The Led Zeppelin frontman turned podcaster reflects on jazz beatniks reading Camus, the primeval power of Ike & Tina Turner, and taking Muddy Waters’s spot on Alexis Korner’s couch
I was an only child until I was 11, so my childhood was spent in this blissful otherworldly state, cycling with my dad through the Welsh borders, visiting castles and churches. Just 30 to 40 miles from the Black Country, everything would change: the landscape, language, folklore and the remoteness of spirits. As a teenager, I spent so much time riding my bicycle into that area and taking photographs. I was drawn to Bron-Yr-Aur, the cottage [immortalised in Led Zeppelin’s Bron-Y-Aur Stomp] where I holidayed with my folks and from where I would ultimately introduce [guitarist] Jimmy Page to Snowdonia. Meanwhile, at school, the other kids had big brothers and sisters who were awash with amazing, exotic, risque stories, all playing out to the hits of 1961. All this was the beginning of it for me.
