I may not believe in myself, but I believe in what I'm doing.
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.
The Yardbirds sort of disbanded, and I was disappointed because I thought what we were doing was really good. I thought we were really onto something. I thought I was really onto something with these ideas that I had.
I don't think the critics could understand what we were 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.
I wasn't into jazz so much - I preferred things raw.
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.
John Peel made his reputation with his radio show and his record label, Dandelion, by championing the underdog.
'Boogie Chillen',' by John Lee Hooker - that is a riff.
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.
You want that - peers respecting what you're doing.
Time sometimes passes quite quickly.
I always believed in the music we did and that's why it was uncompromising.
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.
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.
If people want to find things, they find them themselves.
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.
When I was still in the Yardbirds, our producer, Mickie Most, would always try to get us to record all these horrible songs. During one session, we recorded 'Ten Little Indians,' an extremely silly song that featured a truly awful brass arrangement.
