Jimmy Page

My first guitar was like a campfire guitar. And it was left at a house that my family had moved into... and the guitar was at the house. It was all strung up. It's normally something that would be beyond a bit of rubbish.

I'm involved in all things musical. It's all consuming, even if it doesn't necessarily manifest as a record or a concert.

The album's not dead for me; I still buy vinyl albums.

When I was still in the Yardbirds, our producer, Mickie Most, would always try to get us to record all these horrible songs. During one session, we recorded 'Ten Little Indians,' an extremely silly song that featured a truly awful brass arrangement.

Isolation doesn't bother me at all. It gives me a sense of security.

If you listen to our work, from 'Led Zeppelin I' to 'Coda,' it's just a fantastic textbook.

I seem to have tireless energy when I get involved in things, on an almost OCD basis, which is a good way to do things because if you're gonna do something, you'd better make sure you do it well.

I do not recall ever seeing Spirit perform live.

Listening to John Bonham is just a sheer celebration of his playing - it can't help but fill you with so much joy.

I wasn't into jazz so much - I preferred things raw.

You get a chance like that maybe once in your lifetime, and you are lucky to sustain it over that period of time. It doesn't mean to say that whatever I do in the future has no substance to it - I may present some new material I've got, and there are definitely new angles of doing it - but I'm not looking to recreate another Led Zeppelin.

Spirit is a band I really love.

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.

Jack White is an extraordinary person because he's like a three-dimensional chess player. He thinks so far ahead.

There is no point in putting out 'The Complete BBC Sessions,' and someone's growling that you missed something.

Traveling the world was a constant thing, rich with experiences. But all of it was relative to being able to play live onstage and really stretch out.

It was an extraordinary connection, the synergy within the band. There was an area of ESP between Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, John Bonham, and myself.

Because we spent so much time in the States in the beginning, we weren't able to do so much in England. It was slower catching up. And we didn't have radio here like what was called underground radio over there. So we got these little slots on the BBC.

There's such a currency to Led Zeppelin, or the members of Led Zeppelin. If I put it to you this way, on the run-up to the O2 concert, the only music that we played was music of Led Zeppelin - the past catalog stuff; that's what we played on the way towards shaping up the set list for that. But we played really, really well.

I wasn't on 'You Really Got Me,' but I did play on the Kinks' records.

I really love playing live - it's such a gas.

I consider descending chromatic lines and arpeggiated chords basic skills learned by any student of the guitar.

I was really competitive with myself.

I love playing. If it was down to just that, it would be utopia. But it's not. It's airplanes, hotel rooms, limousines, and armed guards standing outside rooms. I don't get off on that part of it at all.

I really don't listen to Led Zeppelin that much.

Let me explain something about guitar playing. Everyone's got their own character, and that's the thing that's amazed me about guitar playing since the day I first picked it up. Everyone's approach to what can come out of six strings is different from another person, but it's all valid.

Because somebody plays guitar, why does it mean they need a singer? Because people already have this image of things? No, I'll put my music together, then think about whether I need to embellish it with a singer.

I think it was that we were really seasoned musicians. We had serious roots that spanned different cultures, obviously the blues.

From meeting Robert Plant, John Bonham, and John Paul Jones, teaming up, rehearsing, playing selected gigs outside of Britain, coming back into Olympic Studios to record the first album, and then going to America, which we crack open like a nut with the debut record - all that happened, literally, within months.

I can't think of a greater guitar icon than someone who has the musical intellect to change what was there before and take music in another direction. That's a guitar hero for me.

I do know there's a lot of music where Led Zeppelin has been leant on. We didn't do anything about it. And I wouldn't want to, either.

How many guitars do I have? I don't know. I don't know! But I think the answer to it is, more than I can play at any one point in time. Even though I do have double necks, so I can try and play more than at one time!

I believe every guitar player inherently has something unique about their playing. They just have to identify what makes them different and develop it.

I don't think the critics could understand what we were doing.

John Peel made his reputation with his radio show and his record label, Dandelion, by championing the underdog.

If you write a written book, you're gonna get slowed up by lawyers wanting to see what you say about this person, that person - I couldn't be bothered with it.

You shouldn't really have to use EQ in the studio if the instruments sound good. It should all be done with microphones and microphone placement.

Led Zeppelin isn't done yet, quite clearly, because every year since 1968 there's been new fans.

I have one of those gravel-y voices with no range to it.

Led Zeppelin wasn't a corporate entity.

If I pick up a guitar, I don't practise scales. I never have. I come up with something I haven't done before, new approaches to chord sequences, riffs, rhythms, so it becomes composition. It's not like the music I'm doing is just a single thread.

'Boogie Chillen',' by John Lee Hooker - that is a riff.

If I'm going to put my image into something, I'll put my image into something that I actually feel like I'd like to do.

Led Zeppelin was a band that would change things around substantially each time it played... We were becoming tighter and tighter, to the point of telepathy.

Every album that I've attempted, I suppose, has been different - it's bound to be.

I've played guitar in so many different styles, and I want to revisit them all.

The Yardbirds sort of disbanded, and I was disappointed because I thought what we were doing was really good. I thought we were really onto something. I thought I was really onto something with these ideas that I had.

Almost the moment he died, they put him in Playboy as one of the greatest drummers, which he was - there's no doubt about it. There's never been anybody since. He's one of the greatest drummers that ever lived.

I'm just looking for an angel with a broken wing.

In the 1960s and into the '70s, everyone in their own way was trying to open up the musical horizon. There shouldn't be a wall that you're going toward and bouncing off.

I don't really know anything about sales figures, to be honest with you.

I prefer to hear an artist's work and what they can do, so as far as I'm concerned, I'd get a lot more out of a collection of songs to be able to understand what the musician is doing.

We were lucky in the days of Led Zeppelin. Each album was different. We didn't have to continue a formula or produce a certain number of singles. Because, in those days, radio was still playing albums. That was really good.

The fourth album encapsulated some remarkable music that was really groundbreaking. We were able to have something like 'When the Levee Breaks,' which, sonically, was very menacing. But then you had the flip side: something like 'Going to California,' which is really intimate.

It's good to be in a position to know that I've inspired musicians, from what I've learned to lay down personally, and collectively with Led Zeppelin.

I don't think drums had ever sounded so big until Led Zeppelin's first album.

You'll find so many of the guitarists from the '60s will all say Lonnie Donegan was the influence.

I'm always looking for the creative spark. Always.

I've never mastered the guitar. Either I was playing it, or it was playing me; it depends how you look at it. As a kid, the only things I had to do was go to school, do my homework, and play guitar.

The passing of John Bonham... Let's just put it... Before we say, 'the passing of John Bonham,' the introduction of John Bonham on the first album and 'Good Times Bad Times,' it changes drumming overnight.

That's one of the problems with the Zeppelin stuff. It sounds ridiculous on MP3. You can't hear what's there properly.

Every musician wants to do something which will hold up for a long time, and I guess we did it with 'Stairway to Heaven.'

The only way to have time is to shut down and then do what you want to do.

I always felt if we were going in to do an album, there should already be a lot of structure already made up so we could get on with that and see what else happened.

Time sometimes passes quite quickly.

I am very good at remembering music and am absolutely certain that I never heard 'Taurus' until 2014.

The Yardbirds folded in 1968, and within a handful of months, Led Zeppelin was not only a band but also a very successful one.

The instruments that bleed into each other are what creates the ambience. Once you start cleaning everything up, you lose it. You lose that sort of halo that bleeding creates. Then if you eliminate the halo, you have to go back and put in some artificial reverb, which is never as good.

In the wake of the San Francisco scene, ears were alive. It was a listening generation.

Because Led Zeppelin weren't having to worry about doing singles, each time we went in to record, it was a body of work for an album. So you could get the shift and the movement forwards as opposed to having to be rooted back to a single that might have been done a year ago.

But to put out a greatest hits on one CD was totally impossible, I just couldn't do it. The best compromise was to put out two CDs - Early Days - which is what it is - and Latter Days.

I can understand why we got bad reviews. We went right over people's heads. One album would follow another and would have nothing to do with what we'd done before. People didn't know what was going on.

The benchmark of quality I go for is pretty high.

I don't really want to go on about my personal beliefs or my involvement in magic. I'm not interested in turning anybody on to anybody that I'm turned on to.

We weren't making money in the Yardbirds.

'Communication Breakdown' - it was punchy and direct, with a real attitude that was different to other bands going around.

The one person who's disappeared out of the business is the A&R man. Because the listener at home becomes the A&R man. He's the one who chooses what tracks he wants on the album. And that's cool.

I'm not trying to be flippant here, but I just play the guitar, don't I? That is my characteristic, and it's my identity as you hear it.

Certainly, as a guitarist, I was aware of descending chromatic lines and arpeggios long before 1968.

I'm pretty loyal to my guitars, you know, but then they're pretty loyal to me, too.

I may not believe in myself, but I believe in what I'm doing.

I'm not a guitar hero.

The Stones are great and always have been. Jagger's lyrics are just amazing. Right on the ball every time.

I played guitar all my life, all the way through the Yardbirds, but I knew that for me, this was going to be a guitar vehicle, because that's what I wanted it to be. There is no way I would play guitar like a tour de force like I did in Led Zeppelin.

My influences were the riff-based blues coming from Chicago in the Fifties - Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Billy Boy Arnold records.

I always believed in the music we did and that's why it was uncompromising.

In the Led Zeppelin shows of the Sixties and Seventies, it was the same numbers every night, but they were constantly in a state of flux. If I played something good, really substantial, I'd stick it in again.

You want that - peers respecting what you're doing.

With Led Zeppelin, it has always been that mystique of how the music is done - how it works, why it works.

That's exactly why I came into music in the first place: to be inspired by what I hear to make it something else, to make it my own. That's how culture, creativity, moves, isn't it?

I always want to do my very best, and it's frustrating to have something hold me back.

I would say New York, Chicago, Memphis, and Los Angeles were my favorites.

From the first album, Led Zeppelin was always going to be a totally new approach from what had gone before - whether it was approaching the blues or folk music like 'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You': nothing existed like that.

My vocation is more in composition really than anything else - building up harmonies using the guitar, orchestrating the guitar like an army, a guitar army.

Right from the first time we went to America in 1968, Led Zeppelin was a word-of-mouth thing. You can't really compare it to how it is today.

My guitar playing touches so many different areas of the form, but the important thing is what it represents across the form.

The re-releases have more than doubled the amount of Led Zeppelin work out there. I wanted it done authoritatively, 'cause I was the one writing the stuff; I was the producer and mixer. I don't think it's any more weird than writing your autobiography.

The thing about Led Zeppelin was that it was always four musicians at the top of their game, but they could play like a band.

If people want to find things, they find them themselves.

I wanted to emulate music from America - young punks playing rock n' roll is what it was. I read part of Keith Richards' autobiography, and it was totally parallel with me, learning from American records.