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month shy of his twentieth birthday, Plant’s moment had come at last. Not that it seemed this way to him at first. He had, after all, grown used to having his hopes raised and then dashed. And anyway, the Yardbirds were no longer anyone’s idea of a sure thing.

      ‘I ran into him one night at the Queen Mary Ballroom in Dudley and he told me that he’d had this offer to join the Yardbirds,’ says Jim Lea of the N’Betweens. ‘He’d got Maureen with him and he said he wasn’t sure about it, didn’t know if it’d work out. He told me he’d rather be playing the blues with Alexis Korner.

      ‘We were doing quite well at the time and I’d bought myself a sports car, an MG Midget. Planty had this green Ford Prefect. I was just getting into my car and he shouted over, “Nice car – I guess I’ll have to start playing pop!”’

      Plant went and picked up the phone to Grant. What else was he going to do? Speaking a year later to Mark Williams of the International Times he said, ‘It was the real desperation scene, man. I had nowhere else to go.’

      Do what this man says, or fuck off.

      Peter Grant passed on an invitation to Plant to meet with Jimmy Page at his home in Pangbourne on the banks of the River Thames so that they could test the waters and get the measure of each other. Stepping off the train from Birmingham, Plant found himself being set upon by an old woman. She began slapping his face and shrieking about the length of his hair. This would soon seem in keeping with everything that happened to him. He would feel as though he were walking in an alien land, the terrain littered with the unfamiliar and unexpected.

      The village of Pangbourne was a rural retreat for well-off Londoners to escape to and Page had found himself a charming boathouse on the river. A new Bentley was parked in the driveway. Out back a flight of steps led down to a mooring and the water. Inside the house Page had installed a large aquarium and filled the place with antiques he had picked up on his travels.

      This had all been paid for with the money he had earned from the Yardbirds and years of session work before that. For Plant it was a vision of what success looked like. Yet it also made clear to him that, here and now, he and Page would not be meeting as equals.

      ‘I was taken aback when Jimmy asked me to his house,’ Plant told me. ‘I mean, the Yardbirds had cut some serious shapes at one point and obviously they were working in America. Then I met Jimmy and he was so charismatic. His contacts were phenomenal.’

      Four years older than Plant, Page was born in the London suburb of Heston, five months before the end of the war in Europe. An only child, he had been a keen athlete at school, a promising hurdler, but nothing else mattered to him once he heard Elvis on the radio. He got his first guitar, a Spanish acoustic, at the age of twelve, teaching himself to play by copping licks off James Burton, Elvis’s guitarist.

      In his teens Page joined his first band, Neil Christian and the Crusaders, doing one-night stands around the country, bashing out rock ’n’ roll covers. Upon leaving school he enrolled at an art college in Surrey. Most nights he headed into London’s West End with his guitar and began getting up with the house bands at clubs such as the Marquee and Crawdaddy. This led him on to the session circuit, where he flourished, since he was a fast learner and versatile, too, as proficient with ornate acoustic melodies as stinging electric leads.

      The session jobs came thick and fast. He played on the Who’s ‘I Can’t Explain’ and the Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’ singles, but also with Burt Bacharach and on advertising jingles. In 1965 the Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham hired him as staff producer at his new record label, Immediate, for which the Small Faces and Fleetwood Mac recorded. He joined the Yardbirds as bassist the following year, switching to guitar when Jeff Beck, whom Page had known since school, upped and left. He toured the US, storing up knowledge and being shaped by all he heard.

      Kim Fowley, the veteran American producer and hustler, recalls Page running into him in Los Angeles on one of these first visits. ‘I was having breakfast one morning at the Hyatt House Hotel on Sunset Strip when in he comes, Mister boyish, dressed in crushed velvet. He spotted me, and came and sat down. He told me he’d just had the most insane, disturbing experience.

      ‘A well-known singer-songwriter of the time, a pretty blonde, had asked him over to her house. When he got there, she’d detained him. He said she’d used restraints. I asked if he meant handcuffs and he said yes, but also whips – for three days and nights. He said it was scary but also fun. They say there’s always an incident that triggers later behaviour. I contend that this was it for Jimmy Page. Because being in control – that became his deal.’

      Plant stayed at Page’s house for a week. The time was spent sizing each other up and rifling through Page’s record collection to find shared touchstones. An immediate chord was struck when Plant alighted on Joan Baez’s version of ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’, written by Anne Bredon in the ’50s. A delighted Page told him that he had marked the song out for his new band, something they could electrify.

      Yet in most other respects the two of them were very different. Page was reserved and withdrawn, Plant outgoing and cocksure. Plant had left home at seventeen and been scuffling on the fringes of the music business ever since. Page lived with his parents till he was twenty-four, and had them nurture and encourage his passion. For as long as Plant had scrapped, Page had been at the heart of the action.

      Before Plant left he played Page his old Band of Joy demos. Page had not yet found a drummer and Plant suggested he check out John Bonham. On the evening of 31 July 1968 Page and Grant trooped along to a club in Hampstead, north London, to see Bonham drum with Tim Rose. Bonham’s playing was ridiculously loud but also fast and dextrous, so one might miss the great skill behind the thunder. Page, however, had a keen ear and was sold.

      Bonham was less taken with the idea of throwing in his lot with Page. He and his wife Pat were still living in a caravan behind his parents’ house. The couple now had a two-year-old son, Jason, and Bonham was indebted to his father. He was getting a steady income from Rose, not to mention the fact that Pat was of a mind that anything involving her husband’s big, daft mate Robert Plant was bound to end in financial ruin.

      Plant was nonetheless dispatched to work on his friend, although Bonham was finally swung by a visit from Page and Grant, and their offer of more money than Rose was paying. Plant now had a familiar face along for the ride, someone to hold on to should the going get rough. He opened a bank account, depositing £35, his first rewards from this latest band.

      A week before his twentieth birthday he and Bonham returned to London for rehearsals. That summer there were portents in the air for them. Both of the other mercurial guitarists who had been Yardbirds, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, had put out new records. Clapton’s Cream released Wheels of Fire, their third, a sprawling double album that was shot through with fiery blues but also burdened by excess and over-indulgence. Beck debuted his Jeff Beck Group on Truth, with Rod Stewart on vocals, coming up with a sound that was also steeped in the blues, but heavy and portentous. Yet Cream would not survive the year and Beck’s group were no more built to last. As a result there would be a clear run for what Page had in mind.

      Arriving at a poky rehearsal room beneath a record shop on Gerard Street in London’s Soho, Plant and Bonham met their other new band mate. Like Page, John Paul Jones was an only child. Born in 1946 into a musical family in Sidcup, Kent, he was also in a touring band by the time he was a teenager, playing bass guitar for the ex-Shadows duo, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan. He, too, had gone on to do sessions, which is where he and Page had first crossed paths.

      Jones was accomplished on both bass and keyboards

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