JIMMY PAGE

Right from the first time we went to America in 1968, Led Zeppelin was a word-of-mouth thing. You can't really compare it to how it is today.

Almost the moment he died, they put him in Playboy as one of the greatest drummers, which he was - there's no doubt about it. There's never been anybody since. He's one of the greatest drummers that ever lived.

Every musician wants to do something which will hold up for a long time, and I guess we did it with 'Stairway to Heaven.'

I'm just looking for an angel with a broken wing.

I may not believe in myself, but I believe in what I'm doing.

Let me explain something about guitar playing. Everyone's got their own character, and that's the thing that's amazed me about guitar playing since the day I first picked it up. Everyone's approach to what can come out of six strings is different from another person, but it's all valid.

I always felt if we were going in to do an album, there should already be a lot of structure already made up so we could get on with that and see what else happened.

But to put out a greatest hits on one CD was totally impossible, I just couldn't do it. The best compromise was to put out two CDs - Early Days - which is what it is - and Latter Days.

My vocation is more in composition really than anything else - building up harmonies using the guitar, orchestrating the guitar like an army, a guitar army.

I always believed in the music we did and that's why it was uncompromising.

I don't think the critics could understand what we were doing.

I think it was that we were really seasoned musicians. We had serious roots that spanned different cultures, obviously the blues.

I believe every guitar player inherently has something unique about their playing. They just have to identify what makes them different and develop it.

I wanted to emulate music from America - young punks playing rock n' roll is what it was. I read part of Keith Richards' autobiography, and it was totally parallel with me, learning from American records.

Traveling the world was a constant thing, rich with experiences. But all of it was relative to being able to play live onstage and really stretch out.

The benchmark of quality I go for is pretty high.

We weren't making money in the Yardbirds.

I liked the Sex Pistols' music. I thought it was superb.

Having the facility to have this multitrack at home, I could try experiments with sort of all of the instruments, giving them different treatments so they didn't actually sound, necessarily, like the instrument itself.

From the first album, Led Zeppelin was always going to be a totally new approach from what had gone before - whether it was approaching the blues or folk music like 'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You': nothing existed like that.

I have one of those gravel-y voices with no range to it.

Isolation doesn't bother me at all. It gives me a sense of security.

My guitar playing touches so many different areas of the form, but the important thing is what it represents across the form.

That's one of the problems with the Zeppelin stuff. It sounds ridiculous on MP3. You can't hear what's there properly.

The Yardbirds folded in 1968, and within a handful of months, Led Zeppelin was not only a band but also a very successful one.