Jimmy Page Thought the Sex Pistols Were ‘Superb’

The birth of punk in the mid-'70s put a dividing line between itself and everything that came before it. However, Jimmy Page didn't feel that way. In a new interview, he praised the group that drew that line, the Sex Pistols.

"I liked the Sex Pistols’ music," he told the Guardian. "I thought it was superb. I liked it but that didn’t mean to say I was going to give up on the way I was going – but you do, you appreciate other music along the way. You could see the link back to Eddie Cochran, but I don’t want to take anything away from what they did, or try and link it into something else – that’s almost as annoying as people trying to link Led Zeppelin into something. It was just really good music."

Another punk group Page admired was the Damned, saying that he even attended one of their concerts with his lead singer. "I went to hear the Damned," he noted, "and Robert [Plant] came along – the two of us went to see the Damned here in London. He’d probably run a mile from something like that now, but I’d still embrace it."

While the first wave of British punks wanted to establish a new hierarchy and overthrow groups like Led Zeppelin, Page said that they had no effect on the group. "Here’s where it goes with Led Zeppelin," he continued. "It didn’t matter what was going on around us, because the character of Led Zeppelin’s music was so strong."

Next week, Led Zeppelin will put out the reissues of their last three albums, Presence, In Through the Out Door and Coda. Page more or less admitted that this is the end of the line for him with the group, stating, “This is closure, if you want to use that word, on the recording world, the studio world of Led Zeppelin."

See the Sex Pistols and Other Rockers in the Top 100 Albums of the '70s

You Think You Know Led Zeppelin?