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.

Certainly, as a guitarist, I was aware of descending chromatic lines and arpeggios long before 1968.

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'm not trying to be flippant here, but I just play the guitar, don't I? That is my characteristic, and it's my identity as you hear it.

I always want to do my very best, and it's frustrating to have something hold me back.

I played guitar all my life, all the way through the Yardbirds, but I knew that for me, this was going to be a guitar vehicle, because that's what I wanted it to be. There is no way I would play guitar like a tour de force like I did in Led Zeppelin.

How many guitars do I have? I don't know. I don't know! But I think the answer to it is, more than I can play at any one point in time. Even though I do have double necks, so I can try and play more than at one time!

Having the facility to have this multitrack at home, I could try experiments with sort of all of the instruments, giving them different treatments so they didn't actually sound, necessarily, like the instrument itself.

Spirit is a band I really love.

My first guitar was like a campfire guitar. And it was left at a house that my family had moved into... and the guitar was at the house. It was all strung up. It's normally something that would be beyond a bit of rubbish.

Led Zeppelin was an affair of the heart. Each of the members was important to the sum total of what we were.

Led Zeppelin was a band that would change things around substantially each time it played... We were becoming tighter and tighter, to the point of telepathy.

The one person who's disappeared out of the business is the A&R man. Because the listener at home becomes the A&R man. He's the one who chooses what tracks he wants on the album. And that's cool.

Every album that I've attempted, I suppose, has been different - it's bound to be.

If you write a written book, you're gonna get slowed up by lawyers wanting to see what you say about this person, that person - I couldn't be bothered with it.

I was excited about opening for Vanilla Fudge because I was a big fan of theirs.

Every musician wants to do something which will hold up for a long time, and I guess we did it with 'Stairway to Heaven.'

In the 1960s and into the '70s, everyone in their own way was trying to open up the musical horizon. There shouldn't be a wall that you're going toward and bouncing off.

I was always good at hearing complete arrangements in my head.

From the first album, Led Zeppelin was always going to be a totally new approach from what had gone before - whether it was approaching the blues or folk music like 'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You': nothing existed like that.

I wasn't a very good draughtsman.