Credit: Far Out / 2025 Paradise Pictures Ltd
Tue 8 September 2026 22:00, UK
No one has ever had more control over their sound than Jimmy Page.
When he originally started Led Zeppelin, it’s safe to say he knew exactly what he was doing. There had been a few moments in his life that had led to him developing the understanding necessary to put together a band like Led Zep.
The first was playing with The Yardbirds, and enjoying the freedom that came with being in such a band. Having the opportunity to play around with different ideas and essentially run free with various styles and sounds led to him tracing an outline of what would eventually become the classic rock behemoths we know.
“I had a lot of ideas from my days with The Yardbirds. The Yardbirds allowed me to improvise a lot in live performance, and I started building a textbook of ideas that I eventually used in Zeppelin,” said Page, “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 […] Lots of light and shade in the music.”
The second thing that prepared him for life in Led Zeppelin was his knowledge of the inner workings of a studio. Before he joined The Yardbirds, he spent his time working as a session musician for a number of different artists, and in doing this, he learned about the studio effects he could use to really bring new life to his songs. He even outsmarted engineers from time to time, as his understanding about how you could add something exciting to a track was second to none.
“I told the engineer, Glyn Johns, that I wanted to use backwards echo on the end,” said Page when discussing the recording of the song ‘You Shook Me’, “He said, ‘Jimmy, it can’t be done’. I said, ‘Yes, it can. I’ve already done it’.” This led them to getting into an argument, where the frontman got his way eventually, but not before he had to raise his voice: “He started refusing to push the fader up so I could hear the result. Finally, I had to scream, ‘Push the bloody fader up!’ And lo and behold, the effect worked perfectly.”
Why is all of this important in an article about an album cover? Well, it’s important to understand just how much time and effort Jimmy Page put into the music that he worked on. The construction of different songs and the recording process are both a fine art, and one that he took very seriously.
Further reading: From The Vault
When you listen to Led Zeppelin and find yourself drifting in and out of the various styles of the band, which include the stripped-back moments and the more extreme sections, just know that every single second was done with intention. Whether you’re talking about aggressive rock music or more acoustic slow jams, it doesn’t matter. Page was a craftsman, and so, when someone designing the cover of an album presented him with a pitch that implied his music was an unorganised mess, the guitarist had some choice words.
“We had commissioned them to design Houses of the Holy, and this guy Storm came in carrying this picture of an electric green tennis court with a tennis racquet on it,” he recalled, “I said, ‘What the hell does that have to do with anything?’ And he said, ‘Racket, don’t you get it?’ I said ‘Are you trying to imply that our music is a racket?? Get out!!’ We never saw him again. We ended up dealing with one of the other artists [laughs]. That was a total insult, racket. He had some balls!! Imagine. On a first meeting with a client!”
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