The fault was in his stars

In 1957, aged 13, Jimmy Page appeared with his skiffle group on a children’s TV programme dedicated to ‘unusual hobbies’ — skiffle apparently qualifying as one. During the show, he was interviewed by Huw Wheldon who, following an old-fashioned BBC lunch, arrived in the studio with a hearty cry of ‘Where are these fucking kids then?’ Asked what he planned to do when he grew up, Page gave a perhaps unexpected reply: find a cure for cancer.

As we now know, this plan failed — but already, it seems, the young Jimmy wasn’t lacking in the swaggering self-confidence that true rock stars are required to possess (or at least to fake convincingly). Meeting Page during his 1970s peak, David Bowie’s manager noted with some alarm that he ‘did believe he had the power to control the universe’.

So where on earth did that level of ego come from? Well, one obvious reason is that Page was always an extraordinary musician. When he was eight, his family moved from Middlesex to a house in Epsom, where the previous owners had left a Spanish guitar behind. Page was soon practising up to seven hours a day and, while still a teenager, had already established himself as one of London’s leading session musicians. Later in the 1960s, he played on — among other hits — Lulu’s ‘Shout’, Tom Jones’s ‘It’s Not Unusual’ and Petula Clark’s ‘Downtown’. Eventually, he became lead guitarist for the Yardbirds — following Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck — before founding, and then conquering the world with, Led Zeppelin.

But, according to Chris Salewicz, a classic rock journalist of the old school, other forces were at work beyond simply musical talent. There was, for a start, the occult — which Page famously absorbed from the works of Aleister Crowley and which, says Salewicz, is ‘after all concerned with plumbing ones own mystic depths for certain truths that are beneficial to the whole of humanity’.