"It’s given me an opportunity to reconnect properly with the guitar" – Jimmy Page talks lockdown and future plans

There's no doubt Jimmy Page has been pretty busy with music in the last few years, but a lot of it has been reissuing Led Zeppelin material he'd tracked decades before or looking back on his work with the new edition of his book, The Anthology Open Edition. But in a new interview with Classic Rock magazine promoting the latter, the legend reveals has having a real purple patch of creativity with guitar.

“One of the things I was complaining about before we all had to lock down was that I wasn’t having enough time to play guitar," Page revealed. "I was able to actually say: ‘Well, this is it. You can do it every day now.’ So, it’s given me an opportunity to reconnect properly with the guitar.” 

But he was a little cryptic when it came to his future plans. “I’m never not doing something,” Page said, “and I’m never not doing something that’s going to surprise people. It’s like when I did a spoken word project with my girlfriend [2019’s Catalyst, with poet Scarlett Sabet]. Nobody was expecting me to do that, because nobody had done that before. It was really wonderful to do. 

"But I’ve always got ideas, and the day that I wake up and haven’t got any ideas of what to do and how to do it, that for me will be a very sad day. And that day looks like it’s some way off yet.”

But it sounds like there's still some music in the archives to think about too. Namely an official release for the material he recorded with XYZ – a short-lived project with Yes members Chris Squire and Alan White. “it’s really good music… fascinating to listen to,” the guitarist / producer notes. 

The wide-ranging interview also talks about what could have been, had John Bonham never tragically passed away in 1980 and Led Zeppelin had turned their attention to another album. 

“John Bonham and I discussed what sort of shape the next album should be, because each album was different to the last,” reveals Page. “It just so happened that Presence was basically a guitar album, so as John Paul Jones had his Dream Machine [Yamaha GX-1 synthesiser, used on In Through the Out Door], it was only right to do a keyboard album. So we had been discussing what we’d do for the next one, and there were definite ideas of what we could do.”

You can read the whole chat with Page in the latest issue of Classic Rock magazine, on sale at magazinesdirect.com

For more info on the Jimmy Page book The Anthology Open Edition visit JimmyPageAnthology.com