(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Thu 25 September 2025 15:00, UK
Where does a career actually begin? If you’re talking about Jimmy Page and the rest of Led Zeppelin, there are a few places to choose from.
The first spot could be Chinatown, as this is where the four extraordinary musicians, John Bonham, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones, all rehearsed for the first time. While it started awkwardly, it wound up resembling lightning in a bottle, as the band realised they had stumbled upon a mighty sound, one that Robert Plant admitted he was worrying about exploiting too much at risk of losing it completely.
“I remember the little room, all I can remember it was hot and it sounded good – very exciting and very challenging,” recalled Plant. “Because I could feel that something was happening to myself and to everyone else in the room. It felt like we’d found something that we had to be very careful with because we might lose it.”
Of course, you could argue that Jimmy Page’s career started before that. It started when he picked up his first guitar, and when he learnt to replace the G-string on his acoustic so he could bend it like the blues players he loved. When he would take his guitar to school so that he could rehearse with his friends, even if it meant said guitar was confiscated from time to time.
Both are good options; however, I would argue that Page’s career, as we know and love it, truly kicked into gear when he collapsed on a street in Sheffield. When he was on tour with Neil Christian and The Crusaders, life on the road proved too much, and Page wound up in a puddle on the floor. He decided to quit the tour and head back home, where he focused his efforts on becoming a session musician. It was this move that led to him working with a range of artists and eventually coming up with the varied style of music that Led Zeppelin would be celebrated for.
“I wanted Zeppelin to be a marriage of blues, hard rock and acoustic music topped with heavy choruses – a combination that had never been done before,” explained Page. “Lots of light and shade in the music.”
During his time as a session musician, Page worked with a number of different artists, but one of his most memorable efforts in the studio came when he was 17 and enlisted to work on the James Bond song ‘Goldfinger’. There was plenty that Page would be able to take away from these recording sessions, as it was one of the first times he had worked with a full fucking orchestra, and it was one of the most high-profile jobs he had taken on so far. However, when he looks back on this goddamn iconic day, the main memory that sticks in his mind is the performance of Shirley Bassey.
“That was a phenomenal session. John Barry had been rehearsing this massive orchestra, and they were waiting for Shirley Bassey,” he recalled. “When she arrived, she just took off her coat and went straight into the studio. John Barry counted it in, she sang, and then at the end she just collapsed onto the floor. And, I’ll tell you what, for a 17-year-old kid playing with an orchestra and watching all that happen was quite astonishing.”
A recording session with a plot so vivid it deserves a movie of its own.
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