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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Time sometimes passes quite quickly.

Zeppelin vinyl is quite revered in audiophile circles.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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