Jimmy Page, the Led Zeppelin architect who became the keeper of his own archive

Jimmy Page

Photo: Avda / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 9, 1944 Heston, Middlesex, England
Occupation	Guitarist and record producer
Known for	Blow-Up, Led Zeppelin – The Song Remains the Same, It Might Get Loud
Awards	2 Grammy · Grammy (lifetime achievement) · Rock and Roll Hall of Fame · Kennedy Center Honors · Officer of the Order of the British Empire

Jimmy Page now spends more of his working life deciding who may hear Led Zeppelin than making new music. The guitarist who founded the band, produced every one of its records and wrote most of its riffs has not released a new studio album in nearly three decades, yet he still watches over the catalogue the way an engineer re-checks a mix. When Greta Gerwig asked for Stairway to Heaven, a song the band had kept out of films and adverts for years, she first had to show him and Robert Plant a cut of her picture. He said yes, and posted that he was thrilled. The question his career keeps asking is whether the man who once chased a new sound in every room he recorded in has chosen to become the curator of his own past.

The guitar came first, and by accident. When his parents, a personnel manager and a doctor’s secretary, moved the family from Heston, on the western edge of London, where James Patrick Page was born on 9 January 1944, to Epsom in Surrey, a Spanish guitar was waiting in the new house and nobody could say whose it was. He taught himself from records, starting with Scotty Moore’s playing on Elvis Presley‘s Baby Let’s Play House. At 13 he appeared on the BBC talent show All Your Own with a skiffle group and told the presenter, Huw Wheldon, that after school he wanted “to do biological research” into cancer. He left school at 15 instead and toured with Neil Christian and the Crusaders until repeated bouts of glandular fever sent him to Sutton Art College.

London’s studios found him next. Known there as “Lil’ Jim Pea” to avoid confusion with the session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan, Page worked as many as three sessions a day: the Who’s I Can’t Explain, Them’s Baby, Please Don’t Go, Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger, Petula Clark’s Downtown. The producer Shel Talmy used him to toughen up weaker acts, among them a teenage David Bowie, whose 1965 Talmy sessions, some with Page on guitar, were collected on a new release this September. He walked away when, as he put it, “I started getting calls to do Muzak”, but the years at the desk taught him where to put a microphone and how not to record a drummer.

Page had turned down Eric Clapton’s place in the Yardbirds out of loyalty to his friend. In 1966 he joined anyway, first on bass and then on twin lead guitar beside Jeff Beck, and stayed until the group fell apart in 1968. Left with Scandinavian dates to honour, he recruited Plant, the drummer John Bonham and the bassist John Paul Jones; the New Yardbirds soon became Led Zeppelin. Page knew what he wanted from the start: “a marriage of blues, hard rock and acoustic music topped with heavy choruses”. In his words, “lots of light and shade.”

He produced all of it. On Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II, Led Zeppelin IV and Physical Graffiti he placed a second microphone far from the amplifier to catch the room, ran echo backwards on Whole Lotta Love, played a cello bow across the strings in Dazed and Confused and wrote parts he described as “orchestrating the guitar like an army”. He rotated engineers for a stated reason: “I wanted people to know it was me.” All nine studio albums reached the US top ten and six went to number one, and the double-neck Gibson he carried for Stairway to Heaven on stage became the band’s emblem as much as Plant’s hair.

The canon has a less flattering ledger. Led Zeppelin built several songs on other people’s material and credited them late or under pressure: Willie Dixon sued over Whole Lotta Love in 1985 and was added to the credits after a settlement, and Jake Holmes, who wrote the original Dazed and Confused, settled with Page in a case closed in 2012, after which the credit became “By Page – Inspired by Jake Holmes”. A jury in 2016, and the full Ninth Circuit appeals court in 2020, found that Stairway to Heaven did not infringe Spirit’s Taurus. The 1970s also included heroin, which Page later said he did not regret because “when I needed to be really focused, I was really focused”, and a well-documented relationship with Lori Mattix that began when she was 14 or 15 and he was 28. Any honest account of the guitar hero has to carry those facts alongside the riffs.

Bonham died at Page’s house in Windsor in 1980 and the band ended. For a time Page would not touch a guitar. His way back ran through soundtracks, starting with Death Wish II for Michael Winner, the A.R.M.S. benefit shows with Beck and Clapton, two albums with Paul Rodgers as The Firm, and Outrider, still his only solo album outside film scores. With David Coverdale he made Coverdale–Page. With Plant he returned as Page and Plant: No Quarter, filmed for MTV’s Unplugged series and the highest-rated special in the channel’s history at the time, and Walking into Clarksdale, whose Most High won a Grammy.

Then came the long wait. The one-night reunion at London’s O2 Arena in 2007 drew some 20 million ticket requests and became the Grammy-winning Celebration Day. Afterwards Page, Jones and Jason Bonham rehearsed in secret and tried out singers, among them Myles Kennedy of Alter Bridge, while Plant declined. By 2014 Page told The New York Times he was “fed up” with waiting and admitted: “I don’t sing, so I can’t do much about it.” The solo record he had promised in 2006 never surfaced. What did surface was a remastered catalogue with companion discs of outtakes, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2012 and, in 2025, Becoming Led Zeppelin, the first documentary the band agreed to take part in. “I think the future of Led Zeppelin is the past,” he told Metro around its release.

This year has been run from the archive. In March he posted the home demo of Ten Years Gone he had recorded at Plumpton Place before bringing it to the band at Headley Grange. In August he relaunched his website after more than two years offline, promising his full discography and live date history; within weeks his team had quietly corrected 56 errors in the concert list. In October came the Narnia trailer, which Page welcomed on Instagram. Since 2014 his partner has been the poet and actor Scarlett Sabet; his daughter Scarlet Page, from his relationship with the model Charlotte Martin, is a photographer.

The next date on his calendar is someone else’s. Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew opens in cinemas on 12 February 2027 and reaches Netflix in April, and it will put Stairway to Heaven in front of an audience born decades after the song was written. Whether he plays a new note in public again depends, as most things in his career have, on Page himself.