The Yardbirds – Over, Under, Sideways, Down

Jeff Beck started this Yardbirds hit on bass, and the album it opened has never officially been called Roger the Engineer.

Thirteen days separate the BBC1 broadcast of this performance from the night Jimmy Page walked onto the stage of the Marquee in London to play bass for the Yardbirds. The band that played Over, Under, Sideways, Down live on June 8, 1966, had a single climbing the British chart, an album finished four days earlier, and less than two weeks left in its five-man form. Keith Relf sang, Jeff Beck played lead, Chris Dreja held the rhythm, Paul Samwell-Smith played bass, and Jim McCarty drummed. That lineup was about to come apart.

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The song started with the band looking backward. In his 1983 book on the band, McCarty traced the idea to Mike Raven’s radio show, which played old rock and roll, and to the group’s wish for a boogie in the mold of Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock. McCarty played off-beat rim taps the way Haley’s drummers had. At Advision Studios in London on April 19 and 20, 1966, the boogie took a stranger turn. Beck, who had replaced Eric Clapton in 1965, started the track on bass, laying down the line the rest was built on. Then he switched to lead guitar and wrote the intro. McCarty later said the band was surprised by the riff and argued over whether it belonged, before deciding it made the song. “It’s pure ‘Jeff,'” he said.

Roger Cameron engineered the session, and Samwell-Smith and Simon Napier-Bell produced it. Napier-Bell supplied the title phrase, which McCarty described as close to his only real contribution in the studio. The writing credit went to all five members. Columbia released the single in Britain on May 27, 1966, as DB 7928, the follow-up to Shapes of Things, with Beck’s instrumental Jeff’s Boogie on the B-side. The Official Singles Chart picked it up in the week of the BBC1 performance and ranked it No.10, over a nine-week run. Epic was advertising it to American retailers in the June 11 issue of Record World, as catalog 5-10035. The Billboard Hot 100 took it to No.13, and Canada’s RPM chart to No.5.

The album named after a cartoon

The single then gave its name to an album, but only in America. Columbia released the LP in Britain in July 1966 as Yardbirds, and the Official Charts Company still lists it under that title. Epic called the American edition Over Under Sideways Down. Neither label ever called it Roger the Engineer. Dreja drew the front cover, a cartoon of Roger Cameron at work, and fans named the record after the drawing. Its main sessions ran five days, from May 31 to June 4. It reached No.20 in Britain, the only Yardbirds album to chart there.

Four days after those sessions ended, the band appeared on A Whole Scene Going On, BBC1’s Wednesday-evening youth magazine presented by Barry Fantoni. The June 8 edition ran from 6:30 to 7:05 p.m. and also featured the Kinks and Ravi Shankar. The Yardbirds played the single live. Repertoire Records released the audio on Live at the BBC Revisited in 2019, labeled Version 2. That expanded edition dates the performance June 8, correcting the June 18 given on Repertoire’s earlier release. In March 2026, the band’s official channel premiered the clip restored to HD for the album’s 60th anniversary, alongside Demon’s box set of the album’s songs on six colored 7-inch singles.

The lineup in the clip did not survive the month. Samwell-Smith told the band he was leaving around a gig in Oxford, and on June 21 Page made his Yardbirds debut at the Marquee, on bass. Dreja soon moved to bass, so Page could play guitar alongside Beck. The twin-lead lineup was short-lived, and before 1966 was over Beck was gone too. Samwell-Smith turned to production, and his credits include Cat Stevens’ Tea for the Tillerman. Dreja turned down Page’s invitation to join his next band so he could work as a photographer, and he took the back-cover photo for Led Zeppelin’s 1969 debut. He died on September 25, 2025.

In 2008, Rolling Stone ranked Over, Under, Sideways, Down No.23 on its list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Songs, and the reason is in the first seconds of this clip. The riff Beck wrote over a borrowed 1950s boogie sounds like it came from somewhere else. The clip shows something else too. This is the Yardbirds as a five-piece writing team, every member credited, playing the record live just before the lineup changed for good. The album it opened is still known by a nickname taken from Dreja’s drawing of the engineer, and this broadcast is one of the last times that lineup was filmed together.