Jimmy Page and Scarlett Sabet in conversation about their spoken word album, Catalyst – British GQ

Scarlett Sabet: So, a year since Catalyst, what are your thoughts?

Jimmy Page: Well, my thoughts on Catalyst being a living entity a year on: Im really pleased that we did it and relieved that we did a project that I had in my mind. I had it in my head, at various stages, the characters of the poems. To arrive where we arrived, with something that was really avant-garde, that had not been done before, was really thrilling. It was a catalyst, but also a milestone that others hadnt got to yet.

SS: I think thats it. You were so passionate and fired up about it and your vision was so clear and distinct, so although before we did it I couldnt fully comprehend it, I never questioned what you wanted to do. During the recording and production of the album I trusted what you were doing implicitly. We created a new language. Each poem on the album was an important landmark. With the exception of Rocking Underground, which I wrote in 2012, you were the first person to hear all the other poems.

JP: Yes, yes, thats a good point. I was the first person to hear all of those poems. But I also had the pleasure to hear you read on numerous occasions, in a variety of circumstances as well. So I got to feel these poems and to recognise the character of each one and certain cadences you would employ during your readings. I dont think you ever read one poem exactly the same, because you were breathing new life into it every night. All these things were registering with me. What I didnt want to do was what people assumed it would be: poems with music behind it. Well, thats what everyone would think. And I certainly didnt want to think in the normal sort of way. I wanted to think of it in another way altogether. Lets do what I know is right and that you know is right, so I presented you with something that, yes, will be musical, it will sound orchestral, but its all done with the human voice. And thats where we arrived at the territory of things that hadnt been done before.

SS: Yes, thats really well said.

JP: Rocking Underground, I heard you read that at your first poetry reading at Worlds End Bookshop in Chelsea and that really got to me. I thought, Wow, shes really living this, and not only that, but thats a really fine poem. It was a narrative and really interesting. From that point on, having seen your writing and your publications, I thought it was really great you self-published so you didnt have other people getting in the way of it.

SS: Well, that was thanks to you. I took your advice to self-publish.

JP: Rocking Underground was the first poem. I got you to record it on an old Sony cassette player and once youd done a performance you were happy with, then I got you to track it. Now, this is where the unexplained comes into the equations. Id used the cassette before, but on this occasion, it played back with this noisy, metallic sound, like an announcement on an underground tube, and, of course, it was written on a train.

SS: Yes, it was written on the Tube in London and I think there is a misnomer that Rocking in the title is a reference to rock music. It isnt. The word Existing could replace Rocking in the title and the meaning would be the same.

JP: Yes, Im pleased you said that. And what was played back on the cassette gave an atmosphere that gave an identity to the piece, almost like an invocation. I wanted you to double track it. I knew youd be able to do that. So there was a metallic-sounding voice, then a more natural sounding voice on top. So that was a great start and you could see that my ideas were a bit wacky. Interestingly enough, when Catalyst was released Phil Alexander played Rocking Underground on his Kerrang! Radio show and then he played a Led Zeppelin song afterwards and I thought that was really cool.

SS: It was Dazed And Confused.

JP: Well, thats even better, because thats the more avant-garde side of what Ive managed to create in the past, something akin.

SS: You really captured the atmosphere of that and, on a personal note, it was the first poem you saw me read at my first ever poetry reading, so in that way it was a landmark. Also, when I wrote it it was unusual compared to what I had previously written, so that poem was the beginning and you were at the beginning with me, in a way. Rocking Underground was also the title of my first book, which I self-published on your advice, to keep creative control. So I think we both knew this poem was going to be opening this album.

JP: The other poem I knew I wanted to try with you was "The Fifth Circle Of Hell. Every time I witnessed you read that poem, there was such a response, people holding their breath and then a spontaneous applause. I knew how strong it was. So for the recording of it, rather than putting too many textures on it, because of the vocal performance and what was being said and what was being covered in it, I wanted a more locked-in double tracking, not just the power of one voice saying this, but two voices riding all the way through, to make the message even stronger. And you felt at home with these experimental techniques.

SS: I remember so clearly writing it. It had been forming in my mind and then it all came out in one sitting.

JP: Yeah, you did do it in one afternoon. You were channelling, like it was inside you and it had to come out and it did come out. The first time you read it to me I was really impressed, Ive got to say.

SS: I was really excited to read it to you, because it was so different and really long and it was the narrative of what I wanted to say and I caught it in this rhythm. You were in a meeting in another part of the house and I remember once you had finished saying, I think Ive written something. It was a creative landmark for me.

"To arrive where we arrived, with something that was really avant-garde, that had not been done before, was really thrilling. It was a catalyst, but also a milestone that others hadnt got to yet."

JP: The thing is, its as relevant now as it was then.

SS: The tone of the poem on Catalyst is very aggressive. Its almost demonic.

JP: Yes, it is. It takes on a different character from how you read it. Cut Up was the third track we recorded and you came out with a way of reading it that I had never heard before.

SS: I realised that I needed to adapt the performance for the format: we were making a record. It wasnt a live poetry reading, where that poem becomes very impassioned.

JP: It was a totally different pacing and it was incredible, the whole hypnotic, mantric quality to it, and as you were doing it I knew I wanted to use an effect that I had used way back in the days of Led Zeppelin.

SS: On which track?

JP: Well, I did it on You Shook Me, which is at the end of the first album. You can hear it, but I used it differently on Catalyst. With Cut Up, I wanted it to be there, faintly in the background, and it to be an entity to creep in and become more and more audible as things go on, until at the end it builds and its almost like a conflict. Again, I knew this hadnt been done before with spoken word.

SS: That had started as a super-long draft of a poem, written by hand, and it got to the point it was almost 20 pages. I couldnt really stand it and felt I wanted to do something radical, destroy and dismantle what I had written, then rebuild it. So I remember I cut it up with scissors and because there was rhythm in the pre-existing phrases, the rhythm remained and it incorporated its own dark rhythm as well.

JP: It was remarkable and you were really on fire at this point. But this is how it was in the studio between the two of us, sparking off ideas.

SS: The actual recording was amazing and we were lucky to do it at home, being so comfortable, literally at home, and being with you: the trust between us, it made me brave. I wanted to meet you in that moment.

JP: And we did that. We arrived at that. To hear you do it in a different vein and rate and tempo, it was inspiring for me to come up with ideas. It was powerful.

SS: The first tracks are intense and really confront the listener and then Euphoric Kiss comes in and in the version on the album you can hear me laugh at the beginning. It was May when we recorded it, so after a long British winter, everything was coming alive again and I was filled with the joy of creating this piece of work together and its a poem I wrote as I was falling in love with you. Its a love poem, but defiant, and a code between us and it felt joyous to record it.

JP: Yeah, that was beautiful. This was one of the tracks where the poem alone would speak volumes. It needed just the naked honesty of it.

SS: Yes. When I'd perform that poem live, sometimes I'd improvise parts of it. The audience wouldn't know, necessarily, but you would.

JP: I think improvisation is the key to live performance, the people that know your work can see that you're not content to just go through the motions, that you're really hitting it every night in such a way that you're creating and changing the inflections of the poem, the song, whatever it is. Certainly within your poetry I could see you were capable of doing this and moulding things as you were performing them.

SS: You've created these phenomenal, electrifying live performances throughout your life. Are there some that stand out more distinctly to you, especially in terms of live performances, whether it be in a huge stadium or smaller venues or a studio?

JP: On occasion I've reviewed some work I've done in my own environment, from the home studio I had in the 1970s, where I had the facility to multitrack and layer guitars and other instruments as well. Whatever fires that off is the initial inspiration to create a piece. I'm sure it's the same as writing a poem. You get the inspiration for it and you build it and it takes shape.

SS: Yeah.

JP: And it's not necessarily a really long process. It's something that's really coming out. So under the circumstances of a live situation, I've heard versions of Dazed And Confused, for example, four nights a row on tour and I was surprised just how much improvisation there was each night, which I didn't repeat on any other night. To hear them decades later and hear what the mindset was... It was just allowing things to come through. They're unreleased.

SS: Do you have specific memories of when you've walked off stage after a performance or improvisation and just known, "Wow. That one was really..."

JP: Well, I particularly went on stage to do that sort of thing, so even though there was a set list, just walking up the steps to go on stage I knew what the numbers were going to be and I knew that there were little signs for the improvising sections that meant to the other, "Right this is going to change gear," and it was going to be something new, so they were just going to have to pay attention to these signs that would occur. So these whole passages would come out and then I would change it again into another one and that's really living by the seat of your pants, but I really enjoyed doing it and fortunately I was able to. I've really built my whole reputation on improvisation and spontaneous music. I can appreciate it in somebody else, certainly you. I could see you were breathing new life into poems every night.

SS: Possession was very intimate. I also adapted the performance of that piece. I wanted it to be intimate and its sensual and spiritual. I guess thats why its just presented as its recorded.

JP: Yes. Then it goes into And My Lungs Fill Ecstatic Song.

SS: Oh, yes! Well, that was written when I was walking by the River Thames in Sonning. I was inspired by the landscape. I wrote some notes. It wasnt until we went away that December that I started experimenting with those lines and cut them up, rearranged the structure. In that poem I also wanted to evoke almost the muscle memory of writing the poem, the feeling in my legs and the adrenaline, trying to capture it in lines. In poetry readings, I accelerate in the last verse, but in the production of this track you really accomplished what I wanted to convey. But we didnt even have a conversation about it. You just knew and you did.

JP: Given the way you read this, it felt quite mantric and, as you say, theres a pacing to it. I definitely wanted to bring all of that out, and make it quite orchestral in the way that it starts and develops and really pulsates. It has such a dynamic to it. And this is really what I meant when I said the album wouldnt be with instruments, but it will sound orchestral and going into areas no one has done before.

SS: Ah, and then the next is For Jack, which is a love poem or eulogy for Jack Kerouac. I started writing it in the months leading up to The Town And The City Festival in Lowell, Massachusetts, which is Kerouacs birthplace and where he is buried. So the poems inaugural reading was in Kerouacs birthplace. Im so moved by his work. He was so sensitive and spiritual. He tapped into something in the zeitgeist, expressed it in this new freeform way and he got huge praise and ridicule for it and he bore the brunt of both. Hes always affected me and I wanted to try to capture him. The word You is the opening of each line, addressing Kerouac directly. When I read it at City Lights, Peter Marvelis said that I had really captured [Kerouac] and what had happened to him. I think we knew we had to include this poem as part of Catalyst, because this album is kind of in the spirit of the beat writers.

JP: There was this whole movement going on in the 1950s and 1960s in literature and in music.

SS: What was the first poem that stood out to you as a young person ? I remember at primary school age, under ten, I remember Robert Louis Stevenson poems and then, after that, when I was older, WB Yeats and Coleridge. Then I discovered Bob Dylan, then Allen Ginsberg then Kerouac.

JP: Yes, I was introduced to poetry when I was at school and I realised reading poetry in the class room, en masse, that it went into another dimension and then I appreciated the metre of it, the construction. I was quite taken with the Victorian Romantic poets, Byron, Keats, Shelley. When I was in my mid-teens, I paid a lot of attention to Christopher Logue. He released an EP called Red Bird in 1959. I absolutely adored it. I adored what they were doing. It was actually jazz, with Logue reading his poems, but it wasn't freeform, it was really constructed and really exciting.

SS: I remember when you played me that.

JP: I was really impressed with the way that he read his poems, sometimes really fast and other times in a melancholic way. It meant a lot to me when I heard it. I took it in, because it was someone who had done something new and not only that it was absolutely amazing and not many people knew of it. And, of course, Christopher Logue performed at the International Poetry Incarnation in 1965 at the Royal Albert Hall.

SS: You were there that night.

JP: I was there. Allen Ginsburg performed that night with some of the other San Francisco beat poets. I had come across Howl and read it and when many people read that poem it changed their life and I was one of them.

SS: Same.

JP: Burroughs and Gysin experimented with cutup and I know they had done work at the BBC, literally cutting up analogue tapes and putting them together. Thats something I considered to be really moving things in a different direction from what they had been before. That was exactly how I thought about music. And at the same time, you had Krzysztof Penderecki, his ode to Threnody, to the victims of Hiroshima. That texture of the orchestra had such an effect on me, all through my work, in Led Zeppelin and what I was trying to do with the bow and sonic waves and my ideas for what we did on Catalyst. I also liked The New Music a later album of Penderecki. Also during that time in the late 1950s early 1960s, I discovered electronic music records by John Cage, Luciano Berio, Ilhan Mimaroglu. It all had such an effect, these textures. And what they were doing in musique concrte is what I feel we were doing with Catalyst, an extension of that. The whole adventure of Catalyst was done over a few days and Im really thrilled we did it in such a compact amount of time. We spent exactly the right time on each thing, nothing was laboured. It was all so enthusiastic and inspirational.

SS: Yes, it really was. We knew where we were coming from with this project and your passion for it was like a suit of armour. Im so proud of what we created. I always want to do something experimental and the one thing Ive always tried to do is keep challenging myself, push myself creatively, not keep doing the same thing over and over again. To stay alive and connected as an artist I think its important to keep being brave and do different things.

JP: Yes, thats absolutely the way to go about ones work.

SS: Youve never played it safe and gone down the commercial route.

JP: I think its more satisfying to throw down the gauntlet to yourself, take on the challenge and then come out with something where youve really pushed yourself. To actually do something unique and new. Les Paul said to me, You know what you can do? Same picture, different frame. So you never lose the main part of your character, thats recognised, but you adjust the framing of the picture.

SS: Wow. Youve definitely done that.

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Jimmy Page and Scarlett Sabet in conversation about their spoken word album, Catalyst - British GQ