The band Jimmy Page hoped to re-form in the 2000s “but it never happened”
No compilation of Jimmy Page’s best work, whether created by a record label or a fan on a streaming app, is going to front-load his 1980s material.
After the death of John Bonham brought an end to Led Zeppelin at the start of the decade, Page was slightly adrift for a while; there were moments of greatness, technically, but signs of a midlife crisis creatively. “I was fully aware the work I did during the ‘80s certainly wasn’t of the quality of Zeppelin,” Page told the Atlanta Journal in 1993, “but that wasn’t necessarily my own fault. The other components weren’t there. I didn’t feel I had the right pieces.”
This certainly sounds like a damning statement about Page’s primary ‘80s collaborators, highlighted by the Paul Rodgers-fronted supergroup he co-founded in 1984, known as The Firm. During that band’s three-year run, however, when they recorded a pair of moderately successful albums, Page was singing a different tune, saying the “mutual respect” he and Rodgers had for one another “helped a lot, because I could see in him what could help me and vice versa”.
Basically, he was looking for his new Robert Plant, a quest that continued after The Firm’s demise, when he briefly started a new project with Whitesnake’s David Coverdale under very similar circumstances. Comparing The Firm or Coverdale-Page to prime Zeppelin, as many critics did, was always going to result in a sour, disappointing feeling. With the aid of time and hindsight, though, those projects are freed a bit from the weight of the Zeppelin comparisons and allowed to breathe on their own; turns out, they’re not too shabby.
Page apparently came to a similar conclusion in the mid-2000s, roughly 20 years after the last Firm tour. According to The Firm’s drummer, Chris Slade, discussions of a supergroup reunion started circling in 2007.
“We were going to try to get back together,” Slade told eonmusic in 2025, “[Bassist] Tony [Franklin] and Pagey were talking about it, and he said, ‘Oh, you know, it could happen’, and I said, ‘Oh, I’ll keep my fingers crossed!’, but it never happened, and never will, in my opinion.”
Slade said that the conversation got serious enough that Page and Rodgers apparently met to work out potentialities, but the fates soon lined up against them.
“Tony and I were not part of those discussions; they were between Pagey, Paul and the management,” Slade said, noting that Rodgers’ commitment to Queen was one obstacle, but an even bigger one soon emerged, as he recalled, “There was a period, and this little band you’ve never heard of, I’m sure, called Led Zeppelin, got back together [for a one-night performance in London in December of 2007]. Silly name that, but yeah, I heard they were quite good! So The Firm got knocked on the head.”
Page hasn’t confirmed that a Firm reunion ever got that close to happening, but for the small portion of fans who saw the mid-‘80s as the guitarist’s high point, the disappointing reality is that another Led Zeppelin reunion is probably slightly more likely than any further performances by The Firm.
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