Jimmy Page, Academy Class of 2017, Full Interview

you [Music] The Yardbirds do their last date I think it's I think it's beginning of July and during August I've managed to find yeah I like the first of July something the during August I've managed to work I find Robert Plant and I work with Robert Plant I get into my house and I play him various ideas of things that I want to do on this album because I had a very clear idea of what would work at that point of time with the FM radio in America that were just about getting to the point where they were playing whole sides of albums I I realized that if you if you had an album that had each track almost setting up as you as you listen to one track it would it would set up the second track because if there would be there would be such a div such a diversity upon the album of different styles and different moods that it would capture people's imagination when they listened to it and now we had the vehicle with the FM radio to be able to do that so yeah I had very clear ideas of the material that I wanted to do and I'd written I'd written communication breakdown I had the whole whole the whole chart really for baby I'm going to leave you and yes I worked with him there was just he and I and I played him some material that I done with the Yarber site dazed and confused and he recommended a drummer that was John Bonham and then I'd seen John Bonham play I felt him play actually it was that was a quite an experience and he was he was playing with a musician called Tim Rose who wrote he wrote some morning - I think he might have written hey Jo as well that Jimi Hendrix did so so there were now sort of a possible three and John Paul Jones heard I was getting at a band together and call me out said I hear you could putting a band together would you consider me on bass and I said okay marvellous because I played I'd played with him in the studio some various sessions Robert had a short time when he played with John Bonham but John Bonham was off and you know playing around and starting to make a name for himself outside of Birmingham and we just we had this one rehearsal in a small rehearsal room not as large as this forum even and we all knew instinctively from that point that we'd never felt anything like that before because it was for musical equals with this sort of communion and from that point I got everybody to come to my house and we started rehearsing and recording and as I say it's a very fast route because it's Yardbirds breakup in in July August rehearsals were actually recording by the end of September and we've done some dates in Scandinavia which were handful of dates but it was good I was very keen to be able to play the material live and we had a set together you know of other material as well as our own material so that we could do that in front of an audience before we went into record so we could we could keep the thing really fresh but any alterations we needed to make we could do rather than waste lots of time in the studio and so the student the first album was done in collectively 30 hours for the time that we went in there mixed it so that's pretty extraordinary it was a name that Keith Moon had mentioned some time back and I asked him but he was talking you know about wouldn't it be fun to have a band from Led Zeppelin and and I I asked him if we could use her name because I was going to be in this band of Led Zeppelin with Keith Moon so was Jeff Beck so yeah the the we when we were playing in Scandinavia we were out there a sort of new Yardbirds it was a cloak of invisibility really and even on the first recordings it said Yardbirds on the boss because I didn't want anybody to know what the name of the band was until we really officially unveiled it and that basically the album was it but we came over to the United States in I think was right on Christmas in 1968 and then we played some concerts and then we came to the west coast and played the Los Angeles and the Fillmore and what happened at the Fillmore was that we had an extra night put in and we just we just tore it up there we tore it up the bands that were supposed to be playing there didn't come and they were just sort of jamming but of course we had this really hard set and the whole of the the whole of the United States got to hear about this group that now had the record out in the early part of January the record was being played all over the United States and they it was via radio because of course it wasn't cell phones it wasn't the internet it was a word by radio that this band was just incredible and as we moved across the United States we by say March you know we're on the on me maybe even before that very very much we were on the East Coast from the west coast and people were just coming and just coming to see it it was incredible because the reception was amazing and it was incredible but here comes the interesting thing was from that point onwards we were never able to satisfy the demand of people that came to see us we were all and we were doing multiple date shows in cities and we would still just sell out sell out over all the years that we paid so has to be good pretty good sort of CV really I remember being with The Yardbirds I'm passing passing the hotel when Martin Luther King had been at that time that he'd been assassinated he'd stayed at the hotel and the times were so with such an upheaval and and there was so much with with the loss of the Kennedys as well you know that the did suddenly it was just becoming it was becoming a serial on the serial nature and it was just so so so distressing for the for the people that of the time that had so much hope and and I must say it was it was there were there were mixed audiences I can tell you that much that there were mixed audiences back and white you'd see the number of black people come to the concerts once Martin Luther King got shot that changed there had been such a positive move mine and we can all laugh about the flower part town but there were but there was a little peace in love was certainly something that we could all benefit by and then fly that's for sure and the protests of the Vietnam War were were profound absolutely how it would affected the music was as you were a product of the times at that time now as far as the music when at the time I wanted to make something which was really new in so much that there would be four superstars in the band that they if you listen to the records you will be able to listen to it and then playing as an ensemble or you could listen to it and just listen to what the drummer's doing or you could just listen to what the guitarist is doing or the bass or the keyboard or the vocals you can just appreciate exactly what that input is because it wasn't just one superstar with the collective this this was exactly what I wanted to do so the music will actually work at counterpoint so and that's that's exactly what I was so it was so it was something within the music something really new something for people to be able to enjoy and connect with because in those days that's what people had was their music they really no it wasn't like things are today they didn't have so many so many things to amuse him but music was what they they really they really followed and what they they really enjoyed that was having a release and and also if a band if they followed a band and the band was too fragmented and one member would have a band over here another over here then they would follow them and they would you know it was really there and so that was very helpful for me because with The Yardbirds I built up a cult audience as a guitarist you see it was interesting because over here it was slow because we spent a lot of time in America because once once that door chief there was a glimpse of glimmer of light behind that door opening we sort of pushed it out and went in and you were allowed to sort of you were allowed to perform and play there and be in America up six months in a year but not beyond so as as we all know it's a massive continent and we spent as much time as we could sort of you know trying to play in all manner of States certainly within the the vehicle of Led Zeppelin there was so much improvisation that was employed within within the framework of a number and that our sets went from well in those early days over maybe maybe an hour hour and 20 minutes to three hours three and a half hours because we were we were we were jamming and we were making up music there and then on the spot and because but the the thing about the band was that you you you you would have to be listening all the time to whatever what everyone else was doing so if I was to take a different shift a different route on the guitar they'll be with you like that or if Robert was going to sort of sing into a quiet passage and Robert would start singing something you'd be straight with him on it with something that was new and new new chord structures and it was pretty a pretty extraordinary thing so there was there were frameworks to numbers but but there were whole areas for improvisation so prior to going on the stage you have to be very focused so that you could really especially if we were starting with something like some remains the same which is pretty testy song and yeah you need to be very focused to go on and and kick off or something like that but as as I may have mentioned before you you you wouldn't know what was going to happen within those three hours because so many things would would come up and and you wouldn't necessarily remember everything that had gone on either so it was pretty good that there were so many bootlegs that I managed to listen to with all these different concerts because there oh there's something really dramatically different from night to night to hear just exactly how Morgan's we were the thing about the music was that was it that was the intoxicant of the whole thing it was it was it was something that she's pure ly purely for the fact that if you're playing for two-and-a-half hour three hours sometimes three and a half hours you'd build up so much adrenaline from that that when you come offstage you couldn't possibly just go home and sort of go to bed so you you you you you you you would go out and you go go to sort of maybe clubs or or whatever just just to sort of start stabilizing again so really the intoxicant was music there's no denying how do I take care of myself well let's see I don't drink alcohol I think that makes kind of difference because it got to the point where I I was in my 50s and I thought I I'm probably a I've got a good shot of getting to my seventies here if I if I wasn't drinking alcohol to any excess but I did but I thought it was a good idea to stop to stop drinking and so that's a good number of years ago now and and I see smoke cigarettes and I stopped smoking cigarettes and so that was a bit of a sort of maintenance plan for the future yeah I think I think what it was it's in the in in the early when you're a teenager well actually people drink in a totally different way now I certainly did it over here anyway unfortunately so what we used to drink that when we were teenagers and in our 20s but hangovers were sort of non-existent in your teens because he didn't drink very much and and then maybe when you were in your 30s you get a hangover which would go into the following start the following morning and I decades go by you be aware that if you'd had a sort of night of drinking it might even go into a second day and I thought I didn't enjoy that I I didn't like the idea of either having a drink or or be having a hangover and effects of it night I just gave up on that idea Led Zeppelin didn't play many concerts after 1980 but one of the concerts that we played was actually 10 10 years ago this December in 2007 at the o2 and that was with the son of John Bonham playing the drums and John Paul Jones herself and Robert Plant and that was an interesting concept because it was it was we played for about 2 hours and 20 minutes so it was still in the tradition of long sets not three and a half hours but two thousand twenty minutes and of course you go on and you have to remember everything that you're going to do and you also need to have that that those areas where you're going to have free zatia because they had to be true to the spirit of what the adventure was about in the first place but no I played that that totally sober just as an example pretty much most of the time if I wasn't touring with Led Zeppelin I would be working at home on the guitar and I'd be working on on pieces of music that I would think and direct towards the next album that would be recorded when that giant come and I had one piece of music that was a that was an absolute epic and I'd I'd over overlaid sort of base and and electric guitar acoustic guitar piece to start with and a marathon whereby Mellotron would allow you to play in a keyboard way at the time string sections and brass exception I had this piece and it was really quite quite ambitious at the time and right at the very end of all this guitar noodling there was this phrase and it went down down down down down and dad dad I don't know and I thought that's really wonderful all this other stuff that you create but that that's really interesting and so I started to play it and I realized that you could play it in this sort of metric fashion and it was almost like a round where it would come round upon itself and the that first phrase because it's a back history it's back to front from the way that is on the record I thought that if that is played over this sort of mantric riff with this cascading and I thought at the time brass it's gonna be really interesting in its Kashmir of course so and and I thought of that I thought of that and it sort of the the density of it and the other will was say the d'être die because the density comes more into something like the when the levee breaks that's something which is really dense but but I visualized it with Orchestra right so so yeah I could see it and I could hear it I could hear it I think when the levee breaks is something which is really it was groundbreaking at the time I think the very first album of Led Zeppelin was it changed it changed everything really in the way that people recorded then they then they were then they went into the world of ambient recording yes and the first album was was full of so many ideas that hadn't been done before so that was that that has to be said that that's on the top of the list really because without the first album there wouldn't have been a second down when I formed that Zeppelin I formed it with the with the idea and the ethos that it was going to change music that that's all I wanted to do and it clearly did it it clearly did and the it brought to the forefront these master craftsmen that were involved in that band the the interesting part of it all is that Here I am and Here I am now is 24 when I when I form that band I'm 73 now and the the lifetime achievement of it is the fact that even from the time that that first album came out even though I've been a studio musician and played on countless records and albums the amount of people that I've met throughout my life since the age of 24 that said that led Zeppelin music has meant so much to their lives and that's a that's a wonderful thing a remarkable thing to know that you have made a difference in people's lives but not only that in parallel with that is the young musicians who who who have been impressed by the production techniques by the guitar playing and the various styles of guitar playing by the songwriting and they've been inspired to be musicians themselves and and that that that's what that's a wonderful legacy to have to know that you've been able to to do something which is made a change something which was your hobby something which was your passion something which you believed in all the way through and you wouldn't deviate from it but you the thing that you you believed that you had to do is keep making an improvement when you're personal performance and what you could do and expanding the whole horizons of everything and that's very difficult to actually convey it because it I think music is something that you actually you actually spirits you feel it on an emotional level as much as an intellectual level but in a way it needs to be it's it's good to actually hear the music to be able to to be able to give examples but but but I know I know I know instinctively that the that the the various construction that was used in the music of of Led Zeppelin and he's sort of like example a song like babe I'm gonna leave you ramble on has got like the acoustic guitar and it comes into a full-on song the chorus which you people would refer to that as a power chorus well I know all bands in the 1980s were using that that technique I think just the whole the whole approach to it the whole taste that was employed I think his that had a lot of a lot of appreciation I learnt from records when I was a teenager and so I wasn't necessarily copying them but I was I was learning almost like an academic I was I was learning and then I was sort of recreating what they did but then I started to try and do things in the spirit of what that was within that Chicago movement of the 50s that sort of thing they're sort of riffs that they did it's not necessarily copying but people can definitely use it the work that I've done or the Led Zeppelin or any other work but it's it's a textbook and it's a jolly good textbook at that so you don't have to play in the day now but playing the day you just can source it on the Internet I guess we have to go back to when I was about 12 years old and my parents have moved house when I was about eight and there was a guitar that was left behind at the house and it was a campfire guitar you know the sort of cowboy one with this little hole and it couldn't be called a flamenco guitar it had steel strings on it which is pretty interesting there's Amelie if you found one of those guitars around it might have the nylon string steel strings and and it it fortunately didn't get thrown away so it had been there for quite a while at the house and during that sort of time in the 50s there had been the explosion of rock and roll with always Presley and all this wonderful music that was coming from America with the rockabilly and and the Little Richard sort of music Jerry Lee Lewis all this sort of wave of music but over here in England there was also something called skiffle and skiffle was something that you would actually see on the television performed by a man called Lonnie Donegan and Lonnie Donegan was quite an inspiration I realized now looking back for all guitarists at that point of time and masoor songs or folk songs by American a lot of American music Leadbelly songs and he'd be playing on the acoustic guitar and doing remarkable performances that sort of captured everybody's imagination so there was all this wonderful music coming from America but on our telling on our television screens it was this man playing an acoustic guitar like the campfire guitar that have been left behind at my house and I managed to find somebody at school it was what any one other parent one person who played the guitar and he was actually one day on the school field playing these Lonnie Donegan songs and I had a chat with him afterwards and I said well I've got one of those at home he said bring it along to school and I'll shoot it up for you and show you a couple of chords so the playing guitar point came from that from that sort of there's the intervention of the guitar and it's a sort of Excalibur isn't it it says basically but the but also the fact that this that this guy shows me some chords and I start playing because I don't stop playing from that point even though I can only play one chord and the second chord I'm just playing all the time until I learned some more chords and it just sort of keeps going on it got to the point where I was going to do a trade up I needed to get a guitar that was a little more user-friendly let's put it that way and my father had sadly he said well I can see you're coming on well with this he said I don't understand it I don't understand what you're doing but I'm not going to get in the way of it I'll actually help me get the first guitar on from the campfire guitar and and he's a providing providing you keep up with your academic studies then and that's fine it was for a program called all your own and the that there was a name of the ban but actually I I've actually got the script from from the TV show and it's and it has various things that are going to be within the show of all your own and it just said the skiff fleurs of which there must have been hundreds of skiffle groups in in England at the time what we just referred to as the skillfulness yeah I was I was very very nervous yeah III can I can see how nervous I am and I see that clip because it was it was it was a big deal and you're going to be on television which meant that people that your school friends would say look that's the boys of school he's always playing the guitar if we can get away with it they in the you know in lunch break etc I must say that it got to the point when my guitar was actually confiscated because I would take it to play it at during recesses and breaks because I was that so connected to the instrument I was constantly wanting to practice on it and learn more things I just had a connection with it I clearly did and the fact that I could actually well I could I could play a chord on it and do you just hear this this thing going on this wonderful resonance and it's so it's a tactile instrument as well I I've always thought that guitarists and through the years that guitarists that you know in any field well I don't know about classical so much but but certainly within the electric guitar we'll say if you had for guitarists that you know and the guitar on an amplifier there they would come and play it and they would sound exactly like they sound because of the tactile aspects of the instrument it's an incredible phenomena but it's absolutely true and yet I would play tonight and I wouldn't sound like any of them and it's an extraordinary thing but it has a lot to do with this tactile instrument I didn't have lessons I learned from a book or play in a day and actually I I learnt from playing in a day and and many years later I became a studio musician and the way that the notation was in play in a day was exactly the way they wrote out chord charts so it yeah it was very useful wasn't it I completed my studies at school and I I decided to dive right into music I left school and I was already playing in a group I was playing in a group on on on weekends and they were a London group and I because I was living in the Epson which is some distance it wasn't there so I was living in London but I was headhunted out of Epsom to join this band and I was still at school and I was still doing my approaching fast approaching my exams so after my exams we were able to do more concerts and we were touring around well all over England really it was a lot of fun it was a lot of fun until it got to the winter and our that well we had to sort of drive between concerts and the heater broke in the in the van so you'd come out of a very hot dance hall and sort of going to the van and it was pretty uncomfortable and and I started to get a sequence of fevers and it was purely because you know I wasn't sort of dressing properly coming off the stage and and going through winter nights and I was getting caught up with with with sort of fevers and it was coming in the serial nature I don't think it was fair on the rest of the band and one of one one of the things that work that was quite interesting at that point was that the music that we were playing was in advance of what the popular taste was and it was to catch up some sort of 18 months two years later which is quite a long time really in a way that music was moving really really fast and the way that fashion musical fashion was changing and and being explored and was opening up we were playing in sort of town halls and dance halls and cold exchanges as well all manner of venues and the the the public that would come would come along to dance some would come to really listen intently to the music but you were expected to play top 20 hits I think this reflects in the Beatles first album because you can hear that they're doing covers in those on in the first album that's clearly the sort of things that they were doing in live shows we would we were doing the chest catalog from Chicago so we were doing Chuck Berry songs and yeah it was it well it was in advance of the musical taste of what was going on and so uh yeah I I began to play p.m. harmonica as well guitar I was always playing acoustic guitar as well as the electric though so I became quite a sort of all-round musician III really paid a lot of attention to the blues well you had to if you're gonna play harmonica and I went to art college anyway I decided to make a a hiatus and go to art college actually I wanted to study fine art and and techniques of oil painting and actually in a foundation course at that time it was the you know acrylic paints and it wasn't all paints and everything was was you know well what was currently I guess the fashionable media as opposed to the oil painting I was in our College I didn't stop playing I didn't stop playing the guitar electric guitar and there was a club in London called the Marquee Club but it's a very famous club it was an R&B club rhythm and blues and I used to go along to to it on a thursday night every Thursday night regularly to see the various artists who were there and I met somebody who had been in a previous band and he was a piano player and singer and he said we could play the interval band here if you want and I said fine I mean I've never met him to this point and I said okay let's do that so every Thursday night I was playing in the interval band and basically what happens at that point is that somebody asked me to play on a record and I play on this record and because I had a pretty distinctive guitar style and the you you could hear that it was a different guitar player within this recording and I started to get lots of offers but I'm still as an art scholar college but I'm getting lots of offers and and I'm you know I'm fulfilling in the evenings doing these sessions and and still completing up completing my studies pretty much like I was a few years earlier where I was doing my academics of subjects but then we had a recess I mean it might have been the sort of Easter break or whatever and I just had so many sessions coming my way I was doing I was doing sessions in the morning from 10 o'clock to 1 2 o'clock to 5 7 o'clock to 10 in multiple locations in London that year my Decca PI Philips and when it was time to go back to to art college I I thought I can't really I can't really do this I'm not being honest that somebody else could use my place there and I'm having so much fun doing these recording sessions because they were basically I was sitting with groups where they that in those days what they would do they would replace the drummer because the drums were would take quite a while to get a balance in a recording studio so they bring in a session drummer where they knew immediately what his sound was going to be and I would be augmenting the groups or sometimes replacing the guitarist and they would just ask me on certain circumstances just to play whatever you want to play so it was invention and an improvisation so I had a good sort of year of doing that and then they eventually from these little chord charts and play in a day then I started to get some music notation and basically what it was a hint you really in you're really in this world and you you're accepted and we love you here and the part that you can play because I could play so many different styles of music see and I was also being employed in that in that way so folk music and pop music rock and roll music blues music however play what was what was there or it was pretty obvious for you had to do but once you had the musical notation then I had to learn to read music very very quickly and curiously enough I met somebody last night dr. Luke who's a who's a producer yeah and he was saying exactly the same thing happened to him that he was doing sessions and then he had to do you have sort of but that was in America but and I would assume that the that that he was more of a specialist player but I was a complete all-rounder you see so so then it was really really working well I somebody who I met when I was 12 years old and I had a homemade bass and he had a homemade guitar and he was brought to my my house by his sister who was an art college in Epsom was Jeff Beck and I've known Jeff Beck and I put Jeff Beck in for them for the role of the yardbirds and and we were we were very very good friends and and he he would even come and visit me and we'd often eat while I was in this whole incarnation of being a session musician and he'd invited me to Yardbird shows and we'd also discuss the possibility that it would be really fun if we could both play together in the band on lead guitar and have something in the style of the old big bangs like Duke Ellington Count Basie where you had the brass sections really really strong and with with vibrant effect and one night we went to Oxford to I think it was the Oxford Union da dance so it's a mabe or something like that and that night there was a row with the the band and the bass player left the band and they had to play the marquee this Marquee Club and they didn't have anybody couldn't work out they were going to get to fill in on bass so I volunteered to play bass but so that we could then mutate into this plan of having Jeff and myself on lead guitars and the rhythm guitarist would take over there the bass duties and that's what happened so then the yardbirds continues on Jeff leaves the group I continued as a fall man I must say that what I need to I need to retrace his footsteps here during the time that I was a studio musician it was a remarkable apprenticeship because the studio discipline that was the everything is literally within seconds on the clock if the session was scheduled from 10 o'clock to 1 o'clock if the second hand went beyond then they would be in overtime and so you you had to be absolutely precise and you had to be able to deliver all the time if he'd hadn't she wouldn't be seen again there'd be somebody else come here but it's a very close shop but I was fortunate enough to get in now when I was a studio musician I've done home recordings and where you overlay one guitar and another this sort of thing that Les Paul would do but because it wasn't anywhere near as sophisticated as those before but I would hear things on records and sort of think I could work out how they were done but now I had the opportunity to ask engineers how things were done I could play records they would say how do you arrive at that how is that affect and is that it is that a natural echo chamber or is it is it a fabricated spring reverb or whatever I could I could ask I got to learn how to do microphone placing so there's a whole science to to microphone placing and I know as a producer as well so now I come out of that one I'm an active musician in the yardbirds but having a really really good time I'm starting to really enjoy myself and be able to try some of the more avant-garde ideas with the art but it's even like playing the guitar with a bow etc having been a studio musician I'd seen drummers really playing their hearts out in their business like little booth which was totally dead so there was no sound reflective surfaces whatsoever and it would just sound like they were hitting a suitcase and and you see they were quite frustrated when they'd hear the drum sound even though you weren't party to hearing playbacks sometimes when you were a studio musician actually you didn't know who you were going to play with because they just come walking through the door you a hired hand and so you didn't really have any saying the drummer's wouldn't be able to say well wouldn't it be better if because that wasn't necessarily your job unless you were asked to so what I knew was that I could see what a frustrating role it would be for drummers and a drum is an acoustic instrument and it has a tone to it and then I knew that that it that in the recordings that I that I loved from the past that there was certainly an ambience that was used to the drums it wasn't just a close mic and and and no and within a room so yeah I I and certainly with the recording of John Bonham who who was a master craftsman and a genius of drum technique and his his technique of tuning the drums you could hear them projecting and it was so important to be able to capture that with overhead mics you see it's it's not necessarily rocket science but all of this all of the or all of the work that I've done in the studio and especially the studio discipline was really just really came came out so it was it was an apprenticeship this is an interesting story because the string the the string sections really didn't like the I mean it's spent years mastering their bowing techniques and there were these sort of people like drummers and bass players and guitarists I think they thought they just made a bit of a noise rather than music as they saw music and one of the violinists came to me one day and he said have you ever considered playing you know they just didn't talk to the via there you know it was a sort of to them and asked have you ever considered playing the guitar with a bow and I said well I don't think it'll work well it because the these strings are uniform but whereas a violin is arched or a cello is all together and he said well here's my bow would you like to try and I said absolutely so I tried it and I could see there was massive potential and I went after that I went and bought my own bow but this fellow was the father of an actor of David McCallum Man From UNCLE that's it so he was the father with the man from uncle is a very cool gentleman it was on top of a bus a double-decker bus and it was in Beijing in at the Olympics and it was the closing ceremony of the of the Olympics in 2008 and and it was they were passing over the baton so to speak to London and I was there on behalf of London and we there was myself and and the wonderful singer called Leona Lewis and we performed a whole lot of love and a full version of all that above as well and it was it was pretty amazing to play in the in the the stadium near which we know as the bird's nest it was immense it was a huge stadium and I know it was being televised all over the world and I knew there was just one guitarist there there was a heavy weight on his shoulders not to mess up and not to mess it up for Lyon or anything else and it was and it went it was marvelous absolutely marvelous so you know as far as doing things in your comfort zone or not in your comfort so that was that was challenging oh and the other thing was that you had to be elevated up into the air and that was interesting because I had a fear of heights before doing that but up but I had to take that on and and I had a technique that I was sharing whereby you you can conquer that so I thought I was father interesting somebody took me to the role Garden Hotel and we were standing on the ledge it was like a it was somebody who was a sort of hypnotist who was showing me some techniques and as a studio musician I would be brought in to augment a band and though I worked with the producer an American producer called she'll tell me and you didn't know who you would you just be asked to take a beat on your amplifier to to a studio and then lo and behold in comes a band called The Who now I'd seen the who play at the Marquee Club and I was I thought what am i what am I doing here Pete Townsend's but the amazing guitarist and actually I'm I'm there on the first record called can't explain in in the playing the the riff in the background you can't hear it but I was on it and it wasn't necessary because Pete wasn't flying during these playing on their own can't explain but it was you can imagine what the energy was like in that week in that studio when that was being recorded so that's my oldest to be part of that I played um I played on some various things of the Rolling Stones in the early days in the sixties where they were producing other artists and I was a studio musician and I played on one of their albums I've been on the track called one hits of the body which was much later I was in the eighties played the lead guitar very you know very grateful I'm just so a very fortunate man to have been blessed with a gift the the you know that within the area performance with that give there's not so much happiness to people and inspiration to people so so it's good now you know I'll be passing on the baton now like the baton was passed on in Beijing so that'll be like a sort of musical Olympics I do well it's young musicians and the way that you know that the whole generation and the phenomena of musicians or producers who aren't actually musicians but they but they can process music and construct music with computers is pretty extraordinary and amazing stuff and it still comes down to the theme of the idea in the first place in the imagination and and imagining this and working towards it I'm being able to be able to manifest it as far as the the sort of tactile meet instruments the acoustic instruments um they'll always be there'll always be fine musicians they'll always be new protegee eyes you know in in the the field of obviously classical music trained music but also music which is sort of relatively untrained as well you know yes sir well which is sort of almost like a folk music because it comes from the people they'll be LED Sephardim product coming out for sure that people haven't heard because I'm working on that and next year will be the 50th year so there's there's all manner of surprises coming out and then I hope to be seen to be playing so I better get on with it it was quite an achievement to to have a record released in 1971 and people still refer to the solo and and and as as one of the best solos of all time and it gets voted one of the best solos of all time over all the decades I mean that's pretty extraordinary stuff hmm I may not be able to top to top that you know I've only got a few years left

Channel: Academy of Achievement

Views: 755,563

Rating: 4.8927708 out of 5

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Id: WZQ8oSuq4Kg

Length: 50min 33sec (3033 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 11 2017