Disco Duck Posted July 24, 2015 Share Posted July 24, 2015 Why does Page wear sunglasses indoors? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kucaguy Posted July 25, 2015 Share Posted July 25, 2015 This Evening on the National news CBC (Canada), there will be an interview with Jimmy Page. No details but the promo claims it will be revealing. You can stream it on CBC.ca. between 9-10pm EST... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ross62 Posted July 25, 2015 Author Share Posted July 25, 2015 Jimmy Page on Led Zeppelin: ‘Who else but me would have the authority to do this?’ The band’s founder has just finished years of work on their studio back catalogue, with no little relief. And although he appreciates a modern mash-up of their music, he says we will never see the like of Led Zeppelin again Next Image More Images The man Rolling Stone magazine has described with a straight typeface as the pontiff of power riffing is chatting about William Butler Yeats and Edna O’Brien. Jimmy Page knows it’s somewhat off point, but when he hears he’s talking with The Irish Times he’s up for deviations. “There was all that celebration in Sligo recently, wasn’t there? I heard that Edna was there for some sort of anniversary dinner. Brilliant poet, Yeats. Not much of an influence on Led Zeppelin, mind, but he could sure string a verse or two together, couldn’t he?” We are in a small room at the top of Olympic Studios, hallowed ground for British rock and pop royalty of the 1960s and 1970s. As you walk up to the top floor you are reminded that Led Zeppelin, which Page founded in 1968, recorded most of their studio albums here, as did The Rolling Stones, The Troggs, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Small Faces, Queen and David Bowie. Framed photographs adorn the walls. If these walls could talk they’d be yakking for days, with a roll-your-own in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other. “But enough about Edna O’Brien,” says Page, who at 71 looks at least 10 years younger, his age perhaps given away by snow-white hair that trails behind him in a neat ponytail. The regulation sober attire – black runners, black jeans, black shirt, black leather jacket – attests to his rock’n’roll background, but he’s a welcoming sort, engaged in the conversation, eager to question the questions, aiming to clarify any confusion. Page has just come to the end of his mission as guardian of the Led Zeppelin legacy. For the past four years he has taken stock of the band’s back catalogue. In June 2014 the first three studio albums – I, II, III – were remastered and reissued. The end of this month sees the final three studio records – Presence, In Through the Out Door, Coda – reissued. Page tries to hide it, but there’s a look of relief on his face. “It was a substantial project, and I’m sure people can imagine how substantial it was. I don’t have to go into the details of it, but if I say there were thousands of hours involved you’ll have some appreciation of the time involved.” What about his role as guardian of the legacy? Was he always the designated driver? “Being the producer of the band, I was the one who was in the studio much more than the others, so I had more tapes, not alone points of reference. I knew what was there; I had a good recall of what there was and, more importantly, what there could be. The master plan of this was to have me seeing these albums come out with their own companion disc, in order to make the albums have total continuity, from the music to the artwork, all the way through.” 20 million in the queue The project took root around the last time Led Zeppelin performed on stage, at a tribute concert for Ahmet Ertegun, the music industry executive who signed them to Atlantic Records in 1968, in the winter of 2007, at the O2 arena in London. (That performance holds the record for the highest demand for tickets for a single show: 20 million in the queue for 20,000 seats.) Page knew the task of curating and annotating the band’s back catalogue should fall to him. “Not only for myself, and my own curiosity, but also on behalf of everyone else. The other aspect of having me doing it was that if someone else had done it – which happens now and again, because some bands aren’t interested – important things might have been missed. Who else but me would have the knowledge and authority to do it? I just wanted for it to be right. For me, and I’m sure for all the fans out there, getting it right is the key.” Led Zeppelin haven’t performed for almost eight years. The possibility of performing again hangs, threadbare, on the agreement and availability of Robert Plant, the band’s former lead singer. But it doesn’t mean the band aren’t still selling albums by the bucketload. “Well, yes, we are. Not as much as the old days, because the nature of record sales has changed so much. So these albums aren’t going to hurtle to the top of the charts and stay there for months on end – very little does these days – but the truth of the matter is that Led Zeppelin music has been quite buoyant throughout the decades. Who’d have thought that would happen?” Page loves a recent YouTube mash-up of Madonna’s Justify My Love with Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love, as well as a similar one with James Brown’s Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine. “They’re done so well, aren’t they? When people take the time to do stuff like that so ably it’s proof to me that Led Zeppelin’s music still resonates. It consolidates the appeal of the music, doesn’t it? I think with Whole Lotta Love, also, it’s the guitar riff, isn’t it? “That something so simplistic is still quite inspiring amazes me. 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?” Page is wary of dragging up the more lurid, excess-laden pasts of both Led Zeppelin and himself. He adroitly negotiates his way around the sex-drugs-and-rock’n’roll years. “Do we really need to talk about stuff like that? It’s quite long ago, isn’t it?” His use of heroin and cocaine, which was at its most intense during the recordings ofPresence and In Through the Out Door, has been kicked to touch from the early 1980s, and he refuses to talk about Led Zeppelin’s more salacious moments, except to say, “It’s all about focus, and when I needed to be focused back then I was.” (A flick throughHammer of the Gods, Stephen Davis’s unauthorised biography, from 1985, will tell you all you need to know.) “There really isn’t any more” With the Led Zeppelin back catalogue well and truly curated – “there really isn’t any more” – Page is keen to get back to solo material. “I can’t wait to get on with my own stuff, but the Led Zeppelin thing was a substantial project that took a lot of time, effort and energy. I’ll certainly put that same energy into the next thing I do, which will be guitar-based, needless to say.” Ah, Jimmy Page and guitars. When lists of the best guitarists are being collated he rarely seems to be outside the top 10 and is often in the top five. How good does he think he is? If a 71-year-old rock star can blush, then Page is doing exactly that. “Ooh, I don’t know . . .” He looks over my shoulder at the image of Led Zeppelin’s first album cover that adorns a full wall of the room. “My guitar playing touches so many different areas of the form, but the important thing is what it represents across the form. I get feedback on how inspiring it is for young musicians. And, you know, that’s how I learned: listening to other guitarists, trying to get a sound all of my own. That’s how we did it.” Old school: Page on the band’s meteoric rise “Fate had so much to do with it – and the blueprint for the band coming together is something that anyone involved in music would like to replicate. But that can’t be done these days, can it?,” Jimmy Page says, talking about his band’s meteoric success. “The Yardbirds folded in 1968, and within a handful of months Led Zeppelin was not only a band but also a very successful one. 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. “And what happens next? Each of Led Zeppelin’s subsequent albums becomes a milestone as it’s released, and one of the main reasons is because as a live band we’re virtually unequalled. “The success of the albums proved us right. That level of success, that massive reach, you just can’t do that any more, can you? It couldn’t happen that fast, even with all of the social-media thing going on, could it? “Name one act in the past 10 years, 20 years, even, that that kind of success happened to so quickly. Go on, I dare you. You can’t, can you?” http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/jimmy-page-on-led-zeppelin-who-else-but-me-would-have-the-authority-to-do-this-1.2293685 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ross62 Posted July 25, 2015 Author Share Posted July 25, 2015 Why does Page wear sunglasses indoors? Because he's the pontiff of power riffing Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rm2551 Posted July 25, 2015 Share Posted July 25, 2015 He's dead right. It seems the meteoric rise in that short space of such an amazing band is so unlikely at this time, and last decade or two, as to be a bit tragic. BUT Everything changes. It will cycle around. Pub bands, and pub rock will go through a renaissance, and out of that may be seeded something incredible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators sam_webmaster Posted July 25, 2015 Administrators Share Posted July 25, 2015 Q&A: Jimmy Page on the last of the Led Zep reissuesThe legendary guitarist promises to play live again now that he’s remastered all nine Led Zeppelin albums By: Ben Rayner Pop Music Critic, Toronto Star We all know you can’t turn on a rock radio station for more than 30 minutes without hearing another Led Zeppelin tune, but Jimmy Page has higher hopes for the airwaves now that he’s about to flood the market with expanded reissues of Zep’s final three albums — or two-and-a-half, depending upon where you stand on the post-John Bonham catalogue — Presence, In Through the Out Door and Coda. “It’ll be interesting when you turn on the radio and you hear some of these alternate versions,” offered the esteemed English guitar virtuoso whilst in town to stamp (not autograph) copies of his re-released “photographic autobiography” Jimmy Page by Jimmy Page at the Bay/Bloor Indigo. He’ll also talk up the latest batch of reanimated Led Zep product — at Yonge Street’s fabled Masonic Temple, site of Toronto’s first Led Zep show in 1969 when it was known as the Rock Pile — on Monday. “That’s when I’ll have gone ‘Yeah, OK, that’s it.’ But we don’t know whether that’ll happen.” It won’t. Should you desire a Led Zeppelin experience that goes deeper than “Rock and Roll,”“Whole Lotta Love,”“Stairway to Heaven” and the handful of other classics ritually beaten to death by lazy classic-rock programmers, the last three of the nine Led Zep albums lovingly revisited, remastered and appended with worthy, previously unheard material from Page’s personal archives will have you contentedly suspended in nostalgia for months to come. The band’s 1982 swan song, Coda, comes with what Page calls “the mother of all codas”: two new “companion” discs worth of previously neglected material. All three re-releases arrive July 31, concluding a “Herculean” long-term project overseen by Page that, as he puts it, effectively “doubles up the amount of studio product that was already out there.” Q: Have you just been endlessly poring over tapes for years digging for material for these reissues? A: From before the re-release of Led Zeppelin I, II and III I had to make sure that all the stuff we’re talking about was already done. I’d already got all this stuff put together for the companion discs and it was gonna give this whole picture. And where it came from was analogue tapes of alternate mixes or mixes of songs that we hadn’t ever released or versions of songs that people didn’t know about . . . I knew what I was looking for. I knew, for example, there was a whole set of mixes from Sunset Sound in Los Angeles of the fourth album . . . so I wanted to make sure there was a version of “Stairway” and of “Misty Mountain Hop” from those sessions that was superb and etc., etc. etc. I had them all filed away in memory. So what I had to do was go through my archive and listen to every tape that I had just in case there was something in a tape box — they’re all quarter-inch tapes — that was Led Zeppelin, but because there wasn’t anything written on it I was gonna bypass it. I had to leave no stone unturned. Q: Do you have any idea how many hours you’ve invested in these reissues? A: I don’t know. I didn’t add them up because I don’t work like that, on an hourly rate. It’s more a sort of passionate, “OK, whatever this takes to get this right.” It’s not the time that it takes to do something like that, although it was substantial. It was long. But I’ve been doing other projects. I’m here doing the book. That was an incredibly long project because it starts with me as, like, a 12-year-old kid and goes through to me getting an honorary doctorate at Berklee College, which is only a year or so ago. It shows every decade. It shows a musician in the early days, and in early bands and studio work, and in the Yardbirds on the way to Zeppelin. It literally is an autobiography in photographs. Q: Do you have rooms full of this stuff, then? Are you a relentless archivist? A: Yes, I am. I am. I hope it wouldn’t be called hoarding by other people. But I am. Q: Is it a relief to be finished going back through the Led Zep catalogue then or is this kind of a bittersweet “Well, what do I do now?” moment? A: 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. At least that’s the way I do things. The benchmark of quality I go for is pretty high. I had a master plan and the master plan was that, at the end of these releases, then I would start putting all of this energy into being seen to play live again. Q: It’s about time. A: Well, it is. But I haven’t been able to because of all this other stuff. I couldn’t concentrate properly on even thinking about another project until all of this was done. But now’s the time. Now’s the time to really get into the guitar to such a point that all the material I’ve got and all this revisiting of things that I’ve done in the past is put together so that it becomes a project. Q: And do you have a project in mind? A: Well, that is the project. I’m not being sarcastic or facetious when I say it’s a guitar project because that’s what it is. That’s it. That’s what it is until I’ve actually done it. It’ll manifest when it manifests, really. http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/music/2015/07/24/qa-jimmy-page-on-the-last-of-the-led-zep-reissues.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators sam_webmaster Posted July 25, 2015 Administrators Share Posted July 25, 2015 Jimmy Page on Led Zeppelin's Remastered Albums CBC National Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deborah J Posted July 25, 2015 Share Posted July 25, 2015 ^^:-) Jimmy Page on Led Zeppelin: ‘Who else but me would have the authority to do this?’ First published:Sat, Jul 25, 2015, 01:00 Tony Clayton-Lea The band’s founder has just finished years of work on their studio back catalogue, with no little relief. And although he appreciates a modern mash-up of their music, he says we will never see the like of Led Zeppelin again. The man Rolling Stone magazine has described with a straight typeface as the pontiff of power riffing is chatting about William Butler Yeats and Edna O’Brien. Jimmy Page knows it’s somewhat off point, but when he hears he’s talking with The Irish Times he’s up for deviations. “There was all that celebration in Sligo recently, wasn’t there? I heard that Edna was there for some sort of anniversary dinner. Brilliant poet, Yeats. Not much of an influence on Led Zeppelin, mind, but he could sure string a verse or two together, couldn’t he?” We are in a small room at the top of Olympic Studios, hallowed ground for British rock and pop royalty of the 1960s and 1970s. As you walk up to the top floor you are reminded that Led Zeppelin, which Page founded in 1968, recorded most of their studio albums here, as did The Rolling Stones, The Troggs, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Small Faces, Queen and David Bowie. Framed photographs adorn the walls. If these walls could talk they’d be yakking for days, with a roll-your-own in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other. “But enough about Edna O’Brien,” says Page, who at 71 looks at least 10 years younger, his age perhaps given away by snow-white hair that trails behind him in a neat ponytail. The regulation sober attire – black runners, black jeans, black shirt, black leather jacket – attests to his rock’n’roll background, but he’s a welcoming sort, engaged in the conversation, eager to question the questions, aiming to clarify any confusion. Page has just come to the end of his mission as guardian of the Led Zeppelin legacy. For the past four years he has taken stock of the band’s back catalogue. In June 2014 the first three studio albums – I, II, III – were remastered and reissued. The end of this month sees the final three studio records – Presence, In Through the Out Door, Coda – reissued. Page tries to hide it, but there’s a look of relief on his face. “It was a substantial project, and I’m sure people can imagine how substantial it was. I don’t have to go into the details of it, but if I say there were thousands of hours involved you’ll have some appreciation of the time involved.” What about his role as guardian of the legacy? Was he always the designated driver? “Being the producer of the band, I was the one who was in the studio much more than the others, so I had more tapes, not alone points of reference. I knew what was there; I had a good recall of what there was and, more importantly, what there could be. The master plan of this was to have me seeing these albums come out with their own companion disc, in order to make the albums have total continuity, from the music to the artwork, all the way through.” 20 million in the queue The project took root around the last time Led Zeppelin performed on stage, at a tribute concert for Ahmet Ertegun, the music industry executive who signed them to Atlantic Records in 1968, in the winter of 2007, at the O2 arena in London. (That performance holds the record for the highest demand for tickets for a single show: 20 million in the queue for 20,000 seats.) Page knew the task of curating and annotating the band’s back catalogue should fall to him. “Not only for myself, and my own curiosity, but also on behalf of everyone else. The other aspect of having me doing it was that if someone else had done it – which happens now and again, because some bands aren’t interested – important things might have been missed. Who else but me would have the knowledge and authority to do it? I just wanted for it to be right. For me, and I’m sure for all the fans out there, getting it right is the key.” Led Zeppelin haven’t performed for almost eight years. The possibility of performing again hangs, threadbare, on the agreement and availability of Robert Plant, the band’s former lead singer. But it doesn’t mean the band aren’t still selling albums by the bucketload. “Well, yes, we are. Not as much as the old days, because the nature of record sales has changed so much. So these albums aren’t going to hurtle to the top of the charts and stay there for months on end – very little does these days – but the truth of the matter is that Led Zeppelin music has been quite buoyant throughout the decades. Who’d have thought that would happen?” Page loves a recent YouTube mash-up of Madonna’s Justify My Love with Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love, as well as a similar one with James Brown’s Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine. “They’re done so well, aren’t they? When people take the time to do stuff like that so ably it’s proof to me that Led Zeppelin’s music still resonates. It consolidates the appeal of the music, doesn’t it? I think with Whole Lotta Love, also, it’s the guitar riff, isn’t it? “That something so simplistic is still quite inspiring amazes me. 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?” Page is wary of dragging up the more lurid, excess-laden pasts of both Led Zeppelin and himself. He adroitly negotiates his way around the sex-drugs-and-rock’n’roll years. “Do we really need to talk about stuff like that? It’s quite long ago, isn’t it?” His use of heroin and cocaine, which was at its most intense during the recordings ofPresence and In Through the Out Door, has been kicked to touch from the early 1980s, and he refuses to talk about Led Zeppelin’s more salacious moments, except to say, “It’s all about focus, and when I needed to be focused back then I was.” (A flick throughHammer of the Gods, Stephen Davis’s unauthorised biography, from 1985, will tell you all you need to know.) “There really isn’t any more” With the Led Zeppelin back catalogue well and truly curated – “there really isn’t any more” – Page is keen to get back to solo material. “I can’t wait to get on with my own stuff, but the Led Zeppelin thing was a substantial project that took a lot of time, effort and energy. I’ll certainly put that same energy into the next thing I do, which will be guitar-based, needless to say.” Ah, Jimmy Page and guitars. When lists of the best guitarists are being collated he rarely seems to be outside the top 10 and is often in the top five. How good does he think he is? If a 71-year-old rock star can blush, then Page is doing exactly that. “Ooh, I don’t know . . .” He looks over my shoulder at the image of Led Zeppelin’s first album cover that adorns a full wall of the room. “My guitar playing touches so many different areas of the form, but the important thing is what it represents across the form. I get feedback on how inspiring it is for young musicians. And, you know, that’s how I learned: listening to other guitarists, trying to get a sound all of my own. That’s how we did it.” Old school: Page on the band’s meteoric rise “Fate had so much to do with it – and the blueprint for the band coming together is something that anyone involved in music would like to replicate. But that can’t be done these days, can it?,” Jimmy Page says, talking about his band’s meteoric success. “The Yardbirds folded in 1968, and within a handful of months Led Zeppelin was not only a band but also a very successful one. 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. “And what happens next? Each of Led Zeppelin’s subsequent albums becomes a milestone as it’s released, and one of the main reasons is because as a live band we’re virtually unequalled. “The success of the albums proved us right. That level of success, that massive reach, you just can’t do that any more, can you? It couldn’t happen that fast, even with all of the social-media thing going on, could it? “Name one act in the past 10 years, 20 years, even, that that kind of success happened to so quickly. Go on, I dare you. You can’t, can you?” Presence, In Through the Out Door and Coda are released as deluxe editions, through Atlantic Records, on July 31st http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/jimmy-page-on-led-zeppelin-who-else-but-me-would-have-the-authority-to-do-this-1.2293685 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deborah J Posted July 25, 2015 Share Posted July 25, 2015 I hope this does not come across in any way negative as I am loving all of these interviews with Jimmy and know the remasters is his project, but I would love to see JPJ involved in at least one interview (just missing him I guess). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators sam_webmaster Posted July 28, 2015 Administrators Share Posted July 28, 2015 Jimmy Page Looks Back on Led Zeppelin, and Towards the Future July 28, 2015 By Brian Ives On Friday (July 31), Led Zeppelin will release expanded reissues of their final two albums, 1976’s Presence and 1979’s In Through the Out Door, as well as the posthumous outtakes collection, Coda. Thus bringing to a close a project that the band’s guitarist, producer and leader, Jimmy Page, has been working on for the past few years. Many artists of his generation are content to allow their record label to repackage and remaster their seminal albums; others have no choice in the matter, as their labels are legally able to do whatever they want. But Page has always been firmly in charge of Led Zeppelin the band and the brand, and takes that responsibility exceedingly seriously. Indeed, over the course of three interviews in the past year and a half, I always detected a combination of irritation and disbelief that his former bandmates, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones weren’t very involved in working on, or promoting, the reissues. Although now Page may be ready to move on, satisfied that the definitive versions of Led Zeppelin’s albums are now available in varying formats. In our interview discussing the upcoming three reissues, he also spoke about the possibility of releasing the long-abandonded XYZ project (which featured former Yes members Chris Squire and Alan White) and hinted at some new music, which would be his first group of new songs since his 1998 collaboration with Robert Plant, Walking Into Clarksdale. ~ Coda was the first Led Zeppelin album that I bought when it was new; I was too young to really be aware of the band when you were around, but it was so exciting to know that a “new” Zeppelin album was coming out. But what prompted you to release a collection of outtakes in 1982? Coda had to be put together, it was a sort of… we owed the record company another album. I don’t even know how [Led Zeppelin’s late manager] Peter Grant managed to broach the subject to me, it was quite a while after we’d lost John [bonham]. But to me, it still felt like we’d just lost him yesterday. So it was a difficult album to put together, but there was the backbone of it: “Bonzo’s Montreaux,” which was recorded between Presence and In Through the Out Door. I’d worked on it with John. The other members weren’t there. That, for me, was the backbone of the album. Under the circumstances, there couldn’t be anything better than having a drum orchestra of John Bonham. Compiling the music for these companion discs, I knew I wanted to arrive at two extra discs for Coda. To make it a total celebration of Led Zeppelin and its music, and the quirkiness of it. I’d surprised the band with some of this stuff, because they’d not heard it. I just really wanted to show so many colors and textures, and it does. How involved were Robert Plant and John Paul Jones in the reissue process, did you send them tapes? I’ll tell you how it worked. I knew there were some key pieces [that I wanted to include], but this was going to be such a complete picture [of the band]. The whole depth and length of the project became quite clear, but I couldn’t invest hundreds of hours of listening to tapes without the help of the others. What I did was, I played them the companion disc for Led Zeppelin III separately: Robert first. And then the companion disc for Presence. I outlined what the project was going to be. Robert thought it was great. Then I played it for John Paul Jones, and same deal. Robert sent a few tapes that he had, he had a couple of those things were of use. When I spoke to you last year, you told me that you had some concern that you wouldn’t be able to find bonus material for Presence. When did you find the tracks that make up the companion disc? It was when I was trawling through stuff, and it sort of turned up. At one point I thought, “Oh boy, we might have to use a live tape.” I wasn’t that happy about having to use live stuff for the first one [the companion disc on the first Led Zeppelin album was a concert recording], but it was what it was. Anyway, I wasn’t going to go through hundreds of hours of tapes to find something, but it magically turned up. “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” was probably the most popular song from Presence; what do you remember about the recording of that? It was meant to be tricky, with the stops and the pauses and the phased guitar. When you hear that, you say, “My goodness gracious, these guys are on fire here.” And then you listen to “Tea for One,” and it’s so poignant. And you listen to “For Your Life,” that was made up in the studio. That’s getting more into an avant grade thing, and the whole sort of guitar orchestra, which was “Achilles Last Stand”… I’m personally on fire on that, but not more so than anyone else. Robert Plant tells a story about falling off of his crutches [the singer had been recovering from a car accident] in the studio, and says that you raced from the control room to help him out. That actually is true and you’re the only person to say it. He was in a wheelchair, but he was perched up on a stool to sing. Yeah, it’s true. He said, “I never saw him move so fast.” Well, that’s probably quite true. Besides Robert’s injury, you were dealing with a pretty strict deadline to finish the album, right? From what you’ve read and from what I’ve been told, we had 18 days in the studio. Well, what I do know is that it was coming to the point where I knew we were going to go over our allotted time. To do all the mixes and the sequencing of the album. The others had gone home, fair enough, they’d done all their parts, and I was doing the mixing and the guitar overdubs and solos here and there. These were the days you had to mix an album manually: it was the engineer’s hands, and my hands, doing everything. You couldn’t just take the files away, these were analog tapes. And the days were ticking by. The Rolling Stones were due to use the studio next. so I asked Mick if we could have a couple of more days. They were trying all different guitarists out at the time, they were doing Black and Blue there, so Mick said, “Yeah.” Was your solo on the Rolling Stones “One Hit (To the Body)” your way of returning the favor? That was recorded here in New York. But no, it wasn’t like that. Maybe they owe me a favor! But it was great fun to do that. You started using modern synthesizers on In Through the Out Door. That was John Paul Jones. We’re going into rehearsals, and he shows up with this massive theater organ, it was called a Dream Machine. It was a Yamaha Dream Machine, Stevie Wonder had one too. John had it at home and had been working on it, and lo and behold, he’s got these songs together. He’d never written complete songs for Led Zeppelin before. But now he had. It was cool. Because the album before, I’d written it all. It was a guitar driven thing. There’s keyboards on the first Led Zeppelin album, and over the years. But it made obvious logical sense that if he had numbers that he’d written on this new state-of-the-art keyboard, let’s do an album which focuses on the keyboard and features it at the forefront, and that’s how it went. This was the first time there were Led Zeppelin originals that weren’t co-written by you; “South Bound Saurez” and “All My Love” were written by John Paul Jones and Robert Plant. John Paul Jones had written complete songs, and I was quite happy about that. If he has a complete song, I’m not going say, “Oh by the way, I want to be credited as a writer” and then change the song. I couldn’t be bothered with that! I wrote the lyrics in the early days, but I wasn’t so happy doing the lyrics, I was happier doing the rest: writing the music and doing the production. Robert was super-established as a lyricist by In Through the Out Door, so obviously he’s going to write lyrics. And that’s how you get a couple of songs written by John Paul Jones and Robert. Did you play harmonica on any Led Zeppelin songs? I did play harmonica, but never on Led Zeppelin albums. I was a harmonica player when I was a studio musician. But Robert was a good harmonica player, he could do the country blues style, Sonny Terry or Sonny Boy Williamson, but I don’t think he’d played through an amp before he met me. So, now you’re done with the remasters, how do you feel about the project? I feel that it was an important thing to do in the historic picture of Led Zeppelin because, I’ve sort of said this before but it’s a fact… If you say “Led Zeppelin” to somebody, they’ll think of a riff or a vocal, but what I guarantee is that it’s from the studio albums. There’s so much love and affection out there from the audience for the recordings, that I thought that it was only right and proper to release the recordings in a way that had some dignity to it, and that had some context to it, with companion discs that gave a snapshot into the time that these things were recorded. Everything is on the companion disc for a really definite purpose. What it does, in effect, is doubles up the amount of studio information out there. It just gives the people who have been liking Led Zeppelin for so long, it gives them more music to enjoy and I thought that was an important thing to do . You mentioned not wanting to use live stuff for the Presence companion disc, even though you did so for the companion disc to Led Zeppelin (I). I’m guessing you have more live stuff in the vaults; is that something you plan on addressing in the future? Um, I’m not going to be looking at that in the immediate future. Because one of the reasons for concentrating on the studio stuff, was because I felt that there was an imbalance. There was the Led Zeppelin DVD [the 2003 DVD of live material] and How the West Was Won [a 2003 album of live material recorded in 1972]. We were on fire on How the West Was Won. And then there was Celebration Day [the 2012 release recorded at Zeppelin’s one-off reunion concert at the O2 Dome in 2007]. In a way, the O2 performance was really good because we look like what we look like now. The only problem is then we became quite recognizable in the street [laughs]. But those projects were all live stuff, so it was important to do this. I wanted to ask you about the late Chris Squire from Yes… That was really sad, he was a phenomenal bass player. I interviewed him about a year and a half ago, and he told me he was hoping that you would release the XYZ tapes at some point [XYZ was a project that involved Page, Squire and Yes drummer Alan White]. Absolutely, but I haven’t worked on it. It’s a series of multi-tracks, it was something that I was wanting to do after all of the Led Zeppelin stuff was out, I wanted to contact Chris and Alan. It’s really sad that we’ve lost him. The music was really good. It’s the first thing that I did after we lost John Bonham. I had a studio at the time, and they wanted to get together, and I thought this was like laying down the gauntlet… I’m not curling up under a rock and hiding [after Led Zeppelin’s breakup]. And these guys are really, really good so I had to be really good too. It was really an interesting blend, and really good music. You’ve been a vocal fan of Royal Blood – what was it about them that turned you on. Let’s talk about Royal Blood, I’d seen them on a late night show in England. I thought, “That’s really interesting.” They did two songs and it really stuck with me. I thought “How are they doing that?” And they played so tightly, and were really passionate. I was here in this hotel, and I met the manager of the Arctic Monkeys — who are another really fine band I might add –and I said, “Hi, how are you doing?” I thought he was here with the Arctic Monkeys, and he said he manages Royal Blood. I said, “Do you? I know who they are.” There was quite a buzz going on about them in London. He said they’re playing at the [New York club] Mercury Lounge. And I said, “Can I come? I’ll come to the show!” He said, “Yeah, come, they’d love to meet you!” And I went there, and I wanted to get near the front [of the stage] to see what they were doing, but there were a lot of people who were trying to get to the front. It was phenomenal to feel their music and to feel what they were doing. There were riffs, but with a really intellectual attitude. And it was amazing. Do you find yourself impressed with new bands often? That’s the reason I mentioned them, because I had an experience. They don’t fail to impress. Last year I spoke to Paul Rodgers, who told me that you always go to his shows at Royal Albert Hall, but he can’t get you to get on stage. Would you ever work with him again? I don’t know. One of the reasons why I didn’t want to get on stage with anybody was simply that, then people would say, “Oh, he’s playing again!” and then I’d wake up the next morning and I’d be flooded with people asking “Can you do this?” or “Can you do that?” Well, I actually managed to engineer a situation whereby I’ve been abel to battle that stuff off. It wasn’t about not playing with Paul. I was concentrating on a number of things: doing my website, I wanted to launch a website, I did that. I wanted to put a book out, which was a lengthy project, I did that. I wanted to make sure that this Led Zeppelin studio work came out, I’ve done that. I’ve set the scene up now, for me to be able to do the thing that everyone wants me to do, and what I want to do, which is take all that energy that I put into everything else, focus that into the guitar. And that’s what I want to do. Meaning, new music? New music, and to be seen playing. http://radio.com/2015/07/28/jimmy-page-led-zeppelin-future/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Only Way To Fly Posted July 29, 2015 Share Posted July 29, 2015 ^ THANKS! I wonder if there are any vocals on the XYZ stuff. That would be interesting. But I'd much rather he put out another LZ live album! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chillumpuffer Posted July 29, 2015 Share Posted July 29, 2015 Jimmy is on Steve Wright's BBC Radio 2 show this afternoon from 2 pm. I may listen on i player as Wright really grates on me Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andrew r Posted July 29, 2015 Share Posted July 29, 2015 Jimmy is on Steve Wright's BBC Radio 2 show this afternoon from 2 pm. I may listen on i player as Wright really grates on me "Grates" more like the whole fireplace! "well jimmy we play stairway all the time hows Robert by the way" That will be the cringe level, not one worthwhile question Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators sam_webmaster Posted July 29, 2015 Administrators Share Posted July 29, 2015 Jimmy Page Wraps Led Zeppelin Reissues With a Bang Guitarist preps blowout 'Coda' set and promises to get busy on new material By David Fricke | July 29, 2015 Jimmy Page can tell you exactly when he will become a solo artist again: on August 2nd, right after the Led Zeppelin guitarist concludes his year-long deluxe reissues of the band's studio albums with the July 31st release of expanded editions of 1976's Presence, 1979's In Through the Out Door and the 1982 compilation, Coda. On August 1st, "I'll wipe my brow, lay in bed and read the paper," Page says with a grin in a New York hotel room. The next day, "I'll pick up the guitar, and I won't stop from that point on. "I've got new material," he insists. "I've played guitar in so many different styles, and I want to revisit them all." Page says that "the focus and energies I have been putting into this other stuff" — including 2012's Celebration Day, the album and DVD from Zeppelin's 2007 reunion concert, and Sound Tracks, a recent four-disc set of Page's Seventies and Eighties music for films — "meant that I couldn't play guitar or get involved in a project, then keep breaking away to do this. Now it's time." Page still clearly recalls the way he felt about his instrument after Zeppelin broke up in 1980 following the death of drummer John Bonham. "I didn't want to play the guitar," Page admits. "It was going to bring up too much." A short time later, he learned that he was contractually obligated to produce one last Zeppelin studio LP. "I was like, 'Oh, my God, no.' " The result, Coda, "was a compromise, just an album of things left over." Surprisingly, the new three-disc version of that album is now the killer climax of Page's Zeppelin- reissue series — "the mother of all Codas," he notes, with major rarities such as "Sugar Mama," an outtake from 1969's Led Zeppelin and two legendary 1972 recordings Page made in India with singer Robert Plant. That's it, too: "No more studio stuff," Page says firmly. "I made sure these reissues were thorough and complete. There is nothing else you can make a project out of." Page is also adamant about one aspect of his impending solo work: Don't assume it will sound like his old band. "Because somebody plays guitar, why does it mean they need a singer?" Page says heatedly. "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." Still, Page admits, "I play like I play. You hear it on Celebration Day. It's pretty good for a one-night shot." He laughs, then adds, "Whatever I do in the future, it won't be a one-night shot." From The Archives Issue 1241: August 13, 2015 http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/jimmy-page-wraps-led-zeppelin-reissues-with-a-bang-20150729 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteveAJones Posted July 29, 2015 Share Posted July 29, 2015 ^ THANKS! I wonder if there are any vocals on the XYZ stuff. Yes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators sam_webmaster Posted July 29, 2015 Administrators Share Posted July 29, 2015 Jimmy Page talks to Steve Wright BBC 2 Jimmy chats to Steve about the last three reissues from Led Zeppelin's back catalogue. Listen here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02yb52b Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators sam_webmaster Posted July 30, 2015 Administrators Share Posted July 30, 2015 In The Studio with Redbeard Jimmy Page, the mastermind behind the Led Zeppelin legacy, returns In the Studio once more to complete the deluxe reissue series with the last two studio albums, Presence and the timeless In Through the Out Door, plus the greatly expanded odds and sods collection Coda which came out shortly after drummer John Bonham‘s death in 1980 brought the Zeppelin down. – Redbeard. listen here: http://www.inthestudio.net/redbeards-blog/led-zeppelin-presence-doorcoda-deluxe-jimmy-page/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteveAJones Posted July 30, 2015 Share Posted July 30, 2015 ^^^ Many thanks, Sam. I like Redbeard. He has always treated Jimmy & Robert with forthrightness and respect. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators sam_webmaster Posted July 30, 2015 Administrators Share Posted July 30, 2015 Jimmy Page reflects on the end of Led Zeppelin and losing ‘bosom buddy’ John Bonham Jon Dekel | July 30, 2015 “I’d lost a bosom buddy and comrade,” says Jimmy Page, staring through the eager interviewer before him, towards the stage at Toronto’s Masonic Temple — where he performed as both a member of The Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin nearly half a century ago. And, for the first time in our 40 minute interview, the 71-year-old high priest of rock is lost for words. He’s thinking, of course, of John Bonham, the thunderous war machine backbone of Zeppelin whose death in 1980 stopped arguably the most influential and inarguably most monumental group in music history in its tracks, dissolving them instantly. “I was just so aware of the loss to his family and the world of music in general,” he stammers before conceding, “If it’d had been me who went I don’t think they’d been able to replace me either.” Page’s unease with personal matters isn’t out of character. Even in his time as Zeppelin’s bandleader and rock’s mystical bête noir, he despised interviews. But as he puts to bed what he calls the “Herculean labour” of remastering the wealth of unreleased Zeppelin studio material for a series of lovingly crafted box sets – the final three of which are out this Friday – he can taste the finish line of a love labour’s lost. “In effect, what it does is it doubles the amount of studio output,” he boasts. “I knew it was the right thing to do. So many pieces of music that have come out people didn’t know existed. Sometimes not even the rest of the band. They’d forgotten to be honest with you.” He pauses, considering his next words carefully so as to not dig deeper into the chasm that exists between himself and another former comrade, singer Robert Plant, who refuses to tour a reunited Led Zeppelin (a subject interviewers were warned was off the table). “I’m just telling you the truth on that.” A session musician responsible for guitar parts in everything from Bond theme “Goldfinger” to Donavan’s “Sunshine Superman” and even The Who’s “I Can’t Explain,” Page set the path for Zeppelin when he was drafted to succeed Jeff Beck in The Yardbirds (himself a successor to Page pal Eric Clapton). When that group fell apart in 1968, Page was forced to put together a line-up to fulfil live commitments in Scandinavia. Drafting in a trio of the best musical musicians he could find, Page convened the New Yardbirds as a musical supergroup before changing the name to Led Zeppelin in honour of a previous failed supergroup attempt with Who drummer Keith Moon. Despite having no experience, Page also took on production duties to avoid repeating the mistakes he witnessed in the Yardbirds. “Having to do these awful singles was really soul destroying for the Yardbirds. I didn’t want to fall into the trap,” he recalls. “So when I formed Led Zeppelin I wanted to be the producer because I didn’t want anyone getting in the way.” Asked why he feels Zeppelin succeeded while Clapton’s own supergroup Cream floundered, Page smiles. “They didn’t have a producer like me.” “I’m not being arrogant,” he explains, pressing his lips together. “When you’ve got a band like that you need to be able to charge it through. And I’m saying that with the materiel that was being put forward for each album so there was a definite change to it, they weren’t necessarily doing that, were they? You need somebody who’s got their hand on the wheel of the ship.” Page recalls taking to the job with OCD-like dedication, setting out a masterplan to create a harmonious musical interlocking which would showcase his evolving approach to the guitar – taking in a wide variety of styles from the avant-garde to the eastern scales and American blues riffs — without sacrificing its commercial appeal. “I wanted to build a group [who could make] a guitar album but not at the expense of anybody else. That’s the difference between us and every other other band,” he says. “It was built around the drums so you’ve got a stereo picture of the drums and the things that are built on it.” Much of this studio experimentation can be heard in the unearthed material, which includes early mixes of many of Zeppelin’s legendary catalogue, including a bass groove heavy “When The Levee Breaks,” an alternative mix of “Stairway To Heaven” and an early pass on Page’s favourite, “Whole Lotta Love.” “The versions on the studio album are the definitive versions, but that doesn’t take away anything from these other, stripped down versions,” he points out. “‘’Whole Lotta Love’ just came out like a voodoo child! I wanted to have a riff that was so iconic that every time people heard it, it would fill them with joy. It would put a smile on their face. Even all these years later that’s still what it does. A riff has the power to do that.” In 1982, Led Zeppelin released their posthumous album Coda, a collection of career-spanning outtakes released to fill a contractual obligation. Recalling those two years after Bonham’s passing, Page says he couldn’t even pick up a guitar. “Coda, under the circumstances….that was the most difficult album for me to do. It wasn’t possible or feasible to continue with a new drummer. And there wasn’t a drummer who could have possibly fit in and fly with the rest of us.” For the album’s accompanying reissue, Page hoped to bring a more positive energy to the bookend, rounding up his favourite rare Zeppelin material including a peppy outtake from the first album called “Sugar Momma” and two songs he and Plant recorded in India with a Bollywood orchestra. http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/music/jimmy-page-reflects-on-the-end-of-led-zeppelin-and-losing-bosom-buddy-john-bonham Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Disco Duck Posted July 31, 2015 Share Posted July 31, 2015 The article below contains several factual errors. I'm hardly an expert of either Led Zeppelin or Page's career but even I noticed some of the mistakes. 1) Jimmy Page himself has said that he did NOT play on Donovan's Sunshine Superman. According to Page, Alan Parker, was the guitarist on that track. I think the confusion is due to both Donovan and John Paul Jones comments that it was Page. 2) Page was not an inexperienced producer when he started Led Zeppelin. He was the in-house producer for Andrew Oldham's company, Immediate Records, before he joined The Yardbirds. 3) I wouldn't say that Cream "faltered". They were a groundbreaking and highly influential band whose songs are still played by classic rock radio stations. Also, I suspect that Page was being polite when he attributed Cream's breakup to their producer. From what I've read, Cream's breakup was due to drug use and the hostility between Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. Jimmy Page reflects on the end of Led Zeppelin and losing ‘bosom buddy’ John Bonham Jon Dekel | July 30, 2015 “I’d lost a bosom buddy and comrade,” says Jimmy Page, staring through the eager interviewer before him, towards the stage at Toronto’s Masonic Temple — where he performed as both a member of The Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin nearly half a century ago. And, for the first time in our 40 minute interview, the 71-year-old high priest of rock is lost for words. He’s thinking, of course, of John Bonham, the thunderous war machine backbone of Zeppelin whose death in 1980 stopped arguably the most influential and inarguably most monumental group in music history in its tracks, dissolving them instantly. “I was just so aware of the loss to his family and the world of music in general,” he stammers before conceding, “If it’d had been me who went I don’t think they’d been able to replace me either.” Page’s unease with personal matters isn’t out of character. Even in his time as Zeppelin’s bandleader and rock’s mystical bête noir, he despised interviews. But as he puts to bed what he calls the “Herculean labour” of remastering the wealth of unreleased Zeppelin studio material for a series of lovingly crafted box sets – the final three of which are out this Friday – he can taste the finish line of a love labour’s lost. “In effect, what it does is it doubles the amount of studio output,” he boasts. “I knew it was the right thing to do. So many pieces of music that have come out people didn’t know existed. Sometimes not even the rest of the band. They’d forgotten to be honest with you.” He pauses, considering his next words carefully so as to not dig deeper into the chasm that exists between himself and another former comrade, singer Robert Plant, who refuses to tour a reunited Led Zeppelin (a subject interviewers were warned was off the table). “I’m just telling you the truth on that.” A session musician responsible for guitar parts in everything from Bond theme “Goldfinger” to Donavan’s “Sunshine Superman” and even The Who’s “I Can’t Explain,” Page set the path for Zeppelin when he was drafted to succeed Jeff Beck in The Yardbirds (himself a successor to Page pal Eric Clapton). When that group fell apart in 1968, Page was forced to put together a line-up to fulfil live commitments in Scandinavia. Drafting in a trio of the best musical musicians he could find, Page convened the New Yardbirds as a musical supergroup before changing the name to Led Zeppelin in honour of a previous failed supergroup attempt with Who drummer Keith Moon. Despite having no experience, Page also took on production duties to avoid repeating the mistakes he witnessed in the Yardbirds. “Having to do these awful singles was really soul destroying for the Yardbirds. I didn’t want to fall into the trap,” he recalls. “So when I formed Led Zeppelin I wanted to be the producer because I didn’t want anyone getting in the way.” Asked why he feels Zeppelin succeeded while Clapton’s own supergroup Cream floundered, Page smiles. “They didn’t have a producer like me.” “I’m not being arrogant,” he explains, pressing his lips together. “When you’ve got a band like that you need to be able to charge it through. And I’m saying that with the materiel that was being put forward for each album so there was a definite change to it, they weren’t necessarily doing that, were they? You need somebody who’s got their hand on the wheel of the ship.” Page recalls taking to the job with OCD-like dedication, setting out a masterplan to create a harmonious musical interlocking which would showcase his evolving approach to the guitar – taking in a wide variety of styles from the avant-garde to the eastern scales and American blues riffs — without sacrificing its commercial appeal. “I wanted to build a group [who could make] a guitar album but not at the expense of anybody else. That’s the difference between us and every other other band,” he says. “It was built around the drums so you’ve got a stereo picture of the drums and the things that are built on it.” Much of this studio experimentation can be heard in the unearthed material, which includes early mixes of many of Zeppelin’s legendary catalogue, including a bass groove heavy “When The Levee Breaks,” an alternative mix of “Stairway To Heaven” and an early pass on Page’s favourite, “Whole Lotta Love.” “The versions on the studio album are the definitive versions, but that doesn’t take away anything from these other, stripped down versions,” he points out. “‘’Whole Lotta Love’ just came out like a voodoo child! I wanted to have a riff that was so iconic that every time people heard it, it would fill them with joy. It would put a smile on their face. Even all these years later that’s still what it does. A riff has the power to do that.” In 1982, Led Zeppelin released their posthumous album Coda, a collection of career-spanning outtakes released to fill a contractual obligation. Recalling those two years after Bonham’s passing, Page says he couldn’t even pick up a guitar. “Coda, under the circumstances….that was the most difficult album for me to do. It wasn’t possible or feasible to continue with a new drummer. And there wasn’t a drummer who could have possibly fit in and fly with the rest of us.” For the album’s accompanying reissue, Page hoped to bring a more positive energy to the bookend, rounding up his favourite rare Zeppelin material including a peppy outtake from the first album called “Sugar Momma” and two songs he and Plant recorded in India with a Bollywood orchestra. http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/music/jimmy-page-reflects-on-the-end-of-led-zeppelin-and-losing-bosom-buddy-john-bonham Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators sam_webmaster Posted July 31, 2015 Administrators Share Posted July 31, 2015 Interview: Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page Ludovic Hunter-Tilney The Led Zeppelin founder is one of rock’s guitar greats — but he’s also a serious fan of Victorian art The summons arrives. I am to make my way to the splendid house in west London where the 19th-century artist Frederic Leighton lived. Jimmy Page will be there. The Led Zeppelin guitarist had so enjoyed being asked about his fascination for Victorian art and design on a previous encounter that he’d suggested we might meet to discuss the subject further. I assumed that nothing would come of it. Oh ye of little faith! Leighton House, the venue for our meeting, is a red-brick palazzo in Kensington. Built for the immensely wealthy Leighton as a home and studio in the 1860s — he called it a “private palace of art” — it is now a museum. A stuffed peacock greets visitors in the turquoise-tiled hallway, the avian equivalent of Page in his strutting, preening prime. Through a pair of Doric columns a passage leads to a spectacular gold-domed room with Syrian tiles, an Arabic inscription from the Koran and a Moorish fountain in the centre, inspired by Leighton’s travels in the Near East. “It’s absolutely glorious. Anyone who comes here can’t help being amazed by the whole scale of it, the beauty of it,” marvels Page as we inspect Leighton’s Arab Hall. “We can see his vision: he has been to Turkey, he’s been to Damascus, he has brought back all these tiles.” In contrast to the sumptuous decor, Page is dressed in black, with long white hair tied in a ponytail. But an aura of exoticism surrounds him too. At 71, he is among the most celebrated of all guitarists, a player who elevated the instrument to intoxicating heights of artistry in the 1970s. Under his leadership, Led Zeppelin became the definitive rock band, a perfect balance of musicianship and decadence. The band’s exploits — immense three-hour stadium concerts, lurid tales of groupies and black magic, Caligulan goings-on aboard private aircraft — have become the stuff of legend, as mythic as the statues of Pan or painted scenes from antiquity in Leighton House. Page knows the museum well, having lived around the corner since 1972. His interest in 19th-century art goes back even further, to when he was a teenager in Epsom, a market town in Surrey, where he grew up in a solidly middle-class household, the son of a personnel manager. As we stand in the Arab Hall, the fountain plashing in the background, I produce a photograph of Page with his first electric guitar in 1958. It shows a serious-looking 14-year-old practising in a suburban living room. “That wasn’t my house,” Page says, peering at the photo, “but everyone’s houses looked similar in those days. An electric fire, brass plaques on the wall.” His tone is not nostalgic. Listening to Lonnie Donegan and Elvis Presley introduced him to the sounds of skiffle and rock ’n’ roll, escape routes from humdrum Epsom. Meanwhile, illustrations in books and trips to the Tate Gallery fired his enthusiasm for the luxuriant art of 100 years earlier. “I got just caught up in that whole romantic notion of the Pre-Raphaelites, the mission they were on [to revolutionise art]. It was something that really captured my imagination, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.” He points to an 1880s mosaic frieze above our heads depicting a complex iconography of storks, eagles, snakes wrapped around trees and peacocks (an eastern symbol of dignity and beauty). Page identifies it as by Walter Crane, an artist associated with the Arts & Crafts movement of the late 19th century, another of his obsessions. “The whole concept of it is really beautiful. Seeing the hand of man working, I really like that, the craftsmanship,” he says, referring to the movement’s ethos of artisanal production. He briefly went to art school himself, after a bout of illness interrupted his fledgling career as a session musician. “I was pretty amateurish really,” he says of his studies. “I wasn’t a very good draughtsman.” Arts & Crafts and the Pre-Raphaelites were groupings formed in reaction to Victorian Britain’s transformation into an industrial society. There’s an echo here: Page formed Led Zeppelin in 1968 as a reaction to the world of mechanised musical production in which he worked as a highly successful session guitarist, churning out guitar parts for countless hits from Tom Jones’s “It’s Not Unusual” to Petula Clark’s “Downtown”. “Because I had so many different styles of guitar I could play I was pretty useful. I wasn’t a one-trick pony. I could play acoustic, finger-style, I could make things up,” he remembers. “If they’d say, ‘We want something like a Stax riff,’ I’d be able to say, ‘Yes, I can do that straight away.’ Once I came out of it I had the chance to really experiment with the guitar. So I could see that [session work] almost — even though I’m self-taught — as formal training; a degree of formal training. Of course I may be totally wrong in how I see things . . . ” He pauses, and reconsiders how much fallibility to ascribe to himself. “Actually I won’t say that. I’ll say I may not be quite right about the way I see things,” he says. His tone is affable but guarded. Page recruited the other members of Led Zeppelin — vocalist Robert Plant, fellow session guitarist John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham — in 1968, after a two-year stint as guitarist with R&B band The Yardbirds. At the time he was living on a converted Victorian boathouse at Pangbourne on the upper reaches of the Thames. “I used to scour second-hand shops because Arts & Crafts furniture was always being turfed out. I must have furnished half my house from that source,” he remembers. “When I was working with Robert [Plant] I took him to some of these shops and that was where the painting of the old man with the sticks [used on the cover of the band’s fourth album in 1971] was located and photographed.” As we promenade through the ground-floor rooms of Leighton House, we pause before one of Leighton’s paintings, “Orpheus and Eurydice”, painted in 1864. Leighton had links to the Pre-Raphaelites but was not a member of the group. “Some of [his paintings] are beautifully executed in the Victorian style, aren’t they?” Page says. He enthuses about the painter’s masterpiece, “Flaming June”, currently on show at the Frick Collection in New York. Attempts to probe Page’s own art collection are gently repelled. In 2012 he loaned large tapestries by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones to Tate Britain for an exhibition. Does he have many paintings from the period? “At the time I was at art school, Pre-Raphaelites were selling for a few hundred pounds, that’s all,” he says. “But I couldn’t afford that. They were always out of my reach.” He laughs. These days Page is estimated to be worth £100m. When Frederic Leighton moved into his mansion in 1865, the surrounding area was semi-rural. Following his example, other artists built studio-houses nearby, creating an artistic colony. Many of the buildings survive today. As we look out over the large lawn at the back of Leighton House, Page points out one that belonged to the film director Michael Powell until 1971. Scenes from Powell’s sinister 1960 masterpiece Peeping Tom were shot there. Page’s own house is invisible from Leighton’s garden. He gestures in its direction, diagonally across from the lawn. It is called the Tower House, for the magnificent gothic-revival turret that dominates it. It was designed in the 1870s by the Victorian architect and designer William Burges, who sought artistic refuge from industrialisation in a fantasy vision of the Middle Ages. “Basically [burges] was living there and it was his showroom as well,” says Page. “So each room has a different theme with different styles of decoration. One room may have gesso panels, another may have pictorial tiles et cetera. So he’d show people around and say, ‘I can do this and I can do that.’” The finest craftsmen and sculptors were hired to create, in Burges’s words, a “model residence of the 13th century”. The guest bedroom was decorated in gold and crystal and had emu eggs hanging from the ceiling, while Burges’s bedroom was painted with murals of mermaids and sea monsters. A contemporary visitor called it “strange and barbarously splendid”. Page, who bought the house from the actor Richard Harris, is a zealous custodian. He has been in dispute with his neighbour, the pop star Robbie Williams, over the latter’s plans to develop his own property, including an abandoned scheme to dig out a huge basement. “English Heritage are pretty protective towards [the Tower House],” Page says. “I haven’t wanted to change anything in the house and nor would I. But the fact is that the interior is pretty fragile. It can’t take the shaking of developing a four- or five-bedroom house underground. No.” 'Flaming June', widely considered to be Leighton's masterpiece, 1895 Burges’s phantasmagoric designs were thought to have been inspired by a hearty appetite for laudanum. “I don’t know,” Page says. “Burges aficionados were quite upset that was said. But I’ve got an interesting cabinet, a wardrobe, where you could imagine it possibly.” A druggy wardrobe? My eager attempts to find out more are thwarted. “Well, let’s not talk about it.” He laughs. “Maybe one day I’ll show it to you, off the record.” I later discover that Page has not always been so secretive about his Burges wardrobe. In 2002, he allowed it to be shown at a National Trust country house in Devon, where its narcotic decorations — painted opium poppies, scarlet hares — were on view for all to see. Page’s teasing opacity on the subject of drugs is typical. He rarely discusses his own use of them, which culminated in a heroin habit that took hold in the latter years of Led Zeppelin, before the band split up in the wake of John Bonham’s death following a drunken binge in 1980. He is also elusive when I raise the subject of occultism, a topic that fascinated the Victorians — and with which Page has long been associated. “Really?” he says mildly. Despite being the former owner of an occult bookshop called Equinox and the Scottish manor house that belonged to the notorious magus Aleister Crowley, he looks bemused at the notion that anyone might take him to be a serious student of the paranormal. I venture to ask whether the 19th-century tradition of spiritualism is attractive to him. “Yes, I think it would be,” he replies. “But I can’t time-travel so you can only . . . ” His voice trails away. “It’s pretty evocative.” . . . Adjoining Leighton’s handsome studio upstairs is a room currently hosting an exhibition of works by the contemporary Lebanese artist Raed Yassin. Among these is a portrait of the celebrated Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, who died in 1975. Page is a fan. “This is the classic Egyptian orchestration, with the oud and the violin et cetera,” he says. “I’ve heard lots of live records; the music will stop and she’ll come in and sing just one line — and the audience erupts and she’ll sing the line again. It’s just the whole drama of it.” Led Zeppelin’s music drew on blues and folk but also Middle Eastern, Indian and north African influences. The epic ascending riff in “Kashmir” was inspired by Page’s interest in the sitar and eastern modal tunings. Like the best of the Victorian art that Page admires, their songs were a remarkable blend of exoticism, eroticism and spirituality. (“I do agree with that,” he says.) Walking past a sign reading “Ars longa, vita brevis” (“art is long, life is short”), we enter Leighton’s studio, a large light-filled room with paintings lining the walls. “I think the ambience in here is really good,” says Page. Historic buildings played an important role in Led Zeppelin’s history, such as the former poorhouse Headley Grange in Hampshire, where they recorded several albums. “If I was going to play an acoustic guitar I’d prefer to do so in a room like this, where you could hear the dynamics of the guitar filling the room, rather than a studio that was really damped down with no reflective surfaces,” he says. “If you’re going to play the acoustic guitar you want the sound to extend, so you can play with the dynamics.” Page is perhaps the most complete guitarist in rock’s pantheon, a boldly expressive and technically accomplished player in whom vigour is allied with intense thoughtfulness. “It’s like in here, you can see Leighton’s character coming through in everything he did, you can recognise a Leighton. In the same way you can recognise a guitarist,” Page says. He once described solos such as the majestic one in “Stairway to Heaven” as a “meditation” on the song in which they appear. “When a song had built up from a track and Robert had his lyrical content and the overdubs were complete, then yes, I’d like to do the solo as a summing up, if you like, of my input on that song,” he explains. “So that what I hope is for people to go, that solo is perfect” — he clicks his finger — “or that guitar work is perfect within the context of the lyrics and what is being portrayed dynamically by the rest of the band. I would just warm up, get the tape rolling and just do two or three takes at the most, and would usually know which one it was.” Page with Ludovic Hunter-Tilney at Leighton House We pause for a moment in front of the painting that Leighton was working on when he died in 1896 — “Clytie”, a portrait of a classical nymph mourning the departure of her lover, the sun god Apollo. It is unfinished. The question of whether Led Zeppelin is finished has dogged Page since the band’s one-off reunion concert at London’s O2 Arena in 2007. He has spent the intervening years remastering their albums for the digital age, re-releasing each with additional material. It has been a marathon task. “I just wanted to make sure I could locate everything in existence,” Page says of the band’s many recordings. His project now concludes with the reissuing of Led Zeppelin’s last three albums, Presence (1976), In Through the Out Door (1979) and Coda (1982). “That’s the whole catalogue with the companion discs out, completed, and I can breathe a sigh of relief,” he says. “But I don’t know how long I’ll have a holiday for, because then I’ll be putting my whole focus into playing the guitar, to see what we can manifest with that.” It is a tantalising prospect — Page back at work in the recording studio, his equivalent of Frederic Leighton’s workplace. “Well, it’ll probably be rather smaller than this,” he says with a smile. “Not quite so grand. But as long as there are reflective surfaces for the acoustic guitar to be bouncing from, it’ll be fine.” Remastered editions of ‘Presence’, ‘In Through the Out Door’ and ‘Coda’ are out now on Atlantic/Swan Song. Leighton House Museum, 12 Holland Park Road, London W14; open daily except Tuesdays; rbkc.gov.uk/museums Photographs: Zed Nelson; Getty; Tony Busson/the-presidents.org.uk http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/41ae8268-356d-11e5-b05b-b01debd57852.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators sam_webmaster Posted July 31, 2015 Administrators Share Posted July 31, 2015 Jimmy Page says goodbye to Led Zeppelin with final reissues By Jane Stevenson, Postmedia Network Legendary British hard rock band Led Zeppelin had a Presence alright and they fought to keep it intact with their 1976 laser-focused, “guitar-led” album of the same name. At the time, singer Robert Plant was in a leg cast and getting around in a wheelchair while convalescing after a horrible car accident in Greece. But guitarist Jimmy Page, who was in Toronto to promote the final three Led Zeppelin reissues, including Presence, 1979’s In Through the Out Door, and 1982’s Coda and their companion albums, says the band – rounded out by bassist-keyboardist John Paul Jones and late drummer John Bonham – persevered despite Plant’s serious injuries. “His leg’s in a cast but he wants to do an album,” said Page, 71, at the Masonic Temple, where he later hosted a listening party of selected tracks from the companion albums. The band had first played the venue in 1969 (when it was The Rock Pile). “When he was singing, he was actually up on a stool. He wasn’t singing from the wheelchair. So under the circumstance of all of us wanting to do an album, to be able to let off steam... it was always agreed what the next album would be. It would be a concentrated effort like two-three weeks, which is what it was. It’s fast, but ruthless efficiency is the way that I called the Zeppelin recordings because there was no time wasting. And everything was really done for a purpose. The only reason that I’m saying that is it was so focused and it was defiant, if you like, to the set of circumstances.” Following that was the more keyboard-driven In Through the Out Door, which spawned hits like Fool in the Rain and All of My Love because Jones has acquired “a Yamaha dream machine and that says it all for keyboard players, doesn’t it?” said Page. “And he actually came to rehearsals with complete frameworks of songs which he’d never done before. ... It seemed the logical step after a guitar album to do an album which concentrated on the keyboards... As every album had sounded different to the last, my goodness, this is definitely going to sound different to the last album.” And then, of course, the post-Bonham release, Coda of eight unreleased tracks, which was issued as Zep – now broken up following Bonham’s death in 1980 – owed “a contractual album,” which included the pivotal instrumental, Bonzo’s Montreux, recorded by Page and Bonham in Montreux in between Presence and In Through the Out Door. “Nobody else in the band, they don’t even know about this track,” said Page. “And I thought, ‘This is the backbone of Coda because we don’t have John, but we’ve got John as an orchestra.’ And how cool that would be under these awful circumstances of the world having lost this incredible musician, but this is a piece of music and it’s just him playing on it which is absolutely marvellous. But this time coming back to Coda, I just wanted to make it a celebration of Led Zeppelin in its hard form, its most robust, its quirkiness, everything about it... I wanted to make it the mother of all Codas.” So now that Page is seemingly done with his former band – on records anyway – how does he feel? “It’s good,” he said. “I knew that what it was going to do was bring to people’s attention, all these gems that they wouldn’t know existed... This Led Zeppelin process that now presents all of the studio work that people didn’t even know existed, doubling up the amount of studio stuff that is out now from what there was before I started the project, well that’s really cool.” JIMMY PAGE BUSY WRITING NEW SONGS Now that Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page has come to the end of the band’s reissue campaign that began last year, what’s next for the 71-year-old musician? Last fall, he told me he’d be forming a band, rehearsing and going on the road in 2015 but it’s already mid-year and “all of those things are probably a way off,” he says now. “People were asking me on the very first release of 1,2,3, (Led Zeppelin reissues). ‘Well, what are you going to do next?’” said Page in Toronto recently. “Well, you couldn’t belabour the point that actually it is quite a bit of time and attention that’s needed to promoting the Led Zeppelin things. However, that completes some on July 31st so that gives me an opportunity to apply the same sort of focus and energy into playing the guitar. “Now it’s the guitar!” he says again. “Yes, thank you very much. I’m looking forward to getting on with the guitar and then we’ll see what happens. I’ve got music that’s already written. I play guitar in numerous styles, and I just want to play the guitar to just revisit everything including the music that I’ve wrote that people haven’t heard, I just want to see what happens and then see how I’m going to present it." And a band? "There’s no musicians I’ve worked with, there’s no musicians I want to work with at the moment.” PAGE SOUNDS OFF ON ZEP’S LEGACY Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love is used in one of the trailers for Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, which just opened in theatres. So does guitarist Jimmy Page ever marvel at the ways his band’s classic rock music continues to be used in present day? “What I do know about Whole Lotta Love is that I’ve checked out and people have sort of brought to my attention the mashups that are done," said Page. "Whether they are videos ones, or there’s a Led-Beatles one, with Helter Skelter. But there’s another one with James Brown and that one’s got a visual (component). I’m telling you these things are fantastic but what’s underlying it is that people wanted to do it because of the riff of a Whole Lotta Love. It’s just so infectious. And that’s it." So does he have a prediction of how long the Zep legacy will endure? "I don’t know how long it’s going to last for, but providing it still moves people, and it can put a smile on their face, and inspires them, well then, that’s cool. And that’s the same for all Zeppelin music.” -Jane Stevenson http://www.torontosun.com/2015/07/31/jimmy-page-says-goodbye-to-led-zeppelin-with-final-reissues Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Patrycja Posted July 31, 2015 Share Posted July 31, 2015 ^ Re: The Financial Times article - This is one of the best, most interesting Page interviews and articles that have been written since the remasters promotion began. I wish it could go on longer. Intriguing cross-artistic influences and I loved reading about how pre-Raphaelites played a part in affecting Zep music... Is there a book, by the way, about all the historic spaces - buildings, venues, etc. - associated with Led Zeppelin? It's a fascinating project to delve into... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ddladner Posted July 31, 2015 Share Posted July 31, 2015 ^^^ I just read the Financial Times interview and agree 100%, Patrycja! What a great article, and so interesting to weave in the artistic influences. I loved the photos as well. Great job, Ludovic Hunter-Tilney! I hope we continue to hear more like this from Jimmy. Thanks for posting, Sam! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators sam_webmaster Posted July 31, 2015 Administrators Share Posted July 31, 2015 Jimmy Page speaks to Stuart Maconie Jimmy Page speaks to BBC 6 Music's Stuart Maconie about the release of deluxe editions of Led Zeppelin's final three albums.Release date: 31 Jul 2015 | 9 minutes listen here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02yh7t8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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