(Credits: Far Out / Open Culture)
Sat 11 October 2025 20:00, UK
Anyone looking to compare any great rock and roll band to Led Zeppelin is pretty much asking for a fight.
It’s hard to think of anyone coming close to touching Zeppelin’s crown, and even if it’s hard to excuse some of their behaviour over the years, the music itself is still among the finest riffs to come out of the rock sphere. So when Jimmy Page felt that he made music that was on par with what he did with his old group, it wasn’t a sentiment that anyone was going to take lightly.
Then again, Page was always going to have a little bit of nostalgia for Zeppelin throughout the years. In his mind, the band would have most likely kept going for as long as they could had John Bonham not passed away, and even if The Firm was a great band, it was never meant to be a replacement for Zeppelin. It was a way for Page to build a canopy over himself while he recovered from everything, and it didn’t hurt to have someone like Paul Rodgers at his side.
But when he officially struck out on his own, it was bound to be more than a little bit daunting. Although Outrider was among Page’s only true solo projects, he was always open to more collaborations along the line. Not everyone would have had the courage, or the caution, to work with Diddy in the 1990s, nor would any classic rocker be hanging with people like The Black Crowes, but Page was always right at home as long as he had the guitar in his hands.
If he was going to get anywhere, though, he was going to need a vocalist. He was never going to get in front of the mic, and while he could have easily gone the way of Jeff Beck and made purely instrumental records, bringing in David Coverdale actually made a lot more sense than it probably sounds like on paper.
Because looking at Coverdale’s track record, he was always more than the typical hair-metal act on par with Poison and Warrant. He had already spent another lifetime as the replacement singer in Deep Purple, and when he first started working with Page on the album Coverdale Page, you had to rub your eyes seeing the live footage to make sure that it was actually Robert Plant up there.
And while Plant had his own reservations about seeing another singer out with his musical soulmate, Page did acknowledge that the entire project made him step up his game, saying, “The motivation behind the project was to take our time and maintain the quality. I wanted to present the best I could get out of myself. It was the best I’d played since the days of Led Zeppelin.”
While the rest of the world was always going to proceed with caution jumping into a record like this, there are more than a few guitar moments in there. Page is still up to his usual tricks of playing strange offbeat riffs now and again, and when Coverdale breaks out the harmonica, he does have a bit of that fire that felt all too familiar when Zeppelin performed tracks like ‘When the Levee Breaks’.
But even Page understood that this was never going to be a replacement for Led Zeppelin. They had their place in history and there was no way of filling those shoes, but anyone even marginally curious of the magic he still had were in for a treat if they were able to track down a copy of this record.
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