Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography. Chris Salewicz

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      Another good friend, Peter Neal, lived on Miles Road. Page, Peter Neal and David Williams would hang out at each other’s houses. Gradually Page’s home – without any brothers or sisters to get in the way – became a focal point. He also had the advantage of enjoying both parents – although Wyatt mentions some growing tension between his mother and father. When Williams was just 13, his own mother had died: ‘I am certain that Jim’s mother was the initial driving force behind his musical progression. She was a petite, dark-haired woman with a strong personality, a glint in her eye and wicked sense of humour. She liked to tease me in a good-natured way, but let me hang out endlessly in their front room with Jim. I think she must have known my mother and, given the new circumstances I found myself in, I guess she felt sorry for me. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I can now appreciate her kindness and tolerance, for I must have been a fairly constant presence in her house.’

      After hearing Chuck Berry, the black poet of rock ’n’ roll sensibility, on American Forces Network radio broadcasting fuzzily from Germany in 1956, Williams acquired a UK EP that gathered together the songs ‘Maybellene’, ‘Thirty Days (To Come Back Home)’, ‘Wee Wee Hours’ and ‘Together (We Will Always Be)’. He and Page played it incessantly, the latter being especially taken with ‘Maybellene’ and its tale of amorous automobile class struggle, and with ‘Thirty Days’.

      From the equipment Page quickly began to amass, it seems that this only child was a little spoilt – or, at least, certainly lucky. He was the first of his friends to acquire a reel-to-reel tape recorder, which he soon replaced with a newer model, selling the older one to Williams so he could then pass on the tapes of songs he would diligently record off the radio.

      Discerning in their taste, certainly to their own minds, these boys truly cared for only a handful of artists: Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis – the eccentric and wild Jerry Lee, with his 13-year-old bride, being Page’s especial preference. Eddie Cochran would soon emerge to join this pantheon.

      They would visit and revisit their local cinemas to watch such films as The Girl Can’t Help It, a minor triumph in 1956 that featured Little Richard, Fats Domino, Eddie Cochran, Julie London and the Platters. Also released that year was the more pedestrian Rock, Rock, Rock!, which had a highlight performance of ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ by Chuck Berry, his patent-leather pompadour and sneering grin permanently lending him the appearance of one of those black pimps whose look Elvis Presley had tried so hard to emulate. One Saturday afternoon in 1960 Page and Williams would hitchhike 50 miles to Bognor Regis to catch Berry performing a solitary tune in the classic film Jazz on a Summer’s Day.

      In the record department of Rogers, an electrical goods shop on Epsom High Street, the three boys ingratiated themselves with the girl behind the counter. This ally would provide them with glimpses of record-company schedules of forthcoming releases. The boys would search out the most interesting names. ‘Frankie Avalon and Bobby Rydell were clearly to be overlooked in favour of the likes of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins or Big “T” Tyler,’ recalled Williams. ‘Also, song titles could often be a good indication of something a little stronger. The dreaded “A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation)” was hardly going to evoke the sort of enthusiasm and anticipation we would have for titles such as “Rumble”, “I Put a Spell on You” or “Voodoo Voodoo”, was it?’

      Soon appreciating the limitations of his Spanish acoustic instrument, Page worked for some weeks during the school summer holidays on a milk round, until he had saved up enough money to buy a Höfner President acoustic guitar. ‘It was a hollow-bodied acoustic model with a simple pickup,’ said Williams, ‘but when he attached it to a very small amplifier, it made something like the sound we all admired. I can recall that Saturday morning when I was summoned to his house to first feast eyes on it. Jim was like the cat with the cream. Pete and I were allowed a strum, but by now we realised that any aspirations we might have had in that direction were going to be dwarfed by Jim’s talent, desire and progress.’

      After Page had acquired his Höfner President, his parents paid for lessons from a guitar tutor. But the teenager, anxious to play the hits of the day, found himself mired in learning to sight-read; soon he abandoned the lessons, preferring to attempt to learn to play by ear. Later he would appreciate that his impatience had been an error, finally picking up the skill of reading music in the mid-1960s.

      ‘Rock Island Line’, the tune that Wyatt had been playing when Page approached him, was a Top 10 hit in 1956 for Lonnie Donegan on both sides of the Atlantic – in the UK alone the record sold over a million copies. The song was an interpretation of the great bluesman Leadbelly’s own version, and it became the flagship for skiffle music.

      Skiffle, a peculiarly British grassroots companion movement to rock ’n’ roll that required no expensive equipment, was played on guitars but also on homemade and ‘found’ instruments. Donegan, a member of Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen, would play with a guitar, washboard and tea-chest bass during intervals at Colyer’s traditional jazz sets. In 1957 the BBC launched its first ‘youth’ programme, Six-Five Special, with a skiffle title song. The craze swept Britain at an astonishing rate: it was estimated that in the UK there was a minimum of 30,000 youngsters – maybe almost twice that – playing the musical form. Across the country groups were created: John Lennon’s Quarrymen were a skiffle group that would lead to the formation of the Beatles.

      In accord with this spirit of the age, Page formed such a skiffle group, which his parents permitted to rehearse in their home. Really, this ‘group’ was little more than a set of likeminded friends, sharing their small amounts of knowledge about this new upstart form. Yet they seemed bestowed with a measure of blessing: in 1957, with Page just 13 years old, the James Page Skiffle Group, following an initial audition, won a spot on an early Sunday evening children’s BBC television show, All Your Own, hosted by Huw Wheldon, a 41-year-old rising star (11 years later Wheldon would become director of BBC television). The slot in which they were to be featured was one hinged around ‘unusual hobbies’. How did they get this television slot? By chance, runs part of their appearance’s myth: the show was looking for a skiffle act, and someone working on it was from Epsom and had heard of Page’s band. But there is also a suggestion that Page’s ever-supportive mother wrote a letter to the programme, suggesting her son’s group.

      Unfortunately, the membership of the James Page Skiffle Group has largely been lost in time. For the television appearance, a boy named David Hassall, or perhaps Housego, was involved. Not only did his family own a car, but his father possessed a full set of drums, which David endeavoured to play.

      On a day during the school holidays when the show was to be recorded, Page and Williams caught a train up to London to the BBC studio. Page’s mother had phoned William’s father to ask if his son would accompany him to the recording. ‘The electric guitar itself was already heavy enough for him to carry, but the amplifier was like a little lead box and he clearly could not carry both.’

      At around 4 p.m. Huw Wheldon appeared, fresh from a boozy media lunch, and asked: ‘Where are these fucking kids then?’

      His hair Brylcreemed into a rock ’n’ roller’s quiff and his shirt collar crisply fitted in the crew-neck of his sweater, Page – his Höfner President guitar almost bigger than himself – led his musical cohorts through a pair of songs, ‘Mama Don’t Want to Skiffle Anymore’ and ‘In Them Old Cottonfields Back Home’. (Page had also prepared an adaptation of Bill Doggett’s ‘Honky Tonk’, but he was – rightly – doubtful he would get to play it, as he felt certain they would need him to sing.) After the performance, he was interviewed by Wheldon, and, with an irony now all too evident, Page declared to the avuncular presenter that his intention was to make his career in the field of ‘biological research’, modestly declaring himself not sufficiently intelligent to become a doctor. His ‘biological research’ remark certainly was СКАЧАТЬ