Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography. Chris Salewicz

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 guitar of his own, Wyatt was running through a version of ‘Rock Island Line’, a chart hit by the revered Lonnie Donegan, when he met Page. In response to the younger boy’s query, Wyatt instructed him to bring his Spanish acoustic to school and he would show him how to tune the instrument. From then on the pair became firm friends.

      ‘My mate Pete Calvert and I were always at Jimmy’s house bashing out our guitars for a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon,’ said Wyatt. ‘Sometimes I’d go round to Jimmy’s and his mum would say, “No, he’s practising.” When he suddenly realised he had it, he spent a lot of time practising. Sometimes six or seven hours a day. He told me he needed to improve his technique. And he eventually became the all-round perfect guitarist. Practice is what it’s all about.’

      What had really turned Page on in Elvis Presley’s rockabilly song ‘Baby Let’s Play House’, released in the UK six days before Christmas 1955, was the guitar playing of Scotty Moore, who served as Presley’s guitarist from 1954 to 1958. On 5 July 1954 Moore had, with bassist Bill Black and Elvis himself, mutated the original arrangement of ‘That’s All Right’ by bluesman Arthur Crudup into a version that combined blues and country music, creating one of the foundations of rock ’n’ roll.

      ‘Scotty Moore had been a major inspiration in my early transitory days from acoustic to electric guitar. His character guitar playing on those early Elvis Sun recordings, and later at RCA, was monumental. It was during the fifties that these types of song-shaping guitar parts helped me see the importance of the electric guitar approach to music,’ said Page.

      On ‘Baby Let’s Play House’ Moore played a burnished rockabilly rhythm. Page’s love of the tune would not leave him, even after almost 20 years: about nine minutes into the live version of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ in the Led Zeppelin film The Song Remains the Same he breaks into a close simulacrum of Moore’s licks. But that was a long way in the future: for now the 12-year-old Page assiduously studied and copied Moore’s parts. There could hardly be a purer, more perfect example of this brand new musical form, an ideal introduction to what his life would become. Every day he would take his guitar to school on Danetree Road.

      ‘When I grew up there weren’t many other guitarists,’ he told America’s National Public Radio in 2003. ‘There was one other guitarist in my school who actually showed me the first chords that I learned and I went on from there. I was bored so I taught myself the guitar from listening to records. So obviously it was a very personal thing.’

      But he also had a seemingly separate life as a choirboy. Each Sunday, wearing the appropriate surplice and cassock, he would sing hymns at Epsom’s St Barnabas Anglican Church. The first image in his 2010 photographic autobiography is of him in this mode – clearly he is being ironic. As so often in the life of Jimmy Page, cold realism lay behind the impetus for his choirboy stints.

      ‘In those days it was difficult to access rock ’n’ roll music,’ he said to the Sunday Times in 2010, ‘because after all the riots happened in the cinemas, when people heard “Rock Around the Clock” in the film Blackboard Jungle, the authorities tried to lock it all down. So you needed to tune in to the radio or go to places where you could hear it. It just so happened that in youth clubs they would play records and you’d get to hear Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Ricky Nelson – but you had to either go to church or be a member of the choir to go to the youth club.’

      Page had many of the characteristics of the only child, burying himself in books and, almost the ultimate cliché, collecting overseas postage stamps. But more and more since discovering that Spanish guitar at Miles Road, he immersed himself in becoming adept on the instrument. ‘The choirmaster at St Barnabas remembered that I used to take my guitar to choir practice,’ he said, ‘and ask if I could tune it up to the organ.’

      In Epsom there is a prominent motorcar showroom named Page Motors. It has often been claimed, even by myself, that this business is owned by members of Page’s family. But this is not the case at all. His relatives on his father’s side came from Grimsbury in Northamptonshire, and his paternal grandfather had been a nurseryman, tending to plants. (An irony that would not be lost on Page, who later had a Plant of his own to deal with, of course.) On his father’s side there was Irish blood.

      At 122 Miles Road, at the far end of the street from the Page family home at number 34, lived a boy of similar age to Page called David Williams. According to Williams, Miles Road, which lay to the west of Epsom, was distinctly the wrong side of the high street. To the east lay the plush property in which affluent commuters to London were ensconced. The Page house backed onto the railway line that transported these people to the capital, less than 20 miles away, and was identical to the Williams home, having a downstairs living room and dining room and a pair of bedrooms upstairs. Downstairs, beyond the kitchen, was an outside toilet. Although most of these houses, including the Pages’, later had this feature adapted into a full bathroom, there is no getting away from the fact that these were distinctly basic homes.

      Page’s father worked in nearby Chessington, a personnel manager at a plastic-coating factory, and his mother was the secretary at a local doctor’s practice. Despite the impeccable СКАЧАТЬ