Jimmy Page on Led Zeppelin’s good times, bad times and reunion rumours

Will there be a Led Zep reunion? How insane were the glory days? And why is Jimmy Page on a stamp? He reveals all including the multimilliondollar question, the one that follows Jimmy Page around like relentless feedback from an amp, is this: can Led Zeppelin fans hold on to any lingering hopes of a reunion tour? Well, it remains not entirely out of the question, as far as Page is concerned. But don’t get your hopes up. Slightly more than two years since the reunion gig of the biggest, loudest and best rock band of them all made front pages globally, Page has this to say on the matter: “At the time of the run-up and rehearsals towards the show I think we assumed that there were going to be more dates. It would have been nice to have played more concerts. But, even while I was going round doing Christmas shopping people were still coming up and saying: ‘Is there a chance of a reunion?’ I don’t have any real answer, apart from that it doesn’t look like it.” His gentle, middle-class tones, with a slightly raddled edge, can’t conceal a tinge of disappointment.

Given the demand for tickets for that single gig at the O2 — the official website for tickets crashed after 25 million hits in the first 24 hours, while one punter paid £83,000 in a charity auction — it would be about as big a tour as any in history, whatever one thinks of the whole idea.

But if it’s hard to imagine the venerable magus of rock going Christmas shopping in his local high street, it’s easy to see that Page’s life has increasingly become a frustrated quest to perform Zeppelin’s music again. In the band’s 1970s heyday, he was its Byronic overlord, an indefatigable sonic adventurer during their marathon live gigs, an inspiration for every guitarist who saw him, a genius in the studio and a man whose enigmatic character acquired an aura of swirling myths and rumour.

However much he frowns about the more exotic speculations laid on him — that he was an occultist, that he carried a collection of whips for use on gleeful groupies, that he spent a tour living on nothing but daiquiris and heroin — they play a formidable role in Page’s irresistible mythos. That and his enduring, brilliant music. Thirty years since the death of Zeppelin’s drummer John Bonham after a mammoth drinking bender slammed the lid down on the waning Zep era, the band’s reputation rides as high as it ever did.

My interview with Page, conducted over the phone, was offered by Royal Mail of all people. A new set of postage stamps is being issued featuring ten classic album covers. The cover of Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album is one of them. “It’s the most unexpected experience,” Page says. “Having been a kid learning about stamps … well, it’s quite a shock to be honest with you — A pleasant shock! I’m thrilled!”

It comes with some relief that this white-haired “Merlin of Rock” as an awed Steve Tyler of Aerosmith recently called him, is so amenable — if cautiously so, and there are certainly a few sweaty-palmed moments as we trade euphemisms around the odd elephant in the room over the next hour. Me in T-shirt in a cluttered study, he dressed in black crushed-velvet suit and silk scarf in a darkened chamber of his Gothic West London residence. Or so my rioting imagination tells me.

Page sums up his band’s brilliance with a dash of the mystical allure that defined him — and a touch of Spinal Tap, too. “When you had four musicians of that calibre and who played really superbly as a band, it inspires you to write and to visualise beyond the norm. That whole aspect took on a fifth element. This alchemy of it was really ripe for creation.”

I wonder if he has been offered huge sums of money to write his autobiography. “I’ve had a lot of offers,” he says, with a quiet cackle, adding: “The idea of a posthumous book appeals to me . . .” How much of those, ahem, libertarian days of yore can he even remember? “When I look back at it it’s still in focus. Most of it is clear.”
Page, who grew up with a love of rock’n’roll in peaceful Epsom in Surrey, is held to be a naturally introspective character, but with Zeppelin he also showed a clear-eyed, near-ruthless sense of creative ambition. Years as a young session player on just about everybody’s records in the mid-Sixties led to a stint in the Yardbirds; when they fell apart in 1968 he recruited the 19-year-old Robert Plant, the genial session bassist John Paul Jones and John Bonham, a drummer of brawny brilliance. The instant chemistry was such that Led Zeppelin’s first album — all heavy blues, acoustic drama and psychedelic experimentation — was recorded in 36 hours straight. It was a platform for fearless musical adventuring on eight further albums over 12 years.