Jimmy Page ( b2 )

Early life

Page was born to James Patrick Page and Patricia Elizabeth Gaffikin in the west London suburb of Heston on 9 January 1944. His father was a personnel manager at a plastic-coatings plant and his mother, who was of Irish descent, was a doctor's secretary. In 1952, they moved to Feltham and then to Miles Road, Epsom in Surrey. Page was educated from the age of eight at Epsom County Pound Lane Primary School, and when he was eleven he went to Ewell County Secondary School in West Ewell. He came across his first guitar, a Spanish guitar, in the Miles Road house: "I don't know whether [the guitar] was left behind by the people [in the house] before [us], or whether it was a friend of the family's—nobody seemed to know why it was there." First playing the instrument when aged 12, he took a few lessons in nearby Kingston, but was largely self-taught:

When I grew up there weren't many other guitarists ... There was one other guitarist in my school who actually showed me the first chords that I learned and I went on from there. I was bored so I taught myself the guitar from listening to records. So obviously it was a very personal thing.

This "other guitarist" was a boy called Rod Wyatt, a few years his senior, and together with another boy, Pete Calvert, they would practise at Page's house; Page would devote six or seven hours on some days to practising and would always take his guitar with him to secondary school, only to have it confiscated and returned to him after class. Among Page's early influences were rockabilly guitarists Scotty Moore and James Burton, who both played on recordings made by Elvis Presley. Presley's song "Baby Let's Play House" is cited by Page as being his inspiration to take up the guitar, and he would reprise Moore's playing on the song in the live version of "Whole Lotta Love" on The Song Remains the Same.

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