The word legend is overused in our media-saturated age of undeserved hype. But Jimmy Page truly is a legend; the proof of the pudding being the amount of people who know little of rock music but have heard of Jimmy. The beauty of No Quarter is that Martin Power has not taken the well-trodden path of covering only Jimmy’s Led Zeppelin years but rather he has given equal importance to his career before and after Zeppelin, hence the book’s very apt title.
Power’s research and writing is first class and it is a tribute to his skill that Jimmy’s early years would have made an engrossing book of their own. I never knew that Jimmy played on Shirley Bassey’s ‘Goldfinger’, for example. Any writer who credits Peter Stanford’s excellent The Devil: A Biography, and Colin Wilson’s Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast truly leaves no stone unturned.
Jimmy’s words on John Bonham’s death are particularly poignant, and this gives an idea of how Chris Cornell’s loved ones must be feeling: “It took me months upon months to realise he was [gone]. I couldn’t believe it. Anyone who has lost a close friend… you always think they’re going to walk through the door in the next minute and of course they don’t.”
Jimmy’s work on the soundtrack of Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rusing shows the extent of Jimmy’s occult interest. He once owned an occult book shop untitled The Equinox, and he owns the largest private collection of Aleister Crowley memorabilia in the world, and even once owned Boleskine, Crowley’s house. Page gives the best and simplest explanation of Crowley’s philosophy I have ever read and it is well worth taking on board, as applied to your life it really will create change in accordance with will: “What I can relate to is Crowley’s system of self-liberation in which repression is the greatest work of sin. It’s like being in a job when you want to be doing something else. That’s the area where true will should come forward. And when you’ve discovered your true will, you will forge ahead like a steam train. If you put all your energies into it. There’s no doubt you’ll succeed.”
Jimmy speaks of his fascination with the magical aspect of life so often neglected in this day and age. “There has been a major revival throughout the world. There’s a great interest in the Celtic mysteries and the Dark Ages, and the areas where a lot of these truths were erased for the sake of the church. But, I’m quite fascinated by these things.”
Long may he continue to be so!
