in six volumes of Playboy's Book of Lingerie from 1997 to 1999.

Under Gomelsky's guidance, the Yardbirds got themselves signed to EMI's Columbia label in early 1964; they set a precedent of a sort when their first album turned out to be a live album, Five Live Yardbirds, recorded at the legendary Marquee Club in London. Thus began a series of operations to enhance her figure. And, of critical importance, Crawdaddy Club impresario Giorgio Gomelsky—who had all but discovered the Rolling Stones but thought it beyond his range to become their manager—learned enough from his previous miss to become the Yardbirds' manager and, as it turned out, first producer. In July 1998, Jordan received her first breast augmentation, thus forcing her "retirement" from Page 3 of the Sun, which had recently decided that its "natural beauty" policy required it to stay "silicone-free". Between his sleek guitar playing and Keith Relf's improving harmonica style, the group could at least boast two attractive players that made listeners overlook their still-incomplete rhythmic attack. In 1998, Jordan tried out for a part on the television series Baywatch, but did not get the part. They made their first significant lineup addition when singer/harmonica player Keith Relf, rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja, bassist Paul Samwell-Smith, and drummer Jim McCarty, replaced original lead guitarist Anthony (Top) Topham with a very boyish-looking art student named Eric Clapton in late 1963. Clapton already knew what he was doing with his instrument; his solo turns, while far enough from the gripping little gems for which he became famous enough soon enough, already set him apart from most of his peers among the British blues clubbers. It was at this time that she began to use the name Jordan.

Their inexperience and their less-than-stellar musicianship was obvious but their commitment was just as powerful, as they hammered away at versions of such blues classics as "Smokestack Lightning," "Got Love If You Want It," "Here 'Tis," "Baby What's Wrong," "Good Morning Little School Girl," "Boom Boom," "I Wish You Would," "Done Somebody Wrong," and "Rollin' and Tumblin'.". An excellent swimmer, gymnast, and horsewoman, she took up glamour modelling as a "Page 3" girl in The Sun, a popular tabloid newspaper in the United Kingdom. With a repertoire drawn more from the Delta-soaked Chicago blues titans Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson II, and Elmore James than the more commercially-minded Chuck Berry and Jimmy Reed influences of the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds began to build a following of their own in London before very long. After a while her mother, Amy, remarried to Paul Price, and Katie Infield changed her name to Katie Price. Formed originally as the Metropolitan Blues Quartet in 1962–63 in London, the Yardbirds first achieved notice on the burgeoning British blues scene (or "rhythm and blues," as the British music press alluded to it) when they took over as the house band at the Crawdaddy Club in London—succeeding the Rolling Stones. When she was four, her father left home. The Yardbirds were an early British rock band, noted for spawning the careers of several of rock music's most famous guitarists, including Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page. She was born in Brighton.

Jordan is a British glamour model, perhaps most famous for her large, surgically enhanced breasts and the reports of her personal life in British tabloid newspapers. Jordan (born May 22, 1978), is the public name and image of Katie Price, who was born Katie Infield.