Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography

After Page had acquired his Höfner President, his parents paid for lessons from a guitar tutor. But the teenager, anxious to play the hits of the day, found himself mired in learning to sight-read; soon he abandoned the lessons, preferring to attempt to learn to play by ear. Later he would appreciate that his impatience had been an error, finally picking up the skill of reading music in the mid-1960s.

‘Rock Island Line’, the tune that Wyatt had been playing when Page approached him, was a Top 10 hit in 1956 for Lonnie Donegan on both sides of the Atlantic – in the UK alone the record sold over a million copies. The song was an interpretation of the great bluesman Leadbelly’s own version, and it became the flagship for skiffle music.

Skiffle, a peculiarly British grassroots companion movement to rock ’n’ roll that required no expensive equipment, was played on guitars but also on homemade and ‘found’ instruments. Donegan, a member of Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen, would play with a guitar, washboard and tea-chest bass during intervals at Colyer’s traditional jazz sets. In 1957 the BBC launched its first ‘youth’ programme, Six-Five Special, with a skiffle title song. The craze swept Britain at an astonishing rate: it was estimated that in the UK there was a minimum of 30,000 youngsters – maybe almost twice that – playing the musical form. Across the country groups were created: John Lennon’s Quarrymen were a skiffle group that would lead to the formation of the Beatles.

In accord with this spirit of the age, Page formed such a skiffle group, which his parents permitted to rehearse in their home. Really, this ‘group’ was little more than a set of likeminded friends, sharing their small amounts of knowledge about this new upstart form. Yet they seemed bestowed with a measure of blessing: in 1957, with Page just 13 years old, the James Page Skiffle Group, following an initial audition, won a spot on an early Sunday evening children’s BBC television show, All Your Own, hosted by Huw Wheldon, a 41-year-old rising star (11 years later Wheldon would become director of BBC television). The slot in which they were to be featured was one hinged around ‘unusual hobbies’. How did they get this television slot? By chance, runs part of their appearance’s myth: the show was looking for a skiffle act, and someone working on it was from Epsom and had heard of Page’s band. But there is also a suggestion that Page’s ever-supportive mother wrote a letter to the programme, suggesting her son’s group.

Unfortunately, the membership of the James Page Skiffle Group has largely been lost in time. For the television appearance, a boy named David Hassall, or perhaps Housego, was involved. Not only did his family own a car, but his father possessed a full set of drums, which David endeavoured to play.

On a day during the school holidays when the show was to be recorded, Page and Williams caught a train up to London to the BBC studio. Page’s mother had phoned William’s father to ask if his son would accompany him to the recording. ‘The electric guitar itself was already heavy enough for him to carry, but the amplifier was like a little lead box and he clearly could not carry both.’

At around 4 p.m. Huw Wheldon appeared, fresh from a boozy media lunch, and asked: ‘Where are these fucking kids then?’

His hair Brylcreemed into a rock ’n’ roller’s quiff and his shirt collar crisply fitted in the crew-neck of his sweater, Page – his Höfner President guitar almost bigger than himself – led his musical cohorts through a pair of songs, ‘Mama Don’t Want to Skiffle Anymore’ and ‘In Them Old Cottonfields Back Home’. (Page had also prepared an adaptation of Bill Doggett’s ‘Honky Tonk’, but he was – rightly – doubtful he would get to play it, as he felt certain they would need him to sing.) After the performance, he was interviewed by Wheldon, and, with an irony now all too evident, Page declared to the avuncular presenter that his intention was to make his career in the field of ‘biological research’, modestly declaring himself not sufficiently intelligent to become a doctor. His ‘biological research’ remark certainly was not glib; Page wanted, he told Wheldon, to find a cure for ‘cancer, if it isn’t discovered by then’. Clearly this was a serious, thoughtful young man.

You can only imagine the confidence that this TV appearance must have engendered in the boy who had just become a teenager: in 1957 no one knew anyone who had appeared on the magical new medium of television.

Having been watched by an audience of hundreds of thousands at the age of 13, why not carry on as he had begun? Success might not have been instant, but within four years Jimmy Page would become a professional musician.

In the meantime, BBC television had finally begun to give limited exposure to rock ’n’ roll, and Buddy Holly appeared on its solitary television channel. ‘When he was killed in a plane crash in 1959,’ said David Williams, ‘I recall that Pete, Jim and I put on black ties and went to the local paper shop to buy all the newspapers that carried photos and obituaries of one of our heroes.’

In his woodwork class Page carved a reasonable simulacrum of a Fender Jazz Bass, modelling it on the instrument used by Jerry Lee Lewis’s bassist in the film Disc Jockey Jamboree. ‘It sounded good enough,’ said Williams.

‘To say Jim was dedicated would be an understatement. I hardly ever saw him when he wasn’t strapped to his guitar trying to figure out some new licks.’ Williams noted that Page’s principal inspiration was no longer Elvis Presley or the anguished Gene Vincent, but the ostensibly more wholesome Ricky Nelson. This should not be a surprise: Nelson’s upbeat rockabilly tunes featured the acclaimed James Burton on guitar, as much an inspiration to Page as Scotty Moore. Ten years later Burton would be leader of Elvis Presley’s TCB band, playing with the King until Elvis’s death in 1977.

‘Those old Nelson records might seem pretty tame now, but back then the guitar solos (including the ones played by Joe Maphis) were cutting-edge stuff and greatly impressed my pal,’ said Williams. ‘I remember that he struggled for a long time with the instrumental break of “It’s Late”, but eventually someone showed him the fingerings he was after and he happily moved on.’

Now Page set about forming a group that played more than skiffle. He found a boy who played rhythm guitar – though with little of the feel of rock ’n’ roll – in nearby Banstead, and then he found a pianist.

Although lacking either a drummer or a name, the trio were, after a number of practice sessions, deemed sufficiently ready by Page to play their first show at the Comrades Club, a drinking establishment for war veterans in Epsom town centre.

The gig was not a colossal success. In fact, Williams said it was ‘a complete shambles’. Certainly, it didn’t help that the three musicians lacked a drummer to propel the tempo; later in his career Page would ensure he played with the very best drummer he could find.

‘As rock ’n’ roll progressed,’ said Wyatt, ‘Jimmy and I added pickups to our guitars; we were going electric. Pete Calvert, a left-handed guitarist and friend of Jimmy’s and mine, had a small early Watkins amplifier and I had a Selmer. Jimmy had a bigger Selmer, a sign of what was to come? All three of us were always around each other’s houses banging rock ’n’ roll. Tommy Steele was making headlines as Britain’s first rock ’n’ roller, and although that was cool we preferred the grittier sound of the American artists such as Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps and, of course, Elvis. And for Jimmy and me, the sound made by Gene Vincent’s lead guitarist, Cliff Gallup: that was the style and guitar sound we loved the best in those days.’

Page knew something had to change. At an electronics trade fair at London’s Earls Court Exhibition Centre, he watched a young schoolboy called Laurie London stand up to sing on one of the stands. (Soon London would be at the top of the charts, in both the UK and USA, with his interpretation of the gospel song ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’.) Page noticed that the guitarist in London’s backing group was playing a Fender Telecaster, the solid-body guitar he truly coveted that he had seen Buddy Holly playing on television. After the performance, Page spoke with London’s guitarist, took the Telecaster in his hands and played ‘Go Go Go (Down The Line)’, a Roy Orbison tune covered by Ricky Nelson, with Page’s idol James Burton on the guitar parts.

Fender Telecasters, made in the United States, were extremely pricey. Far more affordable, and on sale in London’s musical-instrument shops, was the Futurama Grazioso, a Fender copy replete with tremolo arm, manufactured in Czechoslovakia. Page acquired a second-hand version of this instrument.

Concert venues across the United Kingdom were responding to the new youth market for rock ’n’ roll. By 1958 Epsom’s Ebbisham Hall, little more than a church-hall-type building, had been renamed the ‘Contemporary Club’ for the rock ’n’ roll events it put on each Friday night.

But with another group with whom he briefly played, Page would not even get as far as the Contemporary Club. At around the age of 14, Page briefly became a member of a fledgling local act called Malcolm Austin and the Whirlwinds. On lead vocals was the aforementioned Austin. Tony Busson played bass; Stuart Cockett was on rhythm guitar; there was a drummer named Tom whose surname has evaporated with time; and ‘James Page’, as he was billed, played lead guitar. It was Wyatt who had introduced the various musicians to each other. In 1958 Malcolm Austin and the Whirlwinds played at Busson’s school Christmas concert, a set largely consisting of covers of Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis tunes; they played no more than another couple of dates.

Busson, who was two years older than the group’s guitarist, said that ‘James’ Page was ‘very trendy: Italian jackets and Italian shoes – very pointed. Very cool in his tight jeans and trousers, but very baby-faced. We would go round to his house with our acoustic guitars and listen to his 45s and albums. His mum was always very receptive. She’d give us soft drinks. All we really talked about were guitars and pop music. When I first met Jimmy he only had a semi-acoustic Höfner. Then he got a solid electric, a Futurama Grazioso. He was a great fan of Gene Vincent and the Bluecaps, and also of Scotty Moore. I think he liked anything that was a bit complicated and a bit different.’

The guitarist’s home, remembered Busson, was ‘very lower middle-class.’ But Page struck him as ‘very arty: I thought if he didn’t have a career as a musician he’d be an artist. He left school at 15. I thought he would make it. But I also wondered, “How are you going to support yourself in the interim?”’ Soon Busson would receive an answer.

For Epsom also had larger venues in which more prestigious acts would perform. Wyatt recalled the buzz when a genuine professional rock ’n’ roll show came to Epsom – creating an atmosphere like that of a circus or fair arriving in town. The concert was held at the local swimming baths. ‘Top of the bill,’ said Wyatt, ‘was a singer, one Danny Storm, whose claim to fame was being Cliff Richard’s double. He was a dead ringer. The second headliner was the Buddy Britten Trio. Buddy was a Buddy Holly lookalike. Both Jimmy and I went along to the show, which was very exciting at the time. Halfway through, the compère announced an open-mike talent show; Jimmy and I entered. We both got to play a guitar. I did “Mean Woman Blues” and Jimmy did an instrumental, either “Peter Gunn” or “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”.’

Undaunted by the experience of his show at the Comrades Club, Page had persevered and found a drummer and come up with a name: the Paramounts. And at the end of the summer of 1959 he had a show booked for the Paramounts at the Contemporary Club, supporting Red E. Lewis and the Redcaps, a London group modelled largely on the act, antics and material of Gene Vincent and His Bluecaps.

Although the Paramounts even had a vocalist of sorts, their material that night largely consisted – in the manner of the time – of an instrumental set; Page’s strident guitar playing on Johnny and the Hurricanes’ recent hit ‘Red River Rock’ was notable, impressing Red E. Lewis. Lewis informed his group’s manager, one Chris Tidmarsh, of this guitarist’s prowess: at the end of the Red E. Lewis and the Red Caps’ set, Page came out onstage, borrowed the solid-body guitar of Red Caps guitarist Bobby Oats and played a few guitar parts, including some Chuck Berry solos.

From the rear of the hall Page was watched by his parents. Did they believe he would grow out of this silly interest? He told me: ‘No. Actually they were very encouraging. They may not have understood a lot of what I was doing, but nevertheless they had enough confidence that I knew what I was doing: that I wasn’t just a nut or something …’

Also watching the Paramounts that night, from nearer the stage than his parents, was Sally Anne Upwood, Page’s girlfriend at school, a relationship that lasted for a couple of years. Older than her boyfriend, Sally Anne was in Wyatt’s class and able to observe Page’s musical development.

Jimmy Page and the Paramounts played further shows at the Contemporary Club; they supported such acts as the Freddie Heath Combo, who would later be known as Johnny Kidd & the Pirates, one of the greatest English rock ’n’ roll groups. And when Bobby Oats left Red E. Lewis and the Redcaps at Easter 1959, Chris Tidmarsh invited 15-year-old Page to audition, above a pub in Shoreditch, East London. He got the gig, at £20 a week.

Clearly Page’s life was expanding – philosophically, as well as musically. ‘My interest in the occult started when I was about 15,’ he told me in 1977. At this time in his life, when still at school, he read Aleister Crowley’s Magick in Theory and Practice, a lengthy treatise on Crowley’s system of Western occult practice; not an easy book to first comprehend, and a clear indication of the full extent of Page’s precocious intelligence. The book struck into his core, and he said to himself, ‘Yes, that’s it. My thing: I’ve found it.’ From that age he was on his course.

2

FROM NELSON STORM TO SESSION PLAYER

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.