Growing up, Jimmy Page felt like there were two sides to life. “On one side of it, everything is very quaint and old-fashioned,” he said. “And suddenly there’s this whole explosion of adrenaline, music and attitude.”
Somehow, with a head and a heart firmly rooted in the one side that gave him all meaning, Page embraced music like a prophecy, never really questioning where it came from or why it made so much sense.
“Whether I wanted to be a musician or not, I was going to be one,” he once said. The only reason these words came through without an egotistical edge was that they were actually true.
In fact, Page couldn’t have avoided it if he tried. One of the most pivotal moments when he was younger – about eight years old – was when he lived in Feltham, and he went with his parents to a neighbour’s house just down the other side of the street. The neighbour had a stereo set-up and started playing sound effects through it, like trains passing by, the kind that a young Page felt enthralled by at the time.
It was also one of the very first times he felt a connection to a different kind of music – classical – learning the way its structures and melodies cut deep, even as young as he was. “There’s absolutely no doubt that had a serious effect on me,” he told Louder. Elsewhere, he was surrounded by guitars and other instruments everywhere he went – but when he moved from Feltham to Epsom, that’s when it truly seemed like fate intervened.
“There was a guitar left behind in our new house by the previous owners,” he recalled. “And that was like a really weird intervention, where the guitar sort of found me.”
Deeming it his “excalibur story”, he explained how this flowered into a domino effect where music just found its way everywhere, triggering a deep-seated love that eventually led him to the one thing there wouldn’t be a cure for: rock ‘n’ roll.
“Whether I wanted to be a musician or not, I was going to be one,” he said. “But yes, I was fascinated by the whole process of being enveloped by sound and being part of it. And also, being in a choir, there’s the whole ambience of it. It’s funny how I was picking it up as a kid. And once it came to the point of hearing rock’n’roll coming from America, it was just a youth explosion of music.”
Continuing, “You’re listening to all this stuff, and it’s like it came from another planet. And I had a guitar sitting in the house, untuned; nobody had ever played it. And then there was a connection I made with this friend, Rod, at school, who showed me a few chords. […] And that was it. Once I heard rock ’n’ roll, I was infected by it, really, and there wasn’t going to be a cure. I didn’t wanna be cured.”
By the time Page was more than ready for his overdue moment, he’d likely expected to find a group of musicians who would help to support him into his next venture, not knowing that he’d still be learning. Especially when the world gifted him a certain Robert Plant, John Bonham and John Paul Jones, who brought back that magic he felt when he was a little kid – that magic that wasn’t just about the clinical process of making music but creating things built on emotional collaboration, where everybody saw things others were never really all that capable of.