So when did you first start playing the guitar?

Jimmy Page: I guess we have to go back to when I was about twelve years old, and my parents moved house when I was about eight, and there was a guitar that was left behind at the house, and it was a campfire guitar. You know, the sort of cowboy one with this sort of hole, and it couldn’t be called a flamenco guitar. It had steel strings on it, which is pretty interesting, as normally if you found one of those guitars around it might have the nylon strings, but this had steel strings. And it, fortunately, didn’t get thrown away, so it had been there for quite a while at the house. And during that sort of time in the ’50s there had been the explosion of rock and roll with Elvis Presley and all this wonderful music that was coming from America with the rockabilly and this Little Richard sort of music, Jerry Lee Lewis, all this sort of wave of music.

But over here in England there was also something called skiffle, and skiffle was something that you would actually see on the television performed by a man called Lonnie Donegan, and Lonnie Donegan was quite an inspiration I realize now, looking back, for all guitarists at that time, and he would be singing sort of songs or folk songs by Americans, a lot of American music, Leadbelly songs. And he’d be playing on the acoustic guitar and remarkable performances that sort of captured everybody’s imagination. So there was all this wonderful music coming from America, but on our television screens there was this man playing an acoustic guitar, like the campfire guitar that had been left behind at my house. And I managed to find somebody at school — there was only one other — well, one person who played the guitar, and he was actually one day on the school field playing these Lonnie Donegan songs.

And I had a chat with him afterwards, and I said, “Well, I’ve got one of those at home,” and he said, “Bring it along to school and I’ll tune it up for you and show you a couple of chords.” So the playing-guitar point came from that sort of — there’s the intervention of the guitar and — it’s a sort of Excalibur, isn’t it? It’s just basically — but also the fact that this guy shows me some chords and I start playing. Because I don’t stop playing from that point. Even though I can only play one chord and the second chord, I’m just playing all the time until I learn some more chords and it just sort of keeps going on.

What do you mean you didn’t stop? Did you play for hours a day?

Jimmy Page: I had to do my homework, my prep, but it got to the point where I was going to do a trade-up. I needed to get a guitar that was a little more user-friendly, let’s put it that way. And my father said, he said, “Well, I can see you’re coming on well with this.” He said, “I don’t understand it. I don’t understand what you’re doing, but I’m not going to get in the way of it.” And he actually helped me get the first guitar on from the campfire guitar. And he said, “Providing you keep up with your academic studies then that’s fine.” So we’ve brokered a deal right there on that first guitar that he helped get, and then sold two guitars.

How old were you then?

Jimmy Page: I was about thirteen, I guess. Twelve or thirteen.

Did you keep up with your studies?

Jimmy Page: I did. I sort of managed to get my sort of degrees, and they came in useful later because at another point I went to art college, and they held me in good stead to be able to use those qualifications of maths, English, biology, art, etcetera, you know.

You were only thirteen when you first appeared on television. What was that like? It must have been so nerve-wracking.

Jimmy Page: It really was. It really was, and the curious thing about the clip, it was for a program called All Your Own, and the — there was a name of the band, but actually I — I’ve actually got the script from the TV show, and it has various things that are going to be within the show of All Your Own. And it just said, “The Skifflers,” of which there must have been hundreds of skiffle groups in England at the time, but we’re just referred to as The Skifflers. Yeah, I was very, very nervous. Yeah, I can see how nervous I am when I see that clip because it was a big deal, and you’re going to be on television, which meant people at — your school friends would say, “Look, that’s the boys who’s at school. He’s always playing the guitar if he can get away with it.” You know, in lunch break, etcetera. I must say that it got to the point where my guitar was actually confiscated because I would take it to play it at — during recesses and breaks because I was that — so connected to the instrument. I was constantly wanting to practice on it and learn more things,

What did you love about the guitar?

Jimmy Page: I just had a connection with it. I clearly did, and the fact that I could actually — but I could play a chord on it and that you’d just hear this thing going on, this wonderful resonance, and it’s a tactile instrument, as well. I’ve always thought that guitarists — and through the years that guitarists that you know in any field — well, I don’t know about classical so much, but certainly with an electric guitar also, if you had four guitarists that you know and a guitar and an amplifier there, they would come and play it. And they would sound exactly like they sound because of the tactile aspect of the instrument. It’s an incredible phenomenon, but it’s absolutely true, and yet I would play it and I wouldn’t sound like any of them. And it’s an extraordinary thing, but it has a lot to do with this tactile instrument.

And you never had lessons. You just taught yourself?

Jimmy Page: I didn’t have lessons. I learned from a book called Play in a Day, and actually — I learned from Play in a Day, and many years later I became a studio musician, and the way that the notation was in Play in a Day was exactly the way they wrote out chord charts, so it was very useful, wasn’t it? Very useful.

Did you get the book at the library?

Jimmy Page: No, you could buy it. You could buy it in music shops, which sold recordings and triangles and — not many guitars in those days. Not even acoustic classical guitars or whatever.

So after the talent show on the BBC, did you start playing live shows then?

Jimmy Page: Well, I completed my studies at school, and I decided to dive right into music. I left school, and I was already playing in a group. I was playing in a group on weekends, and they were a London group, and I am — because I was living at Epsom, which is some distance. It wasn’t as though I was living in London, but I was headhunted out of Epsom to join this band, and I was still at school. And I was still doing my — approaching, fast approaching, my exams. So after my exams, we were able to do more concerts, and we were touring around all over England, really.

That must have been an enormous amount of fun.

Jimmy Page: It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun until it got to the winter, and our van — well, we had to sort of drive between concerts, and the heater broke in the van, so you would come out of a very hot dance hall and sort of go into the van, and it was pretty uncomfortable, and I started to get a sequence of fevers. And it was purely because, you know, I wasn’t sort of dressing properly coming off of stage and going through winter nights and…

You were sick for more than a year, right?

Jimmy Page: Well, no. It wasn’t quite as bad as that. But I was getting caught up with sort of fevers, and it was coming in the serial nature. I don’t think it was fair on the rest of the band, and one of the things that was quite interesting at that point was that the music that we were playing was in advance of what the popular taste was, and it was to catch up some sort of eighteen months, two years, later, which is quite a long time, really, in the way that music was moving really, really fast, and the way that fashion — musical fashion was changing and being explored and was opening up.

In what way were you ahead?

Jimmy Page: We were playing in sort of town halls and dance halls and coal exchanges! All manner of venues, and the public that would come would come along to dance. Some would come to really listen intently to the music, but you were expected to play Top 20 hits. I think this reflects in The Beatles’ first album because you can hear that they’re doing covers in those — in the first album — and that’s clearly the sort of things that they were doing in live shows. We, though, we were doing the Chess (Records) catalogue from Chicago, so we were doing Chuck Berry songs, and yeah, it was in advance of the musical taste of what was going on. And so, yeah, I began to play harmonica as well as guitar. I was always playing acoustic guitar, as well as electric, right? So I became quite a sort of all-around musician. I really paid a lot of attention to the blues. Well, you had to if you were going to play harmonica. And I went to art college anyway. I decided to make a hiatus and go to art college,

Were you painting? What were you doing then?

Jimmy Page: At the art college I was, yes. Yes, I was doing a foundation course. So I was painting, graphic design, and I really enjoyed my time at art college. It was really good.

Did you ever think at that point that maybe you should be a graphic designer, or do something else?

Jimmy Page: Well, actually, I wanted to study fine arts and techniques of oil painting, and actually, in a foundation course at that time, it was the — you know, acrylic paints, and it wasn’t oil paints, and everything was, you know, what was currently, I guess, the fashionable media, as opposed to the oil painting.

While I was at art college, I didn’t stop playing. I didn’t stop playing the electric guitar, and there was a club in London called the Marquee Club. It was a very famous club, and it was an R&B club, rhythm and blues, and I used to go along every Thursday night regularly to see the various artists who were there. And I met somebody who had been in a previous band, and he was a piano player and singer, and he said, “We could play the interval band here, if you want,” and I said, “Fine.” I mean, I’d never met him to this point, and I said, “Okay, let’s do that.” So every Thursday night I was playing in the interval band, and basically what happens at that point is that somebody asked me to play on a record, and I play on this record because I had a pretty distinctive guitar style. You could hear that it was a different guitar player within this recording, and I started to get lots of offers, but I’m still at art school college, but I’m getting lots of offers, and I’m fulfilling in the evenings doing these sessions and still completing my studies pretty much like I was a few years earlier where I was doing my academic subjects. But then we had a recess. It might have been the sort of Easter break or whatever, and I just had so many sessions coming my way. I was doing sessions in the morning from 10:00 to 1:00, 2:00 to 5:00, and 7:00 to 10:00 in multiple locations in London, like EMI, Decca, Pye, Phillips, and when it was time to go back to art college, I thought, “I can’t really do this. I’m not being honest, and somebody else could use my place there, and I’m having so much fun doing these recording sessions.”

In those days what they would do, they would replace the drummer because the drums would take quite a while to get a balance in a recording studio, so they’d bring in a session drummer where they knew immediately what his sound was going to be. And I would be augmenting the group, so sometimes replacing the guitarist, and they would just ask me on certain circumstances just to play whatever you want to play, so it was invention and improvisation. So I had a good sort of year of doing that, and then they eventually — from these little chord charts in Play in a Day then I started to get some music notation, and basically what — it was a hinge. You’re really in. You’re really in this world, and you’re accepted, and we love you here and the part that you can play, because I could play so many different styles of music, see? And I was also being employed in that way, so folk music and pop music, rock and roll music, blues music.

You would just hear it, and then just decide on the spot what to play?

Jimmy Page: Well, they would ask me to do so, otherwise I would play what was there, or it was pretty obvious what you had to do, but once you had the musical notation then I had to learn to read music very, very quickly, and curiously enough I met somebody last night, Dr. Luke, who’s a producer, yeah? And he was saying exactly the same thing happened to him, that he was doing sessions, and then he had to — but that was in America, but — and I would assume that he was more of a specialist player. But I was a complete all-rounder, you see.

Somebody who I — when I was twelve years old and I had a homemade bass and he had a homemade guitar, and he was brought to my house by his sister, who was in art college in Epsom — was Jeff Beck. I’d known Jeff Beck, and I put Jeff Beck in for the role of The Yardbirds, and we were very, very good friends. And he would come and visit me, and we’d often — while I was in this whole incarnation of being a session musician, and he’d invited me to Yardbird shows — we’d also discussed the possibility that it would be really fun if we could both play together in a band on lead guitar, and have something in the style of the old big bands, like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, where you had the brass sections really, really strong, and with vibrant effect. And one night we went to Oxford — I think it was the Oxford Union dance, or it was May Ball or something like that — and that night there was a row with the band, and the bass player left the band, and they had to play the Marquee, this Marquee Club, and they didn’t have anybody, couldn’t work out who they were going to get to fill in on bass, so I volunteered to play bass. So that we could then mutate into this plan of having Jeff and myself on lead guitars, and the rhythm guitars would take over the bass duties, and that’s what happened.

So then The Yardbirds continues on. Jeff leaves the group. I can tell you as a former, I must say that — well, I need to retrace the footsteps here. During the time that I was a studio musician it was a remarkable apprenticeship because the studio discipline that was — everything is literally within seconds on the clock.  If the session was scheduled from 10:00 to 1:00, if the second hand went beyond then you would be in overtime, and so you had to be absolutely precise, and you had to be able to deliver all the time. If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t be seen again.  There’d be somebody else coming. It’s a very closed shop, but I was fortunate enough to get in there,

Do you think you just have a gift? I mean, you had no lessons. You were able, on the fly, to listen to music and then to have your own distinctive twist on it.

Jimmy Page: Yes, within the realms of improvisation, isn’t it? Really in creativity, yes. Yes, I did.

Did someone say that to you? You know, “You have a gift, Jimmy Page.”

Jimmy Page: Well, I clearly did have a gift. Yeah.

Did you purposely try to change the parameters of music?

Jimmy Page: When I was a studio musician I had done home recordings, where you overlay one guitar and another, this sort of thing that Les Paul would do, but of course it wasn’t anywhere near as sophisticated as Les Paul. I would hear things on records and sort of think I could work out how they were done, but now I had the opportunity to ask engineers how things were done. I could play records too and say, “How do you arrive at that? How is that effect done? Is that a natural echo chamber, or is it a fabricated spring reverb?” or whatever. I got to learn how to do microphone placings, which there’s a whole science to microphone placing, and I was a producer as well. So now I come out of that world. I’m an active musician in The Yardbirds but have a really, really good time. I’m starting to really enjoy myself and be able to try some of the more avant garde ideas with The Yardbirds even, like playing the guitar with a bow, etcetera.

Having been a studio musician, I’d seen drummers really playing their hearts out, and they’d be in this little booth, which was totally dead so there was no sound reflective surfaces whatsoever, and it would just sound like they were hitting a suitcase. They were quite frustrated when they’d hear the drum sound, even though you weren’t party to hearing playbacks sometimes when you were a studio musician. Actually, you didn’t know who you were going to play with because they’d just come walking through the door. You were a hired hand, and so you didn’t really have any say, and the drummers wouldn’t be able to say, “Well, wouldn’t it be better if…” because that wasn’t necessarily your job unless you were asked to. So what I knew was that I could see what a frustrating role it would be for drummers, and a drum is an acoustic instrument, and it has a tone to it, and I knew that in the recordings that I loved from the past that there was certainly an ambience that was used in the drums. It wasn’t just a close mic and no ambience within a room. And certainly with the recording of John Bonham, who was a master craftsman and a genius of drum technique, and his technique of tuning the drums, you could hear them projecting, and it was so important to be able to capture that with overhead mics, you see? It’s not necessarily rocket science, but all of the work that I’d done in the studio, and especially the studio discipline, just really came out, so it was an apprenticeship.

How did you think to pick up a bow or some of these other innovations?

Jimmy Page: This is an interesting story because the string sections really didn’t like the — I mean they had spent years mastering their bowing techniques, and there were these sort of people like drummers and bass players and guitarists, and I think they thought they just made a bit of a noise rather than music as they saw music. And one of the violinists came to me one day, and he said, “Have you ever considered playing — “ He just didn’t talk to the others. It was sort of them and us. “Have you ever considered playing the guitar with a bow?” And I said, “Well, I don’t think it’ll work, will it? Because the strings are uniform, whereas a violin is arched, or a cello is arched.” And he said, “Well, here’s my bow. Would you like to try?” And I said, “Absolutely.” So I tried it, and I could see there was massive potential, and after that I went and bought my own bow. But this fellow was the father of an actor, of David McCallum. Man from U.N.C.L.E. That’s it. So he was the father of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. He’s a very cool gentleman.

You’ve played so many memorable performances. Is there any one occasion that stands out in your mind?

Jimmy Page: Something that stands out, because it was totally out of the area where I’d performed in the past, in any sort of stage — actually it wasn’t a stage. It was on top of a bus, a double-decker bus, and it was in Beijing in — at the Olympics, and it was the closing ceremony of the Olympics in 2008. And it was — they were passing over the baton, so to speak, to London, and I was there on behalf of London, and we — it was myself and a wonderful singer called Leona Lewis, and we performed “Whole Lotta Love,” and the full version of “Whole Lotta Love” as well, and it was pretty amazing to play in the stadium there, which, you know, is a bird’s nest. It was immense. It was a huge stadium, and I know it was being televised all over the world, and I knew there was just one guitarist there, and there was a heavy weight on his shoulders not to mess up, and — not to mess it up for Leona or anything else, and it was — and it went — it was marvelous, absolutely marvelous. So, you know, as far as doing things in your comfort zone and not in your comfort zone, that was challenging.

Oh, and the other thing was that you had to be elevated up into the air, and that was interesting because I had a fear of heights before doing that, but I had to take that on, and I had a technique that I was shown whereby you can conquer that, so I thought that was rather interesting. Somebody took me to the Royal Garden Hotel, and we were standing on the ledge. It was, like, a — it was somebody who was a sort of hypnotist who was showing me some techniques, and it worked.

When you were a session musician, you played with a lot of the biggest stars on the scene. Can you talk about those days?

Jimmy Page: As a studio musician I would be brought in to augment a band, and I worked with a producer, an American producer called Shel Talmy, and you didn’t know who you were — you’d just be asked to take your guitar and your amplifier to a studio, and then low and behold in comes a band called The Who. Now I’d seen The Who play at the Marquee Club, and I was — I thought, “What am I doing here?” Pete Townsend’s an amazing guitarist, and actually, I’m there on the first record, called “I Can’t Explain,” in the — playing the riff in the background. You can’t hear it, but I was on it, and it wasn’t necessary because Pete was flying during these — playing on the — on “I Can’t Explain,” but it was — you could imagine what the energy was like in that studio when that was being recorded, so that was marvelous to be part of that. I played on some various things with the Rolling Stones in the early days in the ’60s, where they were producing other artists and I was a studio musician, and I played on one of their albums. I played on the track called “One Hit (To The Body),” which was much later. That was in the ’80s. Played the lead guitar.

What a career!

Jimmy Page: It is, isn’t it? I’m very grateful. I’m just a very fortunate man to have been blessed with a gift within the area of performance that has brought so much happiness to people and inspiration to people, so it’s good. Now, you know, I’ll be passing on the baton now, like the baton was passed on at Beijing, so it’ll be like a sort of musical Olympics, won’t it?

How do you see music changing in the digital age?

Jimmy Page: Well, it’s young musicians in the way that — you know, the whole generation and the phenomenon of musicians, or producers, who aren’t actually musicians, but they can process music and construct music with computers. It’s pretty extraordinary and amazing stuff, and it still comes down to the theme of the idea in the first place, and the imagination and imagining this and working towards it, and being able to manifest it. As far as the sort of tactile instruments, the acoustic instruments, there’ll always be fine musicians. It’ll always be new protégés, you know, in the field, obviously classical music, trained music, but also music which is sort of relatively untrained as well, you know. Yes, there will, which is sort of almost like a folk music because it comes from the people.

We look forward to the next thing you’re working on.

Jimmy Page: Yes, indeed. There’ll be a Led Zeppelin product coming out for sure, and that people haven’t heard, because I’m working on that, and next year will be the 50th year. So there’s all manner of surprises coming out. And then I hope to be seen to be playing, so I’d better get on with it.

How do you feel about your old songs? Do you still like “Stairway to Heaven”?

Jimmy Page: Yes, I do. That was quite an achievement to have a record released in 1971 and people still refer to the solo as one of the best solos of all time, and it gets voted one of the best solos of all time over all the decades. I mean that’s pretty extraordinary stuff. Hmm. I may not be able to top that, you know. I’ve only got a few years left!