Led Zeppelin legend Jimmy Page has started rehearsing to get "match fit" for his live comeback.
The 71-year-old guitarist no longer wants to wait for his former bandmate Robert Plant to agree to a Led Zep reunion and has decided to get back on stage on his own.
Jimmy is practising to get his guitar playing up to speed and thinks he’ll be ready for the concerts closer to the end of the year.
Speaking at the launch of the 40th anniversary deluxe reissue of Led Zeppelin album ‘Physical Graffiti’, at Olympic Studios in London, he said: "How it starts off is that you have to play guitar and get match fit first, that’s currently what I’m in the process of doing now. I’m sort of slowly in the process of doing that now. It’ll be closer to the end of the year rather than say, next month. I’m definitely warming up on the touchline, let’s put it that way."
Jimmy insists his stage show will be something completely new for him and he won’t be relying on guest vocalists to fill in for Plant on his tracks when he performs.
When asked by BANG Showbiz during the Q&A he had garnered any inspiration from Queen’s recent gigs with Adam Lambert – who has replaced the late Freddie Mercury on vocals – he said: "Well what I’m going to do is do a project of my own. What I’m doing is something that’s going to be quite different really. It won’t be anything that, hopefully, you would imagine I’d do."
The deluxe edition of ‘Physical Graffiti’ is the latest release in the Led Zeppelin reissue series and comes with a companion audio disc which features seven previously unreleased tracks, including rough mixes of ‘In My Time of Dying’ and ‘Houses of the Holy’ and a very early mix of ‘Trampled Under Foot’ entitled ‘Brandy & Coke’.
The album will be available from February 23, almost 40 years to the day after the LP’s original February 24, 1975, release.