Quotes from Jimmy Page

Playing in my early bands, working as a studio musician, producing and going to art school was, in retrospect, my apprenticeship. I was learning and creating a solid foundation of ideas, but I wasn't really playing music.

I would say New York, Chicago, Memphis, and Los Angeles were my favorites.

Our intent with Led Zeppelin was not to get caught up in the singles' market, but to make albums where you could really flex your muscles - your musical intellect, if you like - and challenge yourself.

I played guitar all my life, all the way through the Yardbirds, but I knew that for me, this was going to be a guitar vehicle, because that's what I wanted it to be. There is no way I would play guitar like a tour de force like I did in Led Zeppelin.

The thing about Led Zeppelin was that it was always four musicians at the top of their game, but they could play like a band.

Led Zeppelin was a band that would change things around substantially each time it played... We were becoming tighter and tighter, to the point of telepathy.

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

The re-releases have more than doubled the amount of Led Zeppelin work out there. I wanted it done authoritatively, 'cause I was the one writing the stuff; I was the producer and mixer. I don't think it's any more weird than writing your autobiography.

You get a chance like that maybe once in your lifetime, and you are lucky to sustain it over that period of time. It doesn't mean to say that whatever I do in the future has no substance to it - I may present some new material I've got, and there are definitely new angles of doing it - but I'm not looking to recreate another Led Zeppelin.

We were lucky in the days of Led Zeppelin. Each album was different. We didn't have to continue a formula or produce a certain number of singles. Because, in those days, radio was still playing albums. That was really good.

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

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.

Led Zeppelin was an affair of the heart. Each of the members was important to the sum total of what we were.

Zeppelin vinyl is quite revered in audiophile circles.

Because Led Zeppelin weren't having to worry about doing singles, each time we went in to record, it was a body of work for an album. So you could get the shift and the movement forwards as opposed to having to be rooted back to a single that might have been done a year ago.

I really don't listen to Led Zeppelin that much.

I don't think drums had ever sounded so big until Led Zeppelin's first album.

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.

It's good to be in a position to know that I've inspired musicians, from what I've learned to lay down personally, and collectively with Led Zeppelin.

I do know there's a lot of music where Led Zeppelin has been leant on. We didn't do anything about it. And I wouldn't want to, either.

There's such a currency to Led Zeppelin, or the members of Led Zeppelin. If I put it to you this way, on the run-up to the O2 concert, the only music that we played was music of Led Zeppelin - the past catalog stuff; that's what we played on the way towards shaping up the set list for that. But we played really, really well.

Led Zeppelin wasn't a corporate entity.

If you listen to our work, from 'Led Zeppelin I' to 'Coda,' it's just a fantastic textbook.

With Led Zeppelin, it has always been that mystique of how the music is done - how it works, why it works.