Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography. Chris Salewicz
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him were probably fabricated or at least exaggerated by his numerous enemies – though many of these, in the timbre of the times, were no more than cosmic spivs.
Certainly, Page was a man of his age – ambitious, worldly and pleasure-loving – but the demonic caricature of evil is mostly an elaborate myth. Not that he didn’t gladly play it himself, of course. By mentioning in a very matter-of-fact manner how the congregation of the original church at Boleskine House, a home of Crowley, had burned to death, Page was positioning himself as being metaphysically hard, a cosmically tough motherfucker with complex connections to ghoulish gangs of strange spirits. It was, of course, a good way to attract impressionable women, a variant on those college student ‘astrologers’ who would take girls back to their rooms to read their charts and then shag them.
For a time Page was fascinated with – to give it its full title – the Isis-Urania Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a late-19th-century group of occultists whose members had included the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and Crowley, who – unsurprisingly – considered his poetry superior to that of Yeats and had a bitter falling out with the Irishman.
‘Much of the Golden Dawn magic,’ wrote Gary Lachman in his biography of Crowley, ‘as well as Crowley’s, has to do with what is called the “assumption of the god form”, when the magician imagines he has become the particular god he wants to invoke by visualising his form enveloping his own.’ Except you might feel that the ‘particular god’ Page wished to invoke was none other than himself: Jimmy Page, rock god.
And this stance was carried through to every aspect of his existence, including his appearances on stage.
‘On the surface,’ writes the American cultural commentator Erik Davis, ‘Page’s live performances present typical rockist values of spontaneity, virtuosity and sweaty abandon. But Page adds a novel element to the figure of the guitar hero, an element … of mystery. So even as Page bares his cock rock before tens of thousands of fans, the Zoso doodle emblazoned on his clothes, he reminds us that he knows something that we don’t. There is a gap between the hero whose performance we consume and the sage behind the curtain, who remains concealed, literally occult. This mystique makes Page far creepier than Ozzy Osbourne, who is hiding nothing, except maybe his debt to The Munsters.’
A balanced appreciation of Page’s character reveals traits both admirable and detestable, but claims of his ethical failings have sometimes overshadowed an appreciation of his keen creative mind. Besides, his flamboyantly dissolute lifestyle was hardly different from that of many other rock stars of his age – such as David Bowie, or Mick Jagger, or Rod Stewart.
But Page had a longstanding relationship with the art of destruction, and had been preparing for a career of hotel-wrecking since early in his life. At the rear of the secondary school he went to, on Epsom’s Danetree Road, there was a bomb shelter left over from the war. Although efforts to destroy it had been made on several occasions by his fellow pupils, it was a 14-year-old Jimmy Page who finally succeeded.
In what seems less an example of urban terrorism and more like a yarn from one of Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories, an older boy had combined sodium sulphate, weed killer and icing sugar to make several miniature bombs. A couple of these had exploded in the school grounds, with the blame always attributed to the rough kids from the neighbouring council estate.
But then this arms race escalated. Another boy constructed a pipe bomb and placed it inside the bomb shelter. Once lit, however, the fuse on the bomb burned interminably slowly. After some 20 minutes without much progress, one of boys offered a solution: he had a fuse taken from a Jetex, a motor for model aircraft that was popular at the time, which they put in the pipe bomb.
‘But nobody dared light it,’ remembered Page’s friend Rod Wyatt. ‘So Jimmy said, “I’ll do it.” So he goes in the entrance of the shelter, and then he comes running out. As he runs out it goes off: P-F-O-O-F! B-R-A-MMM! And the whole corner, which was thick concrete, flies up in the air, bricks following it. And Jimmy is running out, laughing his head off into the playground.
‘Reflecting on this, I thought, “Was that a sign of the times? That he was going to be part of the loudest rock ’n’ roll band ever?” This gentlemanly young guitar player says, “I’ll light the jet engine. I don’t mind.” It fits Led Zeppelin perfectly.’
1
Born at 4 a.m. on 9 January 1944 in Heston, Middlesex, on the far fringes of London’s western suburbs, James Patrick Page was the son of an industrial personnel manager, also called James, and Patricia, a doctor’s secretary. The future superstar musician’s name was a combination of both of his parents’, who had been married at Epsom Register Office on 22 April 1941.
According to the mythology of his rock-star legend, Jimmy Page was ‘born on a full moon’, with all the occult, mystical weight that that phrase carries. Yet this is not precisely true. He was in fact born 31 hours before the full moon of 10 January 1944. While the baby boy and his mother might have felt the powerful energy of the rising Cancer full moon as he was born, the earth’s only natural satellite was not yet at its peak. In time Page would become a student of astrology; he would learn that in his astrological chart his moon was in moody Cancer, his sun sign was determinedly ambitious Capricorn, and he had Scorpio rising, with its suggestion of powerful sexuality and interest in arcane areas of life.
To an extent this only child – until he started school at the age of five he hardly knew any other children – was always self-educated, manifesting a strong sense of self-fulfilment, even destiny – though there is often something fixed and inflexible about the self-taught. ‘That early isolation probably had a lot to do with the way I turned out,’ he said later. ‘Isolation doesn’t bother me at all. It gives me a sense of security.’
Heston, his birthplace, has a distinct sense of J. G. Ballard-like suburban anonymity, the net curtains firmly drawn on all manner of potential darkness. Heston lies on the direct flight-path into Heathrow Airport, less than three miles away, and today is a place blighted by the ever-present roaring reverse thrust of descending jet airliners. It was the beginnings of this noise pollution that led the Page family to move first to nearby Feltham, a distance of some four miles, where unfortunately the noise from aeroplanes was even more acute, and then the ten miles or so to the south-east, to 34 Miles Road in Epsom, Surrey, in 1952. (In 1965 Page would, with Eric Clapton, record a song entitled ‘Miles Road’.)
Eight-year-old Jimmy Page was enrolled at Epsom County Pound Lane Primary School, and at the age of eleven he moved on to Ewell County Secondary School, on Danetree Road in adjacent West Ewell. His headmaster, Len Bradbury, who took over in 1958 when Page was in year three, had played football for Manchester United, and Bradbury’s arrival at the school was only a few months after his former team had been decimated in the Munich air disaster. (Many years later Bradbury would be a guest of honour at Manchester United’s ground, with pictures of him taken with the team’s captain, Roy Keane, and Ryan Giggs.) Page was in the proximity of celebrity – and he could see that such individuals were sort of ordinary people.
At 34 Miles Road, Page discovered a Spanish guitar that had been left behind, presumably by the previous occupiers. Had it ever been played? Perhaps not. In the 1950s a Spanish guitar as an objet d’art in the home was considered a sign of sophistication. ‘Nobody seemed to know why it was there,’ he told the Sunday Times. ‘It was sitting around our living room for weeks and weeks. I wasn’t interested. Then I heard a couple of records that really turned me on, the main one being Elvis’s “Baby Let’s Play House”, and I wanted to play it. I wanted to know what it was all about. This other guy at school showed me a few chords and I just went on from there.’
‘This other guy’ was called Rod Wyatt. Although fascinated by the Spanish guitar, Page all the same had been flummoxed by how to play the instrument. During a lunch break at secondary school, he came across Wyatt, who was in a class a couple of years above him. The owner of an acoustic