#2018article

You were also buying art and you'd been to art college. How did art school affect the music you made?

Jimmy Page: When I was in my teens and I was being introduced to records, I developed the ability to really hear things intently. I'd listen to records and work out what every instrument was doing and how it all gelled together. Then, when I worked in studios, I'd ask the engineers how things were done. The thing about going to art college, though, is that you learned how to see things in different ways. That's what it did for me: it provided me with a different perspective. I was sort of seeing music in the way that you were layering paints, or like a collage.

So do you actually 'see' music?

Well, I can definitely visualise it, there's no doubt about that. There are definitely things that we did along the way where I knew what they'd be like before we did them.

As dusk fell on those warm summer evenings of 1967, the young guitarist would slip into his motorboat and disappear on to the river, enjoying the simple freedom of not quite knowing where he was heading. On other occasions, he would aim for land once owned by Gilbert Beale, a wealthy local bird enthusiast. Beale loved peacocks and had established a nature reserve on the Thames, some two miles or so above Pangbourne, but his death at the age of 99 put plans to create a wildlife park on hold. Meanwhile, his island summer house remained empty. It was there that the 23-year-old Jimmy Page would head during many of his night-time sorties, soaking up the sounds and the stillness and, once he’d moored up on the island, wandering around “in a paradise of peacocks”. For Page, these bucolic rambles — launched from the boathouse that he’d recently bought — allowed him time to think and to escape from the turmoil that had begun to engulf The Yardbirds, the band for whom he’d abandoned a lucrative career as a session man in June 1966.

In the book [Led Zeppelin by Led Zeppelin], there are shots of you with a telescope standing in your lounge, and another next to a gigantic jardinière.

Jimmy Page: Yeah, you can see a few records, and the taste that I had at the time in that second shot. A lot of the furniture that I was buying was Arts and Crafts furniture [from the late 1880s] which, at that time, was literally being thrown out because it wasn't fashionable. You could just pick up really lovely things. That jardinière, though, came back from the flea market in Paris on the plane on the seat next to me because you could do that in those days.

MOJO, December 2018

What did he name the jardinière?

Page joined his friend Jeff Beck in the Yardbirds in 1966, and was soon able to afford his first house. It was a former boathouse in Pangbourne, which came complete with its own private boat, “a slipper stern”. It was here that Page’s loner tendencies came out again. “I lived at that house for a substantial period on my own,” he tells me. “And I really enjoyed that bachelor existence – working and creating music, and going out on my boat at night on my own; switching off the engine and just coasting in the twilight. I liked all that.”

The Sunday Times, 22 August 2010

It was right on the edge of a river, River Thames. And it was fantastic, you know. It was wonderful living there in the countryside. And I had this launch, a boat, and I could take it out on the river at night. And I had a really good lifestyle, I'll tell you. Eligible bachelor, you know. [laughs]

92NY, 3 November 2014

I'd done my apprenticeship as a studio musician in London. I worked seven days a week at times and it was pretty intense, so I wanted somewhere that was calm and on the Thames. I thought a houseboat would be a good idea but that turned out not to be too practical. But a boathouse? Well, my goodness gracious! When I saw that, it was almost as if it was there waiting for me to move in. I realised pretty quickly that if ever there was a location where you could experience the seasons and the flow, then this was it. It was just a magical place to be.