“It was so cool”: The show Jimmy Page called his proudest non-Zeppelin moment
No artist can walk away from a legacy like Led Zeppelin’s unscathed. It was clear that they couldn’t continue if John Bonham died, but since Jimmy Page had sculpted everything from the ground up, everything that he did afterwards was bound to be compared to the four-headed rock and roll monster that he had birthed back in the late 1960s. He had more to offer, though, and he would spend the rest of his days twisting his sound into something different with whomever he could.
Of all the members of the group, Page seemed to be the one willing to fly the flag for that signature Zeppelin sound. Robert Plant was more comfortable moving on into new territory, and John Paul Jones always had a home in the session music scene, but looking at his collaborations with people like Paul Rodgers in the Firm and his one-off shows with The Black Crowes, he was still that rough-and-tumble guitar maestro that happened to now be a free agent.
While some pieces would never be looked back on fondly like his collaborations with P Diddy in the 1990s, he had already put out the best Zeppelin albums that Zeppelin themselves never released. Reuniting with Plant on albums like Unledded gave fans a little bit of hope that they could make that magic again, and David Coverdale working with him on a record added more fuel to that fire, but no one would really get their wish until 2007 when the members officially reunited.
And this wasn’t some sad reunion like their Live Aid performance. If they were going to get together, they wanted to make sure it was done right, and while those one-off performances were among the best ways for any band to go out, it only made people hungrier to see if it would happen again. If Page couldn’t get Plant involved in any way, he was more than willing to try out other musicians, whether bringing in Steven Tyler to jam or cutting some demos with new kids like Myles Kennedy.
Out of all the collaborators in his arsenal, Leona Lewis was probably at the bottom of most people’s lists. The idea of Zeppelin clashing with pop artists didn’t have the best ring to it, but as soon as Page cranked his guitar up at the London Olympics to play ‘Whole Lotta Love’ with Lewis, he found that sense of grandeur that had been missing for so many years.
Despite working with other titans of the rock industry, Page considered playing on that stage among the finest non-Zeppelin moments of his career, saying, “I’d be very sincere if I said that doing the Olympics with Leona Lewis was phenomenal. She’s really plucky, she’s superb, and she sang ‘Whole Lotta Love’ brilliantly. It was so cool the way she approached it. For that audience, and the fact we didn’t fuck it up… we’re really going to do this and we’re going to do it proud. That was important. It was a Led Zeppelin number, but it took on another persona… I was proud to be able to play that riff for the handover.”
It feels hollow knowing that they were only playing the songs Page had recorded years before, but that was hardly a big deal to that crowd. The entire premise of the night was to celebrate what British music was supposed to be, and hearing them inhabit the tune in a completely different way was a way of interpolating their classic hits in the same way that Page interpreted old blues songs back in the day.
Many people would have been far happier to see Plant get back together with them for a little bit, but having someone with Lewis’s voice bellowing through that arena was a godsend. Any classic rock fan would have grown tired of this kind of music over the years, but somewhere in between Page’s riffs is the musical fountain of youth.
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