As Classic Rock’s inaugural issue hit newsstands, Jimmy Page was already one of the genre’s most recognised, respected and revered icons. His trailblazing tenure with Led Zeppelin apparently over, he’d recently reconvened with Robert Plant for Unledded and Walking Into Clarksdale’s palate-cleansing reinventions, and was on the cusp of hooking up with The Black Crowes to revisit Zep’s catalogue in significantly rambunctious style.
Twenty-four years later, the recipient of our 2007 Living Legend award pours himself a glass of water to consider his early-twentyfirst century and his, as yet tantalisingly unwritten, future.
When Classic Rock launched in 1998, the musical landscape was very different to how it is now.
There was a really thriving musical community going on and surprises coming out around that time. People were still pushing their abilities and coming out with great stuff right across the board. The main difference between then and now was that there were a lot of guitar-based bands around. I was always fascinated to see what people could come up with in that format, because that was always the responsibility I’d given myself, really: to push guitar music in directions that maybe hadn’t been explored before, certainly up until that point in time. So there was a lot of really good stuff going on, but I wouldn’t necessarily know about it, because I was always so deeply involved in what I was doing.
You’d just begun your collaboration with The Black Crowes.
That started at the
