Читать книгу Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography - Chris Salewicz, Chris Salewicz - Страница 9

At first Jimmy Page could only play with Red E. Lewis and the Redcaps at weekends; he was, after all, still at school.

In fact, at first his father had nixed the idea of his playing with the group. Chris Tidmarsh had needed to come down to 34 Miles Road to see him; it was only when he explained that almost all of the Redcaps’ dates were at the weekend and would hardly interfere with his son’s schooling that Jimmy’s dad agreed. ‘Oh, okay then,’ said the elder James Page.

Yet soon Page had a major contretemps with Miss Nicholson, the deputy headmistress. When he informed her that he intended to be a pop star when he left school, this martinet was utterly dismissive of him. The minimum school-leaving age was 15 at the time, so he walked out of the school with his four GCE O levels and never looked back.

‘Jimmy’s playing was constantly evolving,’ recalled Rod Wyatt. ‘After he left school he could play lead and pick like Chet Atkins; he was a real prodigy. We still jammed at each other’s houses, but not so frequently. The thing about Jimmy was that, unlike most guitarists of those early days, he could play many styles and genres of music.’

Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds were an emerging act on the R&B circuit in 1960. Page had first seen Farlowe perform three years before, at the British Skiffle Group Championship at Tottenham Royal in north London.

Farlowe’s throaty soul vocals fronted the outfit, but it was his guitarist Bobby Taylor who Page would assiduously study. ‘He would sit there and watch Bobby playing. Then he’d come backstage and say, “Oh man, what a great guitar player you are.” So Bobby influenced him a great deal,’ Farlowe told writer Chris Welch. ‘Jimmy was very keen to meet him as he thought he was the coolest guitarist he’d ever seen. Bobby Taylor was a very handsome bloke and always dressed in black … Jimmy used to come to our gigs at places like the Flamingo. Then one day he walked up to us at some hall in Epsom, where he lived, and said, “I’d like to finance an album of you and the band.”’

Clearly the 16-year-old Page, who was the same age as Farlowe, had a lucid eye on his future, as he had saved the money, aware that this creative investment would eventually repay him handsomely. And he also declared that he would be the producer of this album, a pronouncement of almost shocking confidence and self-possession from one so young.

The album was recorded at R. G. Jones Studios in Morden, Surrey. Page, observed Farlowe, seemed thoroughly au fait with the workings of a recording studio: ‘He knew what to do and just plugged the guitar directly into the system without using any amplifiers. He didn’t play any guitar himself. He didn’t want to, not with Bobby Taylor playing in the studio.’

The songs included a powerhouse version of Carl Perkins’s ‘Matchbox’ and a hard rendition of Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’, driven by a thundering Bo Diddley beat. But the LP would not be released until 2017, on Page’s own label.

Not content with working his way to becoming the greatest rock guitarist, Page’s intuition had clearly told him to study the art of record production too. Did he have a glimmer that he would bring all this together in the not-too-distant future?

In 1960 Red E. Lewis and the Red Caps were introduced to the beat poet Royston Ellis, who was looking for musicians to back him at a series of readings.

Ellis was born in 1941, three years before Jimmy Page, in Pinner, north-west London, an outer suburb, like Heston in far west London, where Page first lived. Leaving school at 16, he was determined to become a writer, and at the age of 18 he had his first book published, Jiving to Gyp, a collection of his poetry. Ellis was immediately taken with rock ’n’ roll; he would supplement his meagre earnings from poetry by writing biographies of the likes of Cliff Richard and the Shadows and James Dean. In 1961 he published his account of UK pop music, The Big Beat Scene.

Ellis referred to his live events, mixing beat music and poetry, as ‘Rocketry’. At first he had been supported by Cliff Richards’s backing group, the Drifters, who, upon changing their name to the Shadows to avoid confusion with the American R&B vocal group, almost immediately had a number one hit with ‘Apache’ and could no longer fulfil this function for the poet.

Determinedly bisexual and looking for someone to pick up, in 1960 Ellis had encountered George Harrison in the Jacaranda coffee bar in Liverpool. Although Harrison managed to avoid the poet’s advances, the Beetles – as they were then known – ended up backing his poetry reading in the city. Ellis always claimed it was he who suggested they substitute the second ‘e’ in their name for an ‘a’. Lennon later said he saw Ellis as ‘the converging point of rock ’n’ roll and literature’; the song ‘Paperback Writer’ was said to have been inspired by him.

Through Red E. Lewis and the Redcaps, Ellis had learned of the stimulant effects of chewing the Benzedrine-covered cardboard strip inside a Vick’s inhaler, useful for the increasing array of late-night shows the group needed to play in far-flung parts of Britain. The poet turned the Beatles on to this, staying up talking to them until nine o’clock the next morning.

When it came to his backing music, Ellis decided he did not require the entire musical combo of Red E. Lewis and the Red Caps. Instead he settled on only one musician: Jimmy Page.

Between late 1960 and July 1961 Page played several stints backing Ellis. One of the most significant dates they played was a television broadcast, on ITV’s Southern Television, recorded in Southampton with Julian Pettifer. Ellis would later claim that he had secured Page his first TV appearance, though this was manifestly not the case.

Page was still playing his second-hand Futurama Grazioso; soon it would be replaced with a genuine Fender Telecaster. On 4 March 1961 he and Ellis played together at Cambridge University, at the Heretics Society. And on 23 July 1961, having played in assorted coffee bars and small halls, the pair were faced with a bigger challenge. Twenty-year-old Ellis, accompanied by seventeen-year-old Page, was part of the Mermaid Festival at the newly opened experimental Mermaid Theatre, by London’s Blackfriars Bridge. Such illustrious names as Louis MacNeice, Ralph Richardson, Flora Robson and William Empson were also giving readings at the festival.

‘Jimmy Page was very dedicated to my poetry, understood it, and we worked well together, producing a dramatic presentation that was well received both on TV and stage,’ said Ellis.

‘Jimmy composed his own music to back my poems – usually ones from Jiving to Gyp, although I might have been performing the one with the line “Easy, easy, break me in easy” from my subsequent book Rave. The Mermaid show was the peak – and possibly the final one – of our stage performances.’

‘Royston had a particularly powerful impact on me,’ said the musician of the poet’s work. ‘It was nothing like I had ever read before and it conjured the essence and energy of its time. He had the same spirit and openness that the beat poets in America had.

‘When I was offered the chance to back Royston I jumped at the opportunity, particularly when we appeared at the Mermaid Theatre in London in 1961. It was truly remarkable how we were breaking new ground with each reading.

‘We knew that American jazz musicians had been backing poets during their readings. Jack Kerouac was using piano to accompany his readings, Lawrence Ferlinghetti teamed with Stan Getz to bring poetry and jazz together.’

These arty events with Royston Ellis were, however, rare and unusual for Page. More commonly he simply toured incessantly with Red E. Lewis and the Redcaps – and then Neil Christian and the Crusaders.

Red E. Lewis and the Redcaps’ manager Chris Tidmarsh had decided that he would become the group’s singer, renaming himself Neil Christian. In accordance with his own change of identity, Tidmarsh/Christian gave the group the moniker the Crusaders, and Page became ‘Nelson Storm’. Rhythm guitarist John Spicer was henceforth known as ‘Jumbo’, while drummer Jim Evans was given the sobriquet of ‘Tornado’.

Playing the same circuit, with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, was a guitarist who had also grown up in Heston. His name was Ritchie Blackmore, and he had a bright future as a founding member of Deep Purple and celebrated guitar hero in his own right.

‘I met Jimmy Page in 1962. I was 16, 17,’ he recalled of their first meeting, at a time when ‘Nelson Storm’ had acquired a new instrument. ‘We played with Neil Christian and the Crusaders. Jimmy Page was playing his Gretsch guitar. I knew he was going to be somebody then. Not only was he a good guitar player, he had that star quality. There was something about him. He was very poised and confident. So I thought, “He’s going to go somewhere, that guy – he knows what he’s doing.” But he was way ahead of most guitar players. He knew he was good too. He was the type of guy, who … he wasn’t arrogant, but he was very comfortable within himself.’

After two years of life on the road, Page came down several times with glandular fever, a lingering virus that was a consequence of exhaustion and a bad diet – and possibly too regular an ingestion of the Vick’s Benzedrine strip. In October 1962, when he was only 18, ‘Nelson Storm’ quit the Neil Christian outfit.

Almost immediately he enrolled at Sutton Art College in Surrey to study painting, a love almost as great as the guitar. Needless to say, Page’s love of music was undimmed, and he had extremely broad taste, eagerly lapping up classical music, both old and new, especially the groundbreaking work of Krzysztof Penderecki, the Polish composer whose 1960 work Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima conveyed the devastation wrought on 6 August 1945 on the Japanese city. Page’s study of Penderecki’s work would be reflected much later in his use of the violin bow on his guitar.

‘I was travelling around all the time in a bus,’ he told Cameron Crowe in Rolling Stone in 1975. ‘I did that for two years after I left school, to the point where I was starting to get really good bread. But I was getting ill. So I went back to art college. And that was a total change in direction … As dedicated as I was to playing the guitar, I knew doing it that way was doing me in forever. Every two months I had glandular fever. So for the next eighteen months I was living on ten dollars a week and getting my strength up. But I was still playing.’

Only days after Jimmy Page left Neil Christian and the Crusaders he experienced something of an epiphany. For the very first time a package tour of American blues artists was scheduled to play in the United Kingdom. Following concerts in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and France, the American Folk Blues Festival had a date scheduled on 22 October 1962 at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, with both afternoon and evening performances. On the bill were Memphis Slim, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Helen Humes, Shakey Jake Harris, T-Bone Walker and John Lee Hooker.

Page arranged to go with his friend David Williams, but opted to catch the train and meet him in Manchester rather than travel together by road. By now he seemed to have registered that one of the causes of his ill health had been squeezing into an uncomfortable van to travel those long distances across Britain with the Crusaders.

David Williams travelled with a trio of companions he had met at Alexis Korner’s Ealing Jazz Club, in reality no more than a room in a basement off Ealing Broadway in West London. Fellow aficionados of this music, these companions had recently formed a group. Its name? The Rolling Stones. These new friends were called Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones.

Although the first set of the American Folk Blues Festival rather failed to fire, perhaps an expression of the wet Manchester afternoon that it was, the evening house more than lived up to their expectations. Especially when John Lee Hooker closed the show with a brief, three-song set, accompanied only by his guitar. ‘It may have been a damp and grey Manchester outside, but we thought we were sweltering down on the Delta,’ said Williams. Hooker had been preceded by T-Bone Walker, the ‘absolute personification of cool’, according to Williams. ‘He performed his famous “Stormy Monday” on his light-coloured Gibson. His playing seemed effortless, and his set just got better and better as he dropped the guitar between his legs and then swung it up behind his head for a solo. I did not look at Jim, Keith or any of the others while this was all going on, but I can tell you that afterwards they were full of praise and mightily impressed.’

Page, Jagger, Richards, Jones and Williams then drove back to London through the night, Jones nervous about the rate of knots at which they were travelling. In 1962 the M1, Britain’s only motorway, extended no further from London than to the outskirts of Birmingham, a hundred miles north of the capital. ‘Eventually we made it to the motorway and came across an all-night service station. Again, for most of us this was a real novelty. However, Jim was a seasoned night-traveller by now and he clearly enjoyed talking me through the delights of the fry-up menu. After a feed we resumed our journey, and it was still dark when we reached the outskirts of London.’

Early on in his time at Sutton Art College, Page encountered a fellow student called Annetta Beck. Annetta had a younger brother called Jeff, who had recently quit his own course at Wimbledon Art College for a job spray-painting cars. Hot-rod-type motors would become an obsession for Beck.

In a 1985 radio interview on California’s KMET, Beck told host Cynthia Foxx: ‘My older sister, as I remember it, came home raving about this guy who played electric guitar. I mean she was always the first to say, “Shut that racket up! Stop playing that horrible noise!” And then when she went to art school the whole thing changed. The recognition of somebody else doing the same thing must have changed her mind. She comes home screaming back into the house saying, “I know a guy who does what you do.” And I was really interested because I thought I was the only mad person around. But she told me where this guy lived and said that it was okay to go around and visit. And to see someone else with these strange-looking electric guitars was great. And I went in there, into Jimmy’s front room … and he got his little acoustic guitar out and started playing away – it was great. He sang Buddy Holly songs. From then on we were just really close. His mum bought him a tape recorder and we used to make home recordings together. I think he sold them for a great sum of money to Immediate Records.’

Beck and Page began to spend afternoons and evenings at Page’s parents’ home, playing together and bouncing ideas off each other. Page would be playing a Gretsch Country Gentleman, running through songs like Ricky Nelson’s ‘My Babe’ and ‘It’s Late’, inspired by Nelson’s guitarist James Burton – ‘so great’, according to Beck. They would play back and listen to their jams on Page’s two-track tape recorder. The microphone would be smothered under one of the sofa’s cushions when they played. ‘I used to bash it, and it would make the best bass drum sound you ever heard!’ said Beck.

But this extra-curricular musical experimentation was not necessarily in opposition to what Page was doing on his art course at Sutton Art College: rather, these two aspects of himself complemented each other. Many years later, when asking Page about his career with Led Zeppelin, Brad Tolinski suggested that ‘the idea of having a grand vision and sticking to it is more characteristic of the fine arts than of rock music: did your having attended art school influence your thinking?’

‘No doubt about it,’ Page replied. ‘One thing I discovered was that most of the abstract painters that I admired were also very good technical draftsmen. Each had spent long periods of time being an apprentice and learning the fundamentals of classical composition and painting before they went off to do their own thing.

‘This made an impact on me because I could see I was running on a parallel path with my music. Playing in my early bands, working as a studio musician, producing and going to art school was, in retrospect, my apprenticeship. I was learning and creating a solid foundation of ideas, but I wasn’t really playing music. Then I joined the Yardbirds, and suddenly – bang! – all that I had learned began to fall into place, and I was off and ready to do something interesting. I had a voracious appetite for this new feeling of confidence.’

Despite starting his studies at Sutton, Page would, from time to time, step in during evening sessions with Cyril Davies’s and Alexis Korner’s R&B All-Stars at the Marquee Club and other London venues, such as Richmond’s Crawdaddy Club or at nearby Eel Pie Island. Soon he was offered a permanent gig as the guitarist with the R&B All-Stars, but he turned it down, worried that his illness might recur.

There was another guitar player on the scene at the time, a callow youth nicknamed Plimsolls, on account of his footwear. Although at first Plimsolls could hardly play at all, he was known to have a reasonably moneyed background that enabled him to own a new Kay guitar. He had another sobriquet, Eric the Mod, a reflection of his stylish dress sense, and he would shortly enjoy greater success when, rather like his idol Robert Johnson, he seemed to suddenly master his instrument, and he reverted to his full name: Eric Clapton.

Page recalled that one night after he had sat in with the R&B All-Stars, ‘Eric came up and said he’d seen some of the sets we’d done and told me, “You play like Matt Murphy,” Memphis Slim’s guitarist, and I said I really liked Matt Murphy and actually he was one of the ones that I’d followed quite heavily.’

Eric Clapton was not the only one to note Page’s expertise. Soon came an approach from John Gibb of the Silhouettes, a group from Mitcham, on the furthest extremes of south London. Gibb asked Page to help record some singles for EMI, starting off with a tune called ‘The Worryin’ Kind’.

The Silhouettes would later occasionally feature Page’s new friend Jeff Beck on guitar. What has always been a fascinating psychogeographical truth is that Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, Britain’s greatest and most creative rock guitarists of the 1960s, grew up within a radius of about 12 miles of each other.

Having witnessed Page’s guitar skills with the R&B All-Stars at the Marquee Club, Mike Leander, a young arranger and producer, pulled him into a studio for a stint as rhythm guitarist in late 1962. Page was moonlighting from art school – something that would become a pattern.

Leander had been alerted to go and check out Page by Glyn Johns, another Epsom boy, a couple of years older than Page who had watched him play years before and was now a tape operator. Of that first meeting, years before, Johns said: ‘One evening we had a talent night. I remember a boy in his early teens no one had seen before, who sat with his legs swinging over the front edge of the stage and played an acoustic guitar. He was pretty good, he may have even won, but I don’t think anyone in the hall that night had any idea that he was to become such an innovative force in modern music.’

‘I was really surprised,’ Page told Beat Instrumental magazine in 1965 about Leander asking him to play. ‘Before that I thought session work was a “closed shop”.

‘Mike was an independent producer then. And he wanted me to play on “Your Momma’s Out of Town” by the Carter-Lewis group. The record was released and I believe it helped him considerably in joining Decca full time.’

Soon Mike Leander had another, more prestigious session gig for Page. This studio date was with Shadows expatriates Jet Harris, a bass player, and drummer Tony Meehan. The resulting tune, ‘Diamonds’, was a number one smash, the first of a run of hits for the duo. Later, Harris and Meehan hired one John Baldwin to accompany their act on the road. Already there were glimmers of some kind of destiny at work; soon John Baldwin would metamorphose into John Paul Jones, so renamed for a solo single by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham; Baldwin’s new moniker was derived from the film John Paul Jones, a popular 1959 movie about the famed US naval commander.

Even though Harris and Meehan had departed the Shadows, it was a huge honour for the 18-year-old Page to play with the alumni of the group that, prior to the Beatles, was the biggest in the UK, largely due to the skill and charisma of Hank Marvin, their bespectacled guitarist.

‘When did I first discover Hank Marvin? When I was about 14, because in those days it was really skiffle for young kids who wanted to learn three chords and have a good time,’ Page told John Sugar on BBC Radio 4 in 2011. ‘But going past that, more into the world of the American rockabilly and rock ’n’ roll was starting to seduce us all as kids. Then you had Cliff Richard and the Drifters [as the Shadows were first known] at that time, putting forward a really, really damned good rendition of it, but it still had that sort of grit identity to it.

‘So really it was a question of seeing Hank playing with Cliff as a kid, looking at Hank on the television. He was good, but he came alive with the Shadows. I mean it was such a really, really good band and Hank was such a stylist … I mean, he was so cool. He was and still is. He had this image … He was such a fluent player … In those early years, all of us – Jeff Beck, myself, Eric Clapton – we all played things like “Apache”, “Man of Mystery”, “F.B.I.”, those sort of [Shadows] hits …

‘Hank managed to come up with this unique sound, and that sound is just so recognisable. He inspired so many guitarists in those days as kids, kids who had no idea they may even be rock stars themselves one day.’

Playing guitar with Jet Harris and Tony Meehan on live dates, along with John Baldwin, was one John McLaughlin, who had given Page some guitar lessons when McLaughlin was working in a guitar shop. ‘I would say he was the best jazz guitarist in England then, in the traditional mode of Johnny Smith and Tal Farlow,’ said Page. ‘He certainly taught me a lot about chord progressions and things like that. He was so fluent and so far ahead, way out there, and I learned a hell of a lot.’

The ‘Diamonds’ session kick-started a new career for Page, one in which he would play up to ten sessions a week, although he was still officially at Sutton Art College. For the next three and a half years, again while officially still a student, he became one of the UK’s top two guitar session players: the other was Big Jim Sullivan, and for a time the boy from Epsom, where he continued to live at his parents’ house, became known as ‘Little Jim’. Working with all manner of artists and styles, he honed his guitar playing during this period. In his early sessions he largely used a black Les Paul Custom he had played with Neil Christian. Known as ‘the fretless wonder’, and with a trio of pickups, it gave Page great tonal flexibility. When required, he also used a 1937 Cromwell archtop acoustic guitar and a Burns amplifier, or from time to time a Fender Telecaster.

In June 1963 Page was interviewed on Channel Television, ITV’s smallest franchise, broadcasting only to the 60,000 inhabitants of the Channel Islands. With his hair immaculately swept back, Page certainly looked the rocking part, yet his accent and precise, formal speech constructions suggested someone from a rather more middle-class background than his actually was. Noted for the duty-free alcohol and tobacco on offer in this UK tax haven, Jersey and Guernsey enjoyed a certain hip cachet as a holiday location: was that why Page was there?

The interview was filmed on an outdoor quayside. The first question was the set-up:

What is a session guitarist?

‘A guitarist who’s brought in to make records, not necessarily doing one-night stands, hoping they’ll get into the hit parade – only getting an ordinary fee.’

He doesn’t work for any particular singer all the time?

‘Not necessarily.’

I gather there are only a few young session guitarists like yourself: why is that?

‘Well, it seems to be quite a closed shop. The Musicians’ Union have their own chaps in and they don’t really like to get the young people in because the old boys need the work.’

So how did you become a session guitarist?

‘I don’t know. Perhaps it was because I had the feel for it.’

How long have you been playing the guitar?

‘Four years.’

Have you always been a session guitarist?

‘No, no. For the last 18 months.’

Do you play for a regular group yourself?

‘Yes: Neil Christian and the Crusaders.’ [By now Page was no longer playing with them.]

And what sort of things do you do with this group?

‘Well, we do one-night stands all over England.’

What are the big names that you have backed on disc?

‘Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, Eden Kane, Duffy Power.’

What is it like working with some of the really big names of show business?

‘Disappointing.’

Why is that?

‘Well, they don’t come up to how you expect them to be. Rather disappointing on the whole, I would say.’

That’s probably bad news for some record fans. What is your professional ambition? Do you want to be a guitarist all the time? Do you want to make your own records?

‘No, not necessarily. I’m very interested in art. I think I’d like to become an accomplished artist.’

Rather than a guitarist?

‘Yes, possibly.’

Is this a means to an end for you? Are you hoping to earn enough money through your guitar playing?

‘Yes. Yes. I’m hoping to finance my art by the guitar.’

The quality of the acts Page worked with built steadily. Carter-Lewis and the Southerners’ ‘Your Momma’s Out of Town’ was an early example. ‘He was a fast player, he knew his rock ’n’ roll and he added to that,’ said John Carter. ‘He was also quiet and a bit of an intellectual.’

John Carter and Ken Lewis were essentially songwriters, with a sub-career as backing singers: the first hit they wrote was ‘Will I What?’, the number eighteen follow-up to Mike Sarne’s 1962 novelty number one hit ‘Come Outside’. They had been persuaded to form Carter-Lewis and the Southerners to promote their material. As a session musician Page played guitar on ‘That’s What I Want’, a Carter-Lewis song that became a Top 40 hit in 1964 for the Marauders, a group from Stoke-on-Trent. Then Page briefly became an actual member of the group. Viv Prince, later drummer with the Pretty Things, played with the group while Page was with them, along with Big Jim Sullivan and drummer Bobby Graham. By 1964 Carter-Lewis and the Southerners would become the Ivy League and then magically transform into the Flower Pot Men, who in 1967 hit the UK number four slot with ‘Let’s Go to San Francisco’.

Page also played on records as diverse as ‘Walk Tall’ by Val Doonican, a kind of Irish Perry Como, and – on 6 November 1964 – with another Irish singer, Them vocalist Van Morrison, on the Belfast group’s ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go’, its B-side ‘Gloria’, and follow-up single ‘Here Comes the Night’.

The twin pillars of Them were Van Morrison and guitarist Billy Harrison. ‘We were brought over,’ said Harrison, ‘in the middle of 1964 and stuck in Decca’s West Hampstead studio to see what we had. We did “Baby, Please Don’t Go”, “Gloria” and “Don’t Stop Crying Now”, which was released as the first single and died a death.’

The sessions were produced by Bert Berns, a streetwise New Yorker who had become a songwriter and record producer of some significance; a crucial figure at Atlantic Records – he revived the career of the Drifters and brought Solomon Burke to the label – he would later run Atlantic’s BANG label, kickstarting the solo careers of Van Morrison and Neil Diamond. At first, influenced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the white songwriting team from Los Angeles who via their cartoon-like wit transformed the subject matter of rhythm and blues, Bert Berns had been a composer of considerable success, subtly lacing his tunes with hypnotic Latin influences, especially mambo. Installed in New York’s famous Brill Building, the endlessly and effortlessly enthusiastic Berns co-wrote the Isley Brothers’ ‘Twist and Shout’, Solomon Burke’s ‘Everybody Needs Somebody to Love’, The Exciters’ ‘Tell Him’, Them’s ‘Here Comes the Night’ and the McCoys’ ‘Hang On Sloopy’, among many others. (As befitted the sometimes sleazy, occasionally Mob-affiliated world of New York popular music, Bert Berns, who everyone found a fabulous human being, attractive and glamorous to those with a fondness for boho chic, was allegedly ‘connected’, and possibly even a ‘made man’. From his rarefied perspective he would have given Page interesting instruction about the US music business. At their first sessions Led Zeppelin recorded a song about him, ‘Baby Come On Home’, subtitled ‘Tribute to Bert Berns’, an exceptionally beautiful soul tune of precisely the type Berns would have produced for Atlantic, which was not released until 1993. In Page’s guitar playing on this 1968 recording you can hear his love for Bert Berns.)

It was Bert Berns’s writing of the song ‘Twist and Shout’ that had first brought him to London. Covered by the Beatles, with John Lennon’s extraordinary, searing performance taking the song to a show-stopping further level, ‘Twist and Shout’ closed Please Please Me, the Liverpool group’s first album, the number one LP in the UK for 30 weeks in 1963. Although the Beatles meant nothing in America at that time, Berns’s first royalty cheque for his song on the album was for $90,000. In October 1963 he came over to London to see what was going on, producing a handful of no-hoper acts.

Already working in the British capital was Shel Talmy. A Los Angeleno who had worked with Capitol Records, he had been hired as staff producer by Dick Rowe, the Decca head of A&R – the man who famously turned down the Beatles but redeemed himself somewhat by signing the Rolling Stones. Rowe now decided that Bert Berns might fit as producer with the Belfast act he had signed named Them.

‘Twist and Shout’ had been covered yet again, by Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, who turned it into a Top 10 UK hit for Decca Records. It was something of a revenge release, as the act had been signed by Dick Rowe in preference to the Beatles – Brian Poole and the Tremeloes were, after all, from Essex, which was far more geographically convenient for a Londoner like Rowe than Liverpool.

In London, where he and Talmy were the only American producers working, Bert Berns had secured work through Decca Records, taking on ‘Little Jimmy’ Page as his principal session guitarist, recognising his talent and befriending him. ‘With the new breed of British producers such as Mickie Most or Andrew Loog Oldham trying as hard as they could to make records that sounded American,’ wrote Berns’s biographer Joel Selvin, ‘Berns was the first American producer trying to make records that sounded British.’

The sessions with Them for Decca proved as much, the resulting recorded songs utterly unique in the resounding clarity of their sound. ‘Bert Berns was inveigled into producing the session,’ said Billy Harrison. ‘And he brought in Jimmy Page, and Bobby Graham on drums. There was much grumbling, mostly from me, because I felt we could play without these guys. Jimmy Page played the same riff as the bass, chugging along. I played the lead: I wrote the riff.

‘Bert Berns had arguments with us about the sound. I thought we were playing it okay: if someone brought in session men you took it as a bit of a sleight. I was very volatile in those days.

‘There were various rows. Jimmy Page didn’t really seem to want to talk to anybody. Just a stuck-up prick who thought he was better than the rest of the world. Sat there in silence. No conversation out of the guy. No response.’

Possibly Billy Harrison was misinterpreting the shyness that other musicians felt characterised the quiet Jimmy Page. And he may have been projecting his personal prejudices. ‘He seemed above everybody, above these Paddies. That was the days when guest houses would have a sign up: “No salesmen, no coloured, no Irish”. Page had that sort of sneering attitude, as though he was looking down on everybody. He’s a fabulous technician, but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of friendliness.’

‘Their lead vocalist, Van Morrison, was really hostile as he didn’t want session men on his recordings,’ said drummer Bobby Graham. ‘I remember the MD, Arthur Greenslade, telling him that we were only there to help. He calmed down but he didn’t like it.’

‘Whatever Morrison’s reservations, they worked well together, and Graham’s frenzied drumming at the end of “Gloria” is one of rock’s great moments,’ wrote Spencer Leigh in his Independent obituary of Graham.

And the opening guitar riff on ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ is one of the defining moments of popular music in the sixties. This was all Billy Harrison’s own work. ‘What annoyed me later,’ he said, ‘was that you would start to see how it was being said that Jimmy Page had played a blinding solo on “Baby Please Don’t Go”. I got narked about that: he never said he did it, but he never denied it.’

‘For a long time,’ said Jackie McAuley, who joined Them the next year, ‘Jimmy Page got credit for Billy Harrison’s guitar part. But he’s owned up about it.’

Bert Berns also pulled Page in for ‘Shout’, a cover of the Isley Brothers’ classic that was the debut hit for Glasgow’s Lulu & The Luvvers. And he had him add his guitar parts to her version of ‘Here Comes the Night’, a majestic version that was released prior to Them’s effort, but spent only one week in the UK charts.

Shel Talmy, a former classmate of Phil Spector at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, also loved Page’s playing, and the guitarist was equally taken with him: a studio innovator, Shel Talmy would play with separation and recording levels, techniques that Page would assiduously study.

Soon after he had arrived in London and started working for Decca, Talmy came across the guitarist: ‘Somebody mentioned that they’d heard this 17-year-old kid who was really terrific, and I went and checked him out and I used him. We got along great and he was fabulous. I thought, “This kid is really gonna go somewhere,” and I only regret that he didn’t call me when he formed Led Zeppelin. It’s a shame! I would like to have done that.

‘He got it. I mean, he was original. At that time in London there were very few really current musicians: a lot of good musicians, but kind of mired slightly in the past. There were, like, one or two good rhythm sections and that was it. I originally started using Big Jim Sullivan, who was the only other one, and then I found Jimmy, who I thought was even better because he was more with it. He was doing what I thought should be done and certainly what was being done in the States, so it was a no-brainer.’

Fitting Page together with drummer Bobby Graham, and from time to time John Baldwin on bass, the producer had a team that was highly resourceful and fast. Talmy has described Graham as ‘the greatest drummer the UK has ever produced’. While playing with Joe Brown and the Bruvvers, Graham had been approached by Brian Epstein at a gig at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton, in June 1962. Would he care to replace Pete Best in the Beatles? Epstein asked him. Graham turned down the offer, leaving the way clear for Ringo Starr.

Graham first met Page when the guitarist was playing with Neil Christian and the Crusaders; they had supported Joe Brown at a show in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. ‘I was so impressed. We became very good friends, and when I became a producer I always used Jimmy. We started a publishing company called Jimbo Music, for stuff we wrote. Jimmy wasn’t one of the most way-out and weirdest characters I ever met: he was very quiet, very shy. Jimmy had a slightly dirtier sound than Big Jim Sullivan – they used to alternate a lot. Unless the arranger wanted a certain thing they’d fight it out amongst themselves.’

Neither Page nor Bobby could sight-read music – though the guitarist would learn how to do so over the next couple of years. ‘I had to rely on what felt right,’ said Graham, who estimated that he played on 15,000 tunes in the course of his career. ‘I was loud. My trick was, if the singer took a breath, fill in. I was one of the first of the new generation coming in. Jim Sullivan was already in. Jimmy Page – same thing, couldn’t read a note but had a great feel.’

Playing sessions paid good money, £9 a time when the average working man earned little more than that a week. And, as befitted the rules of the Musicians’ Union, there would be three sessions a day: 10 a.m. until 1 p.m.; 2 till 5; and 7 until 10 p.m. During each session the musicians were expected to finish four songs, and afterwards they would be handed small brown envelopes containing their fees in cash. If you worked all three sessions, you’d come away with almost £30 for a day’s work. At the end of each evening, Page, Big Jim Sullivan and Graham would adjourn to such fashionable boîtes of the day as the Cromwellian and Annie’s Room.

‘The weirdest thing I ever did with Jimmy was Gonks Go Beat,’ reflected Graham. ‘Charlie Katz had booked us into Decca number three studio, the cathedral where they did all the classical recordings. I wasn’t supposed to be at that session – it was the only time at the wrong place. My part looked like a map of the London Underground. Jimmy came over and said, “I think we’re in the wrong place. I can’t read my part.” The musical director said, “Are you ready, gentlemen?” and there was complete silence. He looked vaguely in my direction, and I thought he was talking to somebody behind me. He said, “Bob, you’re in at the start,” and I struggled. Finally he put the baton down and came over and ran it through with me. During the session I looked across and Jimmy was thundering away. At the end of the session I said, “You looked all right, Jim.” He said, “I turned my amp off.”’

With Shel Talmy, the trio of the two Jims and Bobby worked with a seemingly endless list of aspirant acts and tunes, such as the Lancastrians’ ‘We’ll Sing in the Sunshine’, Wayne Gibson’s ‘See You Later Alligator’ and the First Gear’s ‘Leave My Kitten Alone’, a cover of a Little Willie John tune and the B-side of ‘A Certain Girl’. ‘Leave My Kitten Alone’ was deemed ‘Page’s most outstanding solo prior to “Whole Lotta Love”’ by US rock critic Greg Shaw.

On 15 January 1965, again for Talmy, Page worked with 17-year-old David Jones, the leader of the Manish Boys, on ‘I Pity the Fool’, a cover of the Bobby Bland tune, backed with ‘Take My Tip’. So as not to be mistaken for Davy Jones of the Monkees, David Jones would soon change his name to David Bowie. (In 1964 Page had been a ‘member’ of Jones/Bowie’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men, a clear publicity gimmick that succeeded in getting Jones on television news. And Page had already played with a pair of earlier David Bowie line-ups, Davy Jones’ Locker and Davy Jones and the Lower Third, both with Shel Talmy producing. And he worked on David Bowie’s first, eponymous album, for Deram Records, produced by Mike Vernon.)

‘That “I Pity the Fool” session was phenomenal,’ said Wayne Bardell, then working in Francis, Day and Hunter, a record shop on London’s Charing Cross Road, but soon to become a successful manager. ‘I was at the session at IBC as a guest of the not-yet Bowie, with Shel Talmy producing, Glyn Johns the engineer and Jimmy Page on guitar.’

‘Well, it’s definitely not going to be a hit,’ Page said, correctly, of the tune that day – it sold no more than 500 copies. But during the Manish Boys’ sessions he gave David Jones a guitar riff that the young singer didn’t yet know how to use: as David Bowie he fitted this riff into two separate songs, first on 1970’s ‘The Supermen’ on his The Man Who Sold the World album, and again on ‘Dead Man Walking’ in 1997. ‘When I was a baby,’ said David Bowie later, ‘I did a rock session with one of the bands, one of the millions of bands that I had in the sixties – it was the Manish Boys, that’s what it was – and the session guitar player doing the solo was this young kid who’d just come out of art school and was already a top session man, Jimmy Page.’

And ‘this young kid’ had every right to be very excited about the part he played on ‘I Pity the Fool’, which, despite his misgivings, was a sensationally great record that should have been a hit; this was thanks in no small part to Jimmy Page adding searing, hard-rock guitar, like something Mick Green could have provided for the Pirates.

‘I Pity the Fool’ might have flopped, but Talmy produced breakthrough singles from a pair of acts that would become two of the biggest UK groups of the 1960s: ‘You Really Got Me’, the Kinks’ third 45, and the Who’s ‘I Can’t Explain’. Page played rhythm guitar on a version of the latter track.

‘Because Shel wasn’t sure I could play a solo, he asked his favourite session guitarist, Jimmy Page, to sit in,’ wrote Pete Townshend in his autobiography. ‘And because our band had rehearsed the song with backing vocals in Beach Boys style, but not very skilfully, Shel arranged for three male session singers, the Ivy League, to chirp away in our place. Shel Talmy got a good sound, tight and commercial, and although there was no guitar feedback, I was willing to compromise to get a hit.’

In Guitar Masters: Intimate Portraits by Alan DiPerna, Townshend referred to Page as ‘a friend of mine’. The guitarists certainly had something in common: a fling with Anya Butler, the beautiful – and older – assistant to Who co-manager Chris Stamp. Townshend was initially puzzled by Page’s presence at the session: ‘I said to Jimmy, “Well, what are you doing here?” He said, “I’m here to give some weight to the rhythm guitar. I’m going to do the guitar on the overdubs.” And I said, “Oh, great.” And he said, “What are you going to play?” “A Rick 12,” I told him. And he said, “I’ll play a …” Whatever it was. It was all very friendly. It was all very convivial.’

And on ‘Bald Headed Woman’, the B-side of ‘I Can’t Explain’, it was Page who played the fuzzbox licks. On the liner notes to the Who’s Two’s Missing compilation album, Who bassist John Entwistle said: ‘The fuzz guitar droning throughout is played by Jimmy Page. The reason being, he owned the only fuzzbox in the country at that time.’

Entwistle was not exactly correct. Gibson guitars had put a fuzz-tone pedal into production in 1962, giving it the brand name of ‘Maestro Fuzz-Tone FZ-1’. Although in limited supply, the devices, imported from the US, could be found from time to time in London’s more select musical equipment stores, and it was from one of these that Page had acquired his gadget.

Like many technological developments, the origins of the fuzzbox and the dirty edge it added to a guitar’s sound – which Page would employ to his maximum advantage and could be heard to its defining fullest when played by Keith Richards on the Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ – were accidental. In 1951 Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats – actually Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm – had hit the number one slot in the US rhythm and blues chart with ‘Rocket 88’. A distinctive feature of ‘Rocket 88’ was the growling sound of Willie Kizart’s guitar. On his way from Clarksdale, Mississippi, to Sam Phillips’s Sun Studio in Memphis in 1951 to record the tune, Kizart’s amplifier had fallen from his car while a tyre was being replaced. Endeavouring to repair the resulting damage to the speaker cone, the guitarist stuffed it with paper: the marginally distorted sound that resulted became a feature of the ‘Rocket 88’ single, which is often cited as one of the first rock ’n’ roll records. From then on, guitarists sought out the means to deliver a similar grimy sound, the likes of Link Wray – who would poke holes in his loudspeaker – and Buddy Guy consciously damaging their amps to replicate such a tone. And in 1961 the great country singer Marty Robbins’s ‘Don’t Worry’ single hit number three in the US national charts, largely courtesy of his guitarist Grady Martin’s muttering instrument being played through a faulty amplifier. Martin soon put out his own single, ‘The Fuzz’, thus bestowing the malfunction with a semi-official term.

In Los Angeles a radio-station technician developed an electronic device to create such an effect for producer Lee Hazelwood, who employed it on Sanford Clark’s ‘Go On Home’ 45 in 1960. And in the same city, super session player Orville ‘Red’ Rhodes, who would become a member of the celebrated Wrecking Crew and was also an electronics whizz, developed a similar device, which was utilised by fellow Wrecking Crew guitarist Billy Strange on Ann Margret’s ‘I Just Don’t Understand’. In turn this led to Strange employing Rhodes’s invention with the instrumental surf band the Ventures, a kind of US version of the Shadows, on their late-1962 release ‘The 2,000 Pound Bee’. It was this tune especially that had come to the attention of Page; anxious to replicate its juddering sound, he had purchased his own Maestro Fuzz-Tone.

Yet it was not entirely to his satisfaction. Luckily, he already knew someone who could assist him with this. Roger Mayer was a friend from the Epsom music scene. By 1964 he was working for the Admiralty Research Laboratory in Teddington, in the Acoustical Analysis section, having developed into something of an electronics boffin. And their friendship persisted: Page and Mayer would visit each other’s homes to listen to American records. ‘Jimmy came to me,’ said Mayer, ‘when he got hold of the Maestro Fuzz and said, “It’s good but it doesn’t have enough sustain … it’s a bit staccato.” I said, “Well, I’m sure we can improve on that.” That conversation spurred me to design my first fuzzbox.’

‘I suggested that Roger should try to make something that would improve upon the distortion heard on “The 2,000 Pound Bee” by the Ventures,’ said Page. ‘He went away and came up with the first real good fuzzbox … the first thing that really generated this wonderful sustain.’

Running off a 6-volt battery, Mayer’s fuzzbox was constructed within a custom-made casing, which contained controls for gain and biasing along with a switch that would modify the tonal output. ‘Right from square one,’ said Mayer, ‘Pagey and I wanted something that sustained a lot, but then didn’t start jittering as it went away. One of the things that became very, very apparent early on was that you didn’t want nasty artefacts. It’s very easy to design a fuzzbox – anybody can do it – but to make one sound nice and retain articulation in notes, now that’s something else.’

Page’s part in the Kinks’ career is more cloudy. Although it has often been claimed that he played the iconic solo on ‘You Really Got Me’, this is not the case. ‘Jimmy did play rhythm on the first Kinks LP, and certainly did not play lead on “You Really Got Me”, which preceded the LP by several weeks, or anything else for that matter. I only brought him in to play rhythm because at the time Ray wanted to concentrate on his singing,’ said Shel Talmy. In fact, Page had already played acoustic 12-string guitar on ‘I’ve Been Driving on Bald Mountain’ and ‘I’m a Lover Not a Fighter’, on the Kinks’ eponymously titled debut album. (In 1965 Page played the solo on an instrumental version of ‘You Really Got Me’; almost identical to Dave Davies’s original guitar part, it was included on an instrumental album by the Larry Page Orchestra entitled Kinky Music.)

‘My presence at their sessions was to enable Ray Davies to wander around and virtually maintain control of everything, without having to be down in the studio all the time,’ said Page later. ‘Ray was producing those songs as much as Shel Talmy was … more so, actually, because Ray was directing them and everything. At one point, there were even three guitars playing the same riff.’

‘I’ll tell you something about Jimmy Page,’ Ray Davies told Creem magazine. ‘Jimmy Page thinks he was the first person in the world to ever put a B string where a G string should be. And for me, that’s his only claim to fame. Other than that, I think he’s an asshole … Jimmy Page and a lot of other people subsequently came to our sessions when we became hot, and I think he played rhythm 12-string on “I’m a Lover Not a Fighter”, and he played tambourine on “Long Tall Shorty”.’

In fact, Page did not ‘put a B string where a G string should be’. He told Melody Maker that he would substitute the B string with a top E. Rather than the conventional E string he would swap it for a banjo octave string, either tuned to G or A: ‘You’ll get a raving, authentic blues sound that you hear on most pop records with that string-bending sound.’

‘I didn’t really do that much on the Kinks records,’ Page later admitted. ‘I know I managed to get a couple of riffs in on their album, but I can’t really remember. I know that Ray didn’t really approve of my presence. The Kinks just didn’t want me around when they were recording. It was Shel Talmy’s idea. One aspect of being in the studio while potential hits were being made was the press – too many writers were making a big fuss about the use of session men. Obviously I wasn’t saying anything to the press but it just leaked out … and that sort of thing often led to considerable bad feeling.’

For most of these sessions Page employed a Gibson Les Paul Custom, with the frets filed down ‘to produce a very smooth playing action … it just sounded so pure and fantastic,’ he told John Tobler and Stuart Grundy for BBC’s Radio 1.

Despite the griping of Ray Davies and Billy Harrison, Page played on a number of records that were significant cornerstones of mid-sixties British pop – outright classics, some of them. These included Shirley Bassey’s theme song for Goldfinger, the third James Bond film, on which he played with Big Jim Sullivan and Vic Flick, another renowned UK session guitarist – the tune was a Top 10 US hit. Then there was Tom Jones’s ‘It’s Not Unusual’, number one in the UK and Top Ten in the US; Petula Clark’s ‘Downtown’, a US number one; Kathy Kirby’s ‘Secret Love’; Marianne Faithfull’s ‘As Tears Go By’; P. J. Proby’s ‘Hold Me’; the Merseys’ ‘Sorrow’, covered by David Bowie on his Pin Ups album; the Nashville Teens’ ‘Tobacco Road’; Brian Poole and the Tremeloes’ ‘Candy Man’; Twinkle’s ‘Terry’, a motorcycle-death record in the tradition of the Shangri-Las’ ‘Leader of the Pack’ that was number four in the UK charts at Christmas 1964 and banned by the BBC for being in ‘poor taste’; ‘Baby What’s Wrong’ and its B-side ‘Be a Sect Maniac’, the first single from the Downliners Sect, a wild R&B outfit who made the Pretty Things seem like Cliff Richard.

As it had been with Bert Berns, much of Page’s session work was for the Decca label, at their studios in Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead, a plain, nondescript building, built like an office block.

He worked extensively with Dave Berry, a Decca solo star from Sheffield whose first hit had been a cover of his namesake Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis Tennessee’. He was one of British rock ’n’ roll’s first anti-heroes, a true original. ‘I noticed how strippers used to tease the audience in Hamburg,’ he said of his time playing the circuit in the German port. So almost an entire Dave Berry set might consist of him singing his songs from behind the stage curtain, with only his microphone and hand tantalisingly visible.

When Elvis Presley covered Arthur Crudup’s ‘My Baby Left Me’, Scotty Moore’s guitar licks had proved such an inspiration for the teenage Jimmy Page. Now Page took the lead guitar part himself on Dave Berry’s sensational version of the song, with – as was customary – Big Jim Sullivan on rhythm.

Berry’s ‘My Baby Left Me’ only grazed the Top 40, but his sultry ‘The Crying Game’ was a Top 5 tune when it was released in July 1964. However, this time it was Big Jim Sullivan who took the lead part, with Page providing rhythm; on drums, as per usual, was Bobby Graham. There was a picture in the music press, recalled Berry, of Page standing next to him, along with the engineer Glyn Johns, listening to a playback of ‘The Crying Game’. ‘Many of the session musicians would have left as soon as they had done their part,’ said Berry. ‘But Jimmy Page, being a proper player, would listen to his own part. He would sometimes want to do it again. Mind you, at the time Jimmy was in Carter-Lewis and the Southerners: by 5 p.m. he’d be gone to do a gig.’

The specific session players he used, said Berry, ‘were really into it. I must have done a quarter of my career with Decca with that line-up: 25 to 30 songs. Mike Smith would call me with the studio booked. But if Big Jim and Jimmy Page were not available we’d cancel it and wait.’ There were at least four tracks on which Page played harmonica: ‘C.C. Rider’, for example, and Buster Brown’s ‘Fannie Mae’, which relies on a harmonica riff. Meanwhile, Page played both lead guitar and the harmonica part on ‘Don’t Gimme No Lip Child’, the B-side of ‘The Crying Game’.

Was Page, who was only 20 years old, anxious to impose his personality in the studio? Not at all, said Berry: ‘He was very quiet. The true professional players don’t have any edge to them anyway. The bigger the artist, the less edge they have to them. These two guitarists were really great players. And they didn’t stick to how this stuff was written out. Big Jim would be improvising his solo. You could hear him doing a vocal counter-melody. We’d say, “Leave that in, it’s real.” You could work with these guys and suggest things. In 2010, when I met him again, Jimmy seemed exactly the same – a normal and quiet person. I was very proud of my output: it had a vast range. So when Jimmy Page was in the biggest band in the world I was very proud of my association with them. When I’d meet up with him I’d feel very proud, like a child.’

On 27 March 1964 Page played heavy fuzz-tone guitar on Carter and Lewis’s ‘Skinny Minnie’.

By now this was becoming customary practice for the guitarist. Again, in early 1964, on a session for Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, Page augmented his guitar with his Gibson Maestro Fuzz-Tone on a single that was released in October that year, ‘Dracula’s Daughter’, and its B-side ‘Come Back Baby’, a studio date engineered by the legendary Joe Meek in his tiny Holloway Road set-up. (David Sutch, as his name was registered at birth, was an eccentric English rocker who appeared onstage in a coffin, sometimes dressed as Jack the Ripper – also the title of an earlier Decca single on which Page played – and based his act on the American Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, who had written and recorded ‘I Put a Spell on You’. Sutch’s Savages proved a fertile training ground, employing – among many others – guitarists Jeff Beck and Ritchie Blackmore and drummer Carlo Little, who had played briefly with the Rolling Stones prior to Charlie Watts. In 1963 Sutch stood as a candidate in a UK by-election, representing the Monster Raving Loony Party, the beginning of a career as a perennially unsuccessful Parliamentary candidate. Later, in 1964, Sutch founded Radio Sutch, a pirate broadcaster based in a wartime fort near the Thames estuary. Before the decade was out, Lord Sutch would reappear in the life of Jimmy Page.)

In September 1964 Decca Records paid for the dynamic, soulful American singer Brenda Lee, who was signed to the label, to come to London to record at Broadhurst Gardens. ‘She said to me, “I’ve come here to make a record with the British sound.” She felt she wouldn’t get the same sound in Nashville because they’re only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago,’ said producer Mickie Most to Rolling Stone magazine.

The tune chosen to acquaint Little Miss Dynamite with the zeitgeist was ‘Is It True’, another song written by Page’s musical allies John Carter and Ken Lewis. The guitarist used an early wah-wah pedal on the record, which hit the same number 17 spot on both sides of the Atlantic.

By now Pete Calvert, Page and Rod Wyatt’s guitar-playing buddy from Epsom, had rented a London flat, 4 Neate House in Pimlico. Page would drop in and sometimes stay over if he had an early gig the next day. Soon Chris Dreja of the Yardbirds moved in to one of the rooms.

A desire to improve upon and expand his natural abilities seemed second nature to Page. Having bought a sitar almost as soon as he learned of the instrument’s existence, he became one of its earliest exponents in the UK. ‘Let’s put it this way,’ he said. ‘I had a sitar before George Harrison. I wouldn’t say I played it as well as he did, though. I think George used it well … I actually went to see a Ravi Shankar concert one time, and to show you how far back this was, there were no young people in the audience at all – just a lot of older people from the Indian embassy. This girl I knew was a friend of his and she took me to see him after the concert. She introduced him to me and I explained that I had a sitar, but did not know how to tune it. He was very nice to me and wrote down the tunings on a piece of paper.’ On 7 May 1966 Melody Maker, the weekly British music paper that considered itself intellectually superior to the rest of the pop press, ran an article entitled ‘How About a Tune on the Old Sitar?’, with much of its information taken from Page.

This questing side of him surfaced again in his efforts to improve his abilities on the acoustic guitar. ‘Most great guitarists are either great on electric or great on acoustic,’ said Alan Callan, who first met Page in 1968 and in 1975 became UK vice president of Swan Song Records, Led Zeppelin’s label. ‘But Jim is equally great on both, because he is always faithful to the nature of the instrument. He told me that, quite early on, he’d gone to a session and the producer had said, “Can you do it on acoustic rather than electric?” And he said he came out of that session thinking he hadn’t nailed it, so he went home and practised acoustic for two months.’

The first half of the 1960s was a boom period for UK folk music, with several emerging virtuosos, revered by young men learning the guitar or – in Page’s case – always eager to improve. John Renbourn, Davey Graham – who incorporated Eastern scales into his guitar playing – and Bert Jansch were the holy triumvirate of these players; Page was especially turned on by Jansch, who introduced him to ‘the alternate guitar tunings and finger-style techniques he made his own in future Zeppelin classics such as “Black Mountain Side” and “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp”,’ according to Brad Tolinski in his book Light and Shade.

‘He was, without a doubt, the one who crystallised so many things,’ Page said. ‘As much as Hendrix had done on the electric, I really think he’s done on the acoustic.’ Al Stewart, a folk guitarist and singer, and, like Jansch, a Glaswegian, explained to Page that Jansch’s guitar was tuned to D-A-G-G-A-D – open tuning, as it was known. Page started to employ this himself.