I'm just looking for an angel with a broken wing.

I believe every guitar player inherently has something unique about their playing. They just have to identify what makes them different and develop it.

Isolation doesn't bother me at all. It gives me a sense of security.

Let me explain something about guitar playing. Everyone's got their own character, and that's the thing that's amazed me about guitar playing since the day I first picked it up. Everyone's approach to what can come out of six strings is different from another person, but it's all valid.

I may not believe in myself, but I believe in what I'm doing.

The instruments that bleed into each other are what creates the ambience. Once you start cleaning everything up, you lose it. You lose that sort of halo that bleeding creates. Then if you eliminate the halo, you have to go back and put in some artificial reverb, which is never as good.

That's one of the problems with the Zeppelin stuff. It sounds ridiculous on MP3. You can't hear what's there properly.

'Boogie Chillen',' by John Lee Hooker - that is a riff.

I always believed in the music we did and that's why it was uncompromising.

The only way to have time is to shut down and then do what you want to do.

John Peel made his reputation with his radio show and his record label, Dandelion, by championing the underdog.

Zeppelin vinyl is quite revered in audiophile circles.

Time sometimes passes quite quickly.

If I pick up a guitar, I don't practise scales. I never have. I come up with something I haven't done before, new approaches to chord sequences, riffs, rhythms, so it becomes composition. It's not like the music I'm doing is just a single thread.

The thing about Led Zeppelin was that it was always four musicians at the top of their game, but they could play like a band.

From meeting Robert Plant, John Bonham, and John Paul Jones, teaming up, rehearsing, playing selected gigs outside of Britain, coming back into Olympic Studios to record the first album, and then going to America, which we crack open like a nut with the debut record - all that happened, literally, within months.

If people want to find things, they find them themselves.

It was an extraordinary connection, the synergy within the band. There was an area of ESP between Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, John Bonham, and myself.

The whole thing about 'The Rover' is the whole swagger of it, the whole guitar attitude swagger. I'm afraid I've got to say it, but it's the sort of thing that is so apparent when you hear 'Rumble' by Link Wray - it's just total attitude, isn't it?

I love playing. If it was down to just that, it would be utopia. But it's not. It's airplanes, hotel rooms, limousines, and armed guards standing outside rooms. I don't get off on that part of it at all.

My influences were the riff-based blues coming from Chicago in the Fifties - Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Billy Boy Arnold records.

Playing in my early bands, working as a studio musician, producing and going to art school was, in retrospect, my apprenticeship. I was learning and creating a solid foundation of ideas, but I wasn't really playing music.

Because somebody plays guitar, why does it mean they need a singer? Because people already have this image of things? No, I'll put my music together, then think about whether I need to embellish it with a singer.

The Yardbirds folded in 1968, and within a handful of months, Led Zeppelin was not only a band but also a very successful one.

Our intent with Led Zeppelin was not to get caught up in the singles' market, but to make albums where you could really flex your muscles - your musical intellect, if you like - and challenge yourself.

I wasn't into jazz so much - I preferred things raw.

I liked the Sex Pistols' music. I thought it was superb.

Jack White is an extraordinary person because he's like a three-dimensional chess player. He thinks so far ahead.

Traveling the world was a constant thing, rich with experiences. But all of it was relative to being able to play live onstage and really stretch out.

My vocation is more in composition really than anything else - building up harmonies using the guitar, orchestrating the guitar like an army, a guitar army.

There's such a currency to Led Zeppelin, or the members of Led Zeppelin. If I put it to you this way, on the run-up to the O2 concert, the only music that we played was music of Led Zeppelin - the past catalog stuff; that's what we played on the way towards shaping up the set list for that. But we played really, really well.

You want that - peers respecting what you're doing.

I always felt if we were going in to do an album, there should already be a lot of structure already made up so we could get on with that and see what else happened.

Because Led Zeppelin weren't having to worry about doing singles, each time we went in to record, it was a body of work for an album. So you could get the shift and the movement forwards as opposed to having to be rooted back to a single that might have been done a year ago.

I'm not a guitar hero.

The benchmark of quality I go for is pretty high.

I don't think the critics could understand what we were doing.

It's good to be in a position to know that I've inspired musicians, from what I've learned to lay down personally, and collectively with Led Zeppelin.

The fourth album encapsulated some remarkable music that was really groundbreaking. We were able to have something like 'When the Levee Breaks,' which, sonically, was very menacing. But then you had the flip side: something like 'Going to California,' which is really intimate.

The Stones are great and always have been. Jagger's lyrics are just amazing. Right on the ball every time.

My guitar playing touches so many different areas of the form, but the important thing is what it represents across the form.

You shouldn't really have to use EQ in the studio if the instruments sound good. It should all be done with microphones and microphone placement.

Nobody could have predicted the effect of John Bonham's drum introduction on 'Good Times, Bad Times,' because no matter what he'd played in before, he'd never had the chance to flex his muscles and play like John Bonham.

The album's not dead for me; I still buy vinyl albums.

I've played guitar in so many different styles, and I want to revisit them all.

I don't really want to go on about my personal beliefs or my involvement in magic. I'm not interested in turning anybody on to anybody that I'm turned on to.

I wasn't on 'You Really Got Me,' but I did play on the Kinks' records.

In the wake of the San Francisco scene, ears were alive. It was a listening generation.

That's exactly why I came into music in the first place: to be inspired by what I hear to make it something else, to make it my own. That's how culture, creativity, moves, isn't it?

I've never mastered the guitar. Either I was playing it, or it was playing me; it depends how you look at it. As a kid, the only things I had to do was go to school, do my homework, and play guitar.