JIMMY PAGE
Thanks to the unexpected intervention of a discarded acoustic guitar, James Patrick Page found himself perfectly equipped to deal with rock’n’roll’s ‘youth explosion’ as it irresistibly infected his formative 1950s.
Graduating from skiffle through rockabilly to blues by duplicating riffs on records, he taught himself to improvise, honing his craft with The Paramounts and Red E Lewis and The Redcaps, before becoming the hottest young guitar slinger on the burgeoning 60s session scene. Jimmy Page gravitated from studio anonymity to pop stardom when he joined The Yardbirds in ’66. Two years later, upon the band’s ultimate dissolution, he formed Led Zeppelin, with whom he rapidly conquered the world.
A half-century later, Jimmy Page – arguably rock’s greatest and most celebrated guitarist – is in lockdown. Just like the rest of us. He’s been busy: putting the finishing touches to his second autobiographical work, Jimmy Page: The Anthology, a weighty tome from Genesis Publications that concentrates on the ‘details behind the details’ of his extraordinary life; and playing again. Lockdown has “given me an opportunity to reconnect properly with the guitar,” Page says down the telephone line. No hotel suite get-together in this new normal, just 105 minutes of revelatory chat, during the course of which he admits he’s had “a bit of a charmed life, there’s no doubt about that”, and talks himself hoarse. Here’s what he said.
The first image in Anthology is a photograph of you singing in the choir at St. Barnabas Church in Epsom, presumably your first experience of public performance. Were you a willing chorister, or did you need coercion from your parents?
No, not at all from my parents. I voluntarily went to the church and joined up with the choir. I was compelled to. One reason why I would do that is because in those days rock’n’roll appeared on the airwaves and then it was stamped on by the BBC, et cetera, so you would find ways to actually hear music. We were lucky in Epsom, because there was an external swimming baths, and it had an area where there were amusements – pinball machines and a jukebox. It was like a pilgrimage to the jukebox, but the big boys used to go there, and I was quite young at that point. The church had a youth club where there’d be a dance and they’d play records, but to be in the youth club, you had to be in the choir. And I enjoyed being a choirboy, actually. I really did.
And you got to wear the surplice [the white linen vestment worn by choristers]. It must have been your first excuse to wear fancy clothes.
Absolutely. You’re right. You can see a connection, can’t you? Decking oneself out for the performance [laughs].
As a child you experienced hi-fi sound for the first time thanks to your neighbour’s stereo. It seems that from the very beginning you weren’t entranced just by music but also by the process of capturing sound, because, in many ways, therein lies the magic.
Yes. Thinking back to write the book, I thought about pivotal points. And when I lived in Feltham [Page’s home prior to Epsom], my parents and I were invited to someone’s house just down the road, and he had this stereo set-up. What he played at the time were some sound-effects records, the classic one being of the train going across the speakers, that sort of thing. And for a young boy this was pretty amazing stuff. I was probably about eight. And he played some classical music, and you really felt the depth of it. There’s absolutely no doubt that had a serious effect on me.
What is interesting in the equation is that there wasn’t anybody in my family who played guitar. I had an uncle who played pub piano. He could play various songs, but he never taught me anything. He wasn’t willing to teach, but when we moved from Feltham to Miles Road, in Epsom, there was a guitar left behind in our new house by the previous owners. And that was like a really weird intervention, where the guitar sort of found me.
“Once I heard rock’n’roll I was infected by it, and there wasn’t going to be a cure. I didn’t wanna be cured.”
That is such
