Jimmy Page | Full Address and Q&A at The Oxford Union

[Music] [Music] well good evening and I can't begin to really tell you what a thrill this is to be here this evening because I actually was here before when I was 16 years old and there was a poet called Royston Ellis who actually was hanging out with the Beatles at some point and actually as he was a sort of beat poet or two to some description he was a big poet from over here and he encouraged the Beatles to change their they with silver beetles at one time with two E's and he said why don't you make it like the beat poets and well basically he was he was a poet and he came here to give a talk and I was accompanying him on guitar for a couple of his poems yes so it's very interesting that here I am after all of these years I should give you some idea of how I became a musician in the 1950s I heard the music that was coming from America which was sort of at that time it was it was rock and roll and obviously Elvis Presley having birthed this whole thing for everybody else and and also actually coming in under the radar in America I would say with Elvis because he was singing black music of country blues artists and I don't think they really knew that that that was the case and certainly with Little Richard and other black artists that he was covering a number of sort of musicians at that time were seduced I'd say not just by what was coming through the the airwaves and what they could play with records but with this well really an iconic figure from over here could Lonnie Donegan and he he again was doing American music he was doing the music of Lead Belly but doing what they called skiffle which was playing acoustic guitar and he had like a little ensemble of with him electric guitar and a bass player but suddenly this whole possibility okay you could hear all this complicated music because of course it was it sounded like it was coming from Mars or somewhere being beamed in a beacon from Mars but there was this fellow playing very passionately these old sort of blues songs and boiler belly more kind of country blues songs and you could see a portal with this Saku stick guitar and all of the guitarists from that sort of period when they were in the Beatles or whatever band they were everyone who had the same story about Lonnie Donegan and I Adam I I'm the same one I came into the same way with this portal by Lonnie Donegan and seeing the acoustic guitar and seeing there was a possibility that it was possible to do this and well I did that I started to learn to play and I traded up guitars and sort of eventually got to the electric guitar I think the electric guitar is something which is pretty phenomenal really because it comes from America it's a six string electric instrument so you know it doesn't have any sort of acoustic resonance to it apart from within itself and when you think what the electric electric guitar managed to serve those people in the sort of 50s certainly in the 60s and it started a whole youth revolution and it could even be said them from what I heard about what was going on in Russia that it could even have brought down the the wall because the whole politics of the what was going on in the West trying to be filtered out in the east and people were buying records bootleg records well actually not even bootleg but for them it was it was actually a penalty of a jail sentence if they got caught with the music of the sixties and I know that the Led Zeppelin played a big part in all of that and I and I found that to be quite quite moving when I was told that by the mayor of them in in Poland one of the mayor's rock'n'roll mayor he called himself so anyway I was here when I was 16 I was also here with a friend of mine Jeff Beck to to to see The Yardbirds play here in the university and I just happened to be there the night that the band imploded and the bass player left I've been a studio musician at this point I was a studio musician for three years but at that point I came out and I they had they had the Marquee Club to play in London and they didn't have a bass player so I said well I tell you what I'll just fill in for the night and see how it goes and Jeff and I had spoken prior to that about starting a band anyway well not yeah actually starting about but actually joining in with the are birds and there was the opportunity so I think with these things in life these these opportunities come along and you see them you said sometimes you think in opportunities there but the timing isn't right you haven't got all the pieces to puzzle together but at that point for me it was because I've done a three-year term if you like is a studio musician and that was working of five six days a week but it really get became an apprenticeship for me because I I've said I started to play the guitar from looking at somebody on the television and acetal records but by the time I finished being a studio musician I I learnt a lot I made it my business to learn how to to read music also how to record with the microphone placing the whole science of microphone placing and also being a a musical arranger and producer so by the time all of all of that apprenticeship had been served and suddenly the opportunity came up to join The Yardbirds I knew that that was the time to go because the thing that the thing that happened prior to the two going to see the the band play with my friend Jeff because I seen a few other concerts as well with them but I'd been I become such a accepted part of the musical tradition and one of the backroom boys that I was getting these big sheets of music well actually when I first started doing sessions they just said play what you like because I had the same roots as the sort of bands that were around like the stones and the Beatles and I could just sort of put in riffs and this was great fun but just prior to this sort of hiatus with the session world there was these huge scores of reading music and basically what it was was what they called music which is lift shaft music um and it was just hell you know I just yeah all this I had so they had introduced the distortion box into the world of music and I was playing the guitar with a bow and I had all these ideas that I wanted to do and I'm playing music now something wrong with that story so and yes so then there was the yardbirds and then eventually there was led zeppelin so that once that they they implode in a second time but this time i wanted to start a band and this is again the opportunity was there you either sort of will go down another route altogether or you follow what you believe is your passion and what you managed to understand with the climate of where you were as a musician so i could see that there was an underground network of of dates in america in venues in you know the major cities San Francisco Chicago and Detroit etc they there was a form of radio was had nothing whatsoever to do with pop music really it was it was an underground music these venues that I was talking about in those cities were underground when he was in in the 60s and this is the late 60s we're getting on to about sort of 60 68 69 that the people then they really have their music in America and that's exactly what they they they enjoyed going to concerts and they enjoyed if a band splinted are they would follow the various members to see what incarnations they would come up with him they were very loyal and true so when the yarn was folded I could see that that was the route and I knew that the that we'd already played these underground venues and that the underground radio was waiting it just needed the product to go on there and whereas the pop music ones the a.m. would just play single records they were going to play on FM whole sides of albums so that's 20 minutes that had a shot so I figured that if you if you were to have quite a variety of music one track basically following up the next and you had quite a diversity within that music that you you would get people really listening in and and buying into the whole idea of what you were doing if it was quite experimental so anyway the the legacy that I've had over the years is from not not so many people know my earlier work as a studio musician Oh possibly that much with The Yardbirds but certainly with Led Zeppelin with the crafting of Led Zeppelin and finding these musicians whereby Robert Plant was just a local singer in in Birmingham John Bonham was a drummer who just about started to move out of John Paul Jones art known as as a musician in as a studio musician well you know I we had only we had a we had a sort of rehearsal and the rehearsal was just it changed everybody's life from just the first song that we played because the intensity of these four master musicians coming together was something that none of us have ever experienced before and from that first rehearsal I managed to sort of basically mentor the the band because none of the others had been to America however I had in this this underground circuit and the the the I was very clear about the music that I wanted to do with Led Zeppelin and and and have something a vehicle which if the first album was going to take off and it was actually quite a complex arrangement of ideas in there that haven't been done by other people and the band could just keep growing and growing and and continuing to make very unusual music in various fields as well of various roots and that's basically what was accomplished and as I say the lifetime achievement of this is Here I am now talking to you guys and there have been a number of like re-releases of Led Zeppelin from day one there's been people musicians coming to listen to Led Zeppelin and through the decades and whether it's from the guitar playing the performance aspect of that whether it's songwriting or whether it's a production it it's been inspiring to young musicians and I feel that that that really is my sort of lifetime achievement to do something which was initially my hobby turned that into something which was a very professional process but still but still very creative one or not not closed down and just something which is constantly reinventing itself and to inspire young musicians is something which is really wonderful could you pass the baton thanks very much [Applause] great firstly Jimmy thank you so much for taking the time to join us this evening it's it's such a wonderful privilege to have you here I wanted to start on picking up on a few things that you said and you've talked about of your early days and how that influenced you creatively one of those amazing facts about you is the fact that you predominantly taught yourself guitar and I wanted to ask how you think that influenced the unique sound and style of your guitar playing and Led Zeppelin in the end result okay yes well I was I was self-taught I was talking about this fellow Lonnie Donegan and seeing him on the television and and my parents had moved house and it's some sort of two and a half years later after this move but what was notable about the move was that the previous owners had left the guitar behind and nakusoo guitar like a campfire guitar and and this is the really odd thing there was an intervention of the guitar and even though I didn't know what it was but I made the connection between having this thing which nobody had ever played in the house because none of my relations that that I knew outraged music and and seeing this portal with this guy playing the acoustic guitar once I started playing I or appreciating the guitar it was this whole aspect of six strings and I whether it was acoustic music whether it's classical music whether it was rock and roll music whether it was blues music country blues music I was just had a voracious appetite for all of it and so that that's the six strings but then I was also as a teenager this is I was starting to listen as well and to absorb classical music and Indian music and by the time I thought of eighteen I just really just it's sort of like a sponge soaking it all in and so with my own playing I was I was able to to create music this as well as a session musician and so much in demand that they would there was this young our seven years younger than any of the other session musicians when I first went in there and they would just ask you to come up with ideas and I was basically just just inventing things along the way so I had always been able to create music and and and then the writing process has started to started to develop and then I got more more material but it was coming from all various styles of music so that answered the question yeah good yes what what did being a session guitarist as you say teach you about the music industry is he okay well well one of the things was that even though I was sort of self-taught obviously somebody showed me how to tune the guitar in a couple of chords and there was a book called play in a day which is rather interesting it was it was written by an old school guitarist even then called Burke Whedon and Burt wienies play in a day had these sort of unusual silly songs like they were all public domain songs like Bobby Shafto and it would show you the chords and and there were charts and curiously enough so I came across that but when I was about 12 or 13 when I was a studio player they were using exactly the same chart with the names of the courts we hadn't got to the point of having to read music at this point and so I went in there and it wasn't difficult for me to be able to just either play the chords or make something up around what was going on around me but I had been very interested in the recording processes of the records that I'd listen to certainly in the areas of Blues and and well actually it costs all of it very good sort of we say I could listen to records and I was on I felt as though I was almost in the room with them because you could the sort of recording it was done at the time was with a limited amount of mics and in these very early recordings it relies a lot upon the sound of the room for acoustic so I felt like I was in there and I can hear sort of reverb situations and by the time I got into the the world of a professional recording and such I would ask the engineers well how was this done and they say well I'd actually take records along and playing them to engineers and I'll somehow they actually managed to record an acoustic guitar is such a wide sound and it was hell that's compression and all these had learned and as I said before like the microphone placing techniques and I just made it my business to learn as much as I could I just did so much as though then eventually they gave me the musical notation to have to read then I had to read music very very quickly had to learn to read music but it was an apprenticeship that's exactly how I viewed it but I'm still being self-taught if you see what I mean it was just still absorbing like the sponge of the teenage boy Leslie to those early records was interesting there where you sort of pointed out that it wasn't just your guitar playing that you cared about but even when you're recording of things it was no seeing how far there might should be the acoustics of the of the room do you think that really is something that stands sets you apart well one of the things one of the things that I learnt as a studio musician were just being a hired hand and just witnessing everything that was going on was how to do things and certainly not how to do things as well because I could I'd been in sessions where you'd see people really enthusiastic and then by one means or another you'd find I could produce oh just didn't have a clue about what was going on trying to bully a drummer and then the whole session would just sort of come in on itself I I learnt a lot about for example one of one of the things that was very clear to me there was a music and be sorry that musical instruments the percentage of them outside of electric instruments or acoustic so if it was acoustic you would need to have microphones not necessarily right on top of it but to allow the space so the instrument would sings and this is the same with the drums and as I say I'd been a studio musician for three years and I can remember at least three of those years of drummers being sort of put into like little booths which were sound sound absorbent booths and so they would hit the drum and it would just get just thud there wouldn't be any sort of ambience or ring to it because a drum is actually tuned and you've got a number of them as well when the drum is playing and that I would I could tell how it's bombed in some of these drummers would be where they said well I played really well on that I just heard the playback which was rare that you'd even hear a playback actually I said the drum sounded terrible well this the fact that you couldn't hear them breathe so if you put microphones above them you're going to get the you that you know more of a sort of well if somebody who played the drums properly and tune the drums properly then you're going to get a pretty you know much better effect so you know I'll just just things that I picked up along the way and they stood me in good stead as a producer when I was a star producer but certainly when it came to the point of the The Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin and with your sort actual songwriting when it when you came to sit down and write your songs did you try and write them for a market per se or did you write them so you were just personally like them whether or not those who listened to them did well the one thing that do you mean in Led Zeppelin yeah why did you say yeah yeah yeah well the idea with Led Zeppelin was you see we had this vehicle of the FM radio where they would play whole sides of records so so it seemed that if you had the variety of music from one track to another and and that they would just totally different sound pictures but they would lead on to each other I I could see the possibility of that basically with my writing it was I was trying to do all manner of things from from sort of blue yeah traditional but we'll say this Chicago blues more than the country blues it was a whole sort of electric movement that goes on in the 50s in Chicago where you get all this sort of wonderful harmonica playing and really fine electric playing and all this sort of riff music which was the thing that I was so that I was so taken by really so there was that there was also the acoustic guitar from the folk scene and I wanted to make a blend between between that the electric guitars acoustic guitars by overlaying and and then employing that within a band and having music that was that would be a very quite different to the ways that other people had approached it so for example I'll give you an example once once I had found Robert Plant I said but you come to my house and I will discuss this idea of maybe doing a group together and one of the songs that I played him was something that we did with the yardbirds and that was called dazed and confused but another one that I that I played him was was an album by Joan Baez it was a linked concert album and it had a track on it called babe I'm gonna leave you on that particular record he didn't say who that who the writer was and some of the others did but this one just had a blank so I thought it's probably a traditional song and she had this this very interesting rippling guitar and and very haunting melody over it and I I said to Robert look I've got an idea for this in fact I've already worked out what my guitar part is going to be it was nothing like the Joan Baez version and if you just get this top line if you start singing this top line then I'll show you what it is so what the idea of this having the gel of the two things and of course it's it's one of them one of the most important tracks I think on the first album because it goes to show this sort of layering at the various guitars and and the the aspect where you can have the the fragility of the voice in the guitar and then the power of the rest of the band coming in on the choruses and that was the sort of way that I was thinking about things in it and of course that was really successful in its end product hmm and obviously the industry as a whole is really difficult to break into and it's even more competitive nowadays yeah with your own success how much do you pin that down to civ luck or talent or can I tell you this is really interesting please you've asked this question because you're really well know the thing is when the yardbirds folded if I'd have gone to a record company and said well look I was in a band called The Yardbirds over here for example that's been very popular in America because we've got cult audiences and I'd like to have an advance for an album well they probably wouldn't take you very seriously so what what I did on the first album was to make sure that it was financed in internally so none of us are paid for it now if therefore if you could now go to the record company as opposed to going cap in hand you get actually played on the record and this is at the point where certain stipulations were made like no singles because we didn't want to get I I'd had a history beforehand of singles with or being a studio musician but certainly in the yardbirds and I would say that having had to be a single spam with the others almost broke the spirits of the band so I could see though that at that time the climate was right and it was an LPS that's what it was final LPS and so I didn't wanted the band to get caught up in singles for radio singles for radio because I really just wanted to be able to develop the ideas of the band as a band without keep being anchored backwards and where's the singalong this new album where's a single look well there isn't a single and as they had to be sort of two or three minutes long they were I thought well the best way to deal with that is make the numbers five minutes long so they don't be playing on radio well that literally let's how it was I could pull the punches because the first album was paid for and that philosophy of of when you were producing these these albums of not wanting necessary to just aim for a single did that continued throughout were you just building albums the whole or were you thinking oh I do hope that one that's gonna be the single no no no the thing about the the thing about the the albums what they were designed and was certainly our one for the John but this wasn't unique because this was the the character of what was going on in those days with other bands but you would put put an album together there's you know some people calling concept albums what it I mean I think these are concept albums because of the way that they run from one track to another it's quite it it doesn't appear but it's not like you pull the things out of her hat you say you know write the titles down put them out of a hat you actually know exactly what you've got the full expanse of the album material sometimes things get left off and then you you sort of pieced them together in such a way that on vinyl in those days it would be twenty or twenty minutes they play the whole side and that would all even lead into turning it over and playing the next side so it was it was very count calculated in a way blues with artistic integrity one of the things I personally think is special about music is how songs can associate with certain memories from your past like I would that without going to too personal bank being cliched steriod heaven for me takes me back to when England won the ashes and my brother was in the background playing still learning stairway to heaven that's great do you have any to your songs for your from Led Zeppelin have any particular memories that take you back to maybe a particular for performance or maybe when you're listening back to your own music well I can be yeah I I skipping you actually that the whole babe I'm going to leave you one is a good example because that's something that is pre the band even it's just before the band is actually sort of come together each and every one I've had to sort of revisit what the pub of the projects are what I've been doing more recently over the last few years is to revisit the whole of the analog tape library that I that I had of Led Zeppelin and I and I'd put out him I put out a whole sequence of records there were nine nine studio albums and so what I did was to remaster them get to get them ready for vine or current vinyl and in all different formats CD and digital but to also make for each of those nine albums a companion album and so that involved listening to all of the outtakes and different versions and all the rest of it so you would literally have as I say a companion album to the original one and I thought that was a really really interesting thing to do and because of that I really like into the sort of pool of it all and ER and and had a good chance to be able to be to be able to listen and and to everything cause all had to be listened to in real time there were many many hours of well many hours put into listening to all these different versions and things they all had each and every one of those songs had a memory I could I could remember the way that they were recorded I could remember the circumstances of why they were recorded and it was interesting really because we're just talking about lots of them and the log tape so you take off and you put on a tape wheel and as I were playing back I could remove exactly at what point this was done and at what stage and I'd know what overdubs I was going to hear it's pretty amazing and it because of course for each song and maybe quite a number of various reference mixes and so there there were there were well each of those songs has a different story really great I think now might be a good time to open up to the audience for questions all right so if you have a question raise your hand nice hi and where you can choose the thank you wait until the microphone comes to you so let's start with you in the patterned shirt yeah hi quite a few Led Zeppelin songs reference the work of JRR tolkien I'm thinking things like ramble on battle of evermore why did talking in The Lord of the Rings have such an influence on Led Zeppelin well I think to be fair here it was the the lyrics certainly of a battle of evermore and ramble on were primarily robert's lyrics on those and and and Robert had read that he'd read Tolkien and and this it's just like yeah I guess in so much as if you're doing lyrics so everything that's the sort of word goes in and it comes out another way just as much as it does with a musician with hearing all things musical but yeah that's what it was Robert who wrote the Louis's yeah let's go to you on the end of the yellow jumper and I read that when you as she do musician um he once played rhythm guitar for an 18 year old David Bowie I was wondering what it's been like for you and your peers to have you know known each other from such a young age and watch each other grow and evolve as artists okay it's interesting you've mentioned David Bowie because not many people know that I even did play with David Bowie but I had it was very in the very early days of being a studio musician I I was on he had various it he he had the same producer this isn't the this isn't the one that you necessarily know this is a guy called shel talmy in the early days but he had one was called Davy Jones and Davy Jones's Locker and David David Jones in the lower third the mannish boys so there's three different incarnations that I was playing the electric guitar things and then of course he then he made a an album on D Ram I believe it was called and I wasn't on any of the ones often after that but it was only in those those earlier ones and I actually what happened in those days because I can give you a really good example of this because everyone knows the Beatles and I think most people have heard that there was a session drummer and not Ringo on the very early sessions why that was was because the the producers at the time and certainly the engineers would prefer to have the drummers that they knew could just set up their drums and it was instant as opposed to somebody who was new coming in the never met before and probably had a very odd way of tuning the drums and and every second counts as money in the studio so as it they wouldn't really want to be able to have to spend a lot of time getting a drum sound so the two weak links would be the drum the drums and then also the guitarist so that's why I always get I was brought in on all these various sessions like the dead like the mannish boys and baby Jones's Locker okay thank you for that question yeah let's go to you and the green the green ether quasi yeah just wait for the microphone hi I love your songs are quite spiritual like stairway to heaven which is the best song ever written um and I wondered and if you could tell us about your involvement in the Golden Dawn oh my involvement in the Golden Dawn is in so much as I was pretty I was very interested actually in the eastern and western mysticism and I spent time reading and researching when I was younger yeah I guess I guess that's it that that's there were some there were some there very eminent characters in the Golden Dawn and I found it very interesting to see the history of those that had been in it and this sort of esoteric movement and also sort of what went on the offshoots of it of that sort of love of all things mystical and magic and All Things Bright and Beautiful really do you think that's why people did that thing when they play it stairway to heaven backwards and said that you're talking about Satan yeah well you know I'm gonna get I'm gonna go straight back for the Beatles here because that there was there was a time when somebody wrote a thesis about Paul McCartney being dead and Paul is dead and if you played back the records I'm very serious it's not this crazy but if you play back the records there was something which said Paul is dead and so then they started to play back all manner of records and of course we were going to be main candidates for it and and somebody somebody said oh it says my sweet Satan in it gosh it's hard enough writing the music one way around thank you for that question okay yeah let's go let's go to youth and long hair yeah we've we talked a lot about kind of songwriting and composing but let's up Lin was also quite known for in a live setting kind of stretching things out using improvisation and I was wondering did you find improvisation versus composing design one more rewarding than the other or did you kind of find them two sides of the same coin okay so it's an interesting question because I can I can take it right back to when I was a studio musician because then I was improvising them and an actual fact I was improvising from the very first band that I did I joined I was always trying to change the guitar solos and make things work for you The Yardbirds was a band that was very much into improvisation but the archetype of all is Led Zeppelin because because what I can say there is that say for example if we had it well actually I've just been listening to something which is was recording in January 1973 and there's a version of Dazed and Confused which in July of 1973 it's recorded and becomes part of the song remains the same film but it's so different and it's a and and and the reason why is because every night we were pushing it we paid we paid a lot of attention to each other we could hear each other so consequently if somebody's taking I know it's sort of very guitar led but if Robert was to solder sing anything at any point we'd be right on it like that and so it was such fun it was incredible fun and when he walked up the steps to go on stage you didn't know what was going to be what would be happening all the way through that concert what would evolve and what would come out of nowhere by the time he walked off and that so that was a remarkable band of everyone was was on an equal level you say it was it was superb for master musicians I'd say that were able to have this communion year after year after year and so that's really why we could we could keep pushing the horizons even further so you know if there was a hill we were going to go over it to see the next hill and go over that because we were so good that we sort of owed it to ourselves to do that to keep growing and and make the music so interesting and challenging not just for us but for other people who heard it thanks okay thank you for that question yeah let's go to doing the stripey red and blue top viu towards the front there we go hi um I was just wondering about my favorite Led Zeppelin album which is Physical Graffiti at what stage did you realize that this was going to be a bigger album than a single LP and also what's the story behind in the light which for me is the most intriguing Led Zeppelin track okay okay I'm gonna start off let's hope I can remember the in the light because I'd like to talk about that as well basically after the fourth album which we'd actually made the the fourth album on location this is a radical move it was recorded at a house called Headley Grange curiously enough Headley Grange it was an old workhouse Victorian workhouse but but it was it was in the countryside in Hampshire and we'd heard that Fleetwood Mac had rehearsed there didn't nobody recorded there Fleetwood Mac had rehearsed there and that meant straightaway well there's no noise problems and you could actually stay in this place you could be in residence there and I thought it would be really novel to take a to take a mobile recording studio there with multi tracks and actually stay in the location and actually use it as a workshop to actually make music record music and commit it to tape and etc relative to the fourth album there was quite a number of songs that were left over as it had been from well the third album as well but from the fourth album there's quite a number of songs left over and then we went back to Headley Grange to begin to do the next set of recordings and basically what happens is from the fourth album and houses of the Holy by the time we get to the point of Physical Graffiti we've already got a few songs left over and given given any point that we actually had recording you know that the space to record at our own leisure etc which is basically what we did and from the first album onwards certainly after the first album it was a you know a creative a creative cauldron really there was just so much coming out of it that even though we went in to do like a single album I could see straight away that we could we could extend it and then incorporate some of these other tracks that were that were left over from other previous recording sessions and make a double album so you could go from a song which actually was recorded on the fourth album like boogie with Stu but wouldn't have fitted on the fourth album but actually it had the we had the the Rolling Stones mobile recording took to be able to record with and Ian Stewart who was a met who was like their their road manager he was originally in the band playing piano a genius of blues and boogie woogie piano he came down to see how we were getting on on the 4000 and just sat in and started playing well we couldn't put that on the fourth album we jolly well could on a double album and so suddenly the whole thing just seemed to be from the throne the the huge sort of climax of Kashmir to these sort of things which are quite fun and and the Bronner are instrumental which is just the guitar you could go through all these various moods and textures and colors and journeys and stories that it seemed to be the best way to go in the light that starts off as a sort of most of these things started off well they all started off with the musical content and then Robert would supply the you know who would come in on on scat singing and then he come up with sort of lyrics and things be within the light it was it was one song and actually you know I was talking about the album's and their companion dis the the original version of it comes out on on one of those Campania this is good everyone makes it through I think but we had this thing Robert went away and he came back with these sort of blocked vocals for where it was it opens up which is very much like music of Bulgaria if you ever heard any of that choral stuff it's it's very much into that sort of idea and you're at the opening of in the light it has a drone it starts with the guitar a guitar drone which is bowed in a court and then built up to a big texture and then John Paul Jones comes in with this most incredible keyboard line which sounds like a Shanghai from India which is a readed instrument but it was you know the whole construction of this was building and building and building in this it's really rather beautiful I think thank you thank you for that question yeah let's go to you in the red top just here yeah at the very front row Adam red top Thanks so I'm really interested in how obviously one of the core parts of led zeppelin's music is guitar riffs so like the ocean or whole lotta love what was your personal creative process behind that did you just think these things up because I've often I mean I've listened to them hundreds of times but I've often just thought how amazing it would be to just suddenly think of something like that but was that your creative process or did it take a long period of time and improvisation well there's a variety of ways that the creative process would work but I guess 80% of it would be at home playing acoustic guitar and I would come out with the ideas on the acoustic guitar however a good example of something which comes out of nowhere is is the song rock and roll because we're recording something else and with we're in various parts of the Headley Grange if we're not all in the same room at this point and John Bonham plays the this drum introduction and I just start playing what you know is rock and roll that opening sort of 12-bar thing and it so let's stop what we're doing let's do this so that's literally something that just comes out of thin air just it's just hearing the the opening the the it's like a Little Richard drum intro actually and and I recognized what it was and where it came from it's like from keeper knocking by Little Richard and then I'm playing the guitar I'm following on immediately in the way that I would hear like a brass section making little Rich's band so that so that that riff is like that in my mind and it's being played as a 12-bar we just stop and then we just we just have fun doing that other other other songs were written as I say at home and and I'd have from just simple just riffs and think to present to the Baron or I'd have complete songs like 10 years gone that's the other you know extreme two things but if we weren't touring I would be at home and I'd be thinking about the next album and writing for him great thank you for that question let's go to you in the red on the black yeah hi so um so since John Bonham died and Led Zeppelin broke up you've collaborated a little bit with the remaining members of Led Zeppelin and you've done some reunion gigs but generally there hasn't seen there doesn't seem to have been much enthusiasm from that for any of you you haven't done very much together and so I'm just wondering why that is and also if John Bonham hadn't died do you think that led Zeppelin would still be going today or do you think there's something else would have broken the band up the last part of your question it's a difficult one I know that before he died we'd already discussed what the next album was going to be like what the approach was going to be like after because we'd had to get a very guitar well the presence was was all guitars there were no keyboards on it whatsoever which gave gave the ground to be able to do a keyboard album because they've been keyboards on the rest of the art that's not on presents but on the album caught him through the outdoor that was great the keyboards were really featured on that because John Paul Jones had bought this amazing synth synthesizer outfit called the dream machine so I think that says it already and and he had actually started to write some full songs so that was really good but we discussed John and I had discussed what their that we were going to go more back into the guitar power aspect of things the so it's hard to say that we had a really amazing connection an incredible connection between the two of us John Bonham and I this is no just no doubt about that so I'm sure whoever you know somebody to go on off to do their solo projects on what we still would have been coming back together again because we we really enjoyed playing together so much and I know that John John Bonham loved Led Zeppelin music and played it at home and any most of the time so so that's that's really interesting as far as getting together I mean I did two projects with Robert I did one that involved recording in Morocco and I actually involved a bit of a bit of this and a bit of that bit of recording in Morocco with some ganar musicians who were who was sort of quite sort of shamanistic players and also in in the studio with an audience and by the side of the Thames here in London and in Wales and this whole thing was very very sort of kaleidoscopic bunch of images really of music that was sort of our past and also what we would channeling it to the present I thought that was quite a good project and we did another projects as well called walking into plasto which was a really stripped down version of the band we'd like no overdubs really hard again well there weren't any of it I was maybe two on the whole of the album but it was an idea to try and do something that was really that was really fast and you know yeah Sony we're those those are the two projects we did we had a couple of disastrous reunions for the for live aid that was a bit of a shambles to say the least because we had two drummers we had two hours rehearsal and two drummers and neither of them knew the songs it was really unbelievable and so we were going out on a wing and a prayer and it was an absolute disaster horrible but what we did do so many years later was to play and it's ten years ago almost this December in 2007 at the o2 and that that that was really just absolutely marvelous because it sort of showed us because with many people that had heard about what Led Zeppelin was and as well we don't really know you know whether we'd like them or what and we we went out there and did it you know did exactly what we should have done which was to play really standing on the precipice ready to ball at any moment and still improvising and not playing anything safe whatsoever and it was also wonderful to do that with John Bonham son and to do as much rehearsal so that he felt part of a band as opposed to a novelty in it you know it was cool I mean I thought we did so well with that was good it's ten years ago great thank you for that question we have time for one more so yeah you who's doing that what that yeah you what's your most cherished expiry of you being in Led Zeppelin with regards to the lifestyle in the 1970s experience well well I was creating an art form that's what I was doing I mean I was from broke from day one I was developing a whole persona but I was living it it wasn't anything that was false or sham I was living in every inch of the way and that was the determination of it because because I was so I was so committed to the whole aspect of writing new music and presenting presenting views on music that other people hadn't really got to yeah I mean they probably would do but but but to be able to do that and I just really like each and every one of us in that band this as I said it was a communion you know and that was just something which was such a buzz to be playing in a band like that and certainly a band the I mean initially from Led Zeppelin one I knew exactly that the whole of the textures that I wanted to present to people too so that it would go wow that's really interesting I haven't heard so so many things approached it in one go you know and just that just the ethos of tried keep moving and moving and moving forward and these ideas I mean that was just that was just intoxicating great I'm afraid that is all we have time for Oh so please join me in thanking Julie paid you

Channel: undefined

Views: 784,789

Rating: 4.9010501 out of 5

Keywords: Oxford, Union, Oxford Union, Oxford Union Society, debate, debating, The Oxford Union, Oxford University, Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin, rock and roll, musician, rock, Robert Plant, Yardbirds

Id: vVi6rMo2Ppo

Length: 54min 43sec (3283 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/World_Gone_Wrong]

Saw that online. Interesting. A question I'd have liked him to be asked was: Why only two official live audio releases and nothing from after 1973? We know he's a bit of perfectionist (hence the saga of the Garden Tapes) but I'd liked to have heard his response.