I think it’s more likely they don’t know who I am”: John Squire opens up on his return to music with Liam Gallagher – and why he’s no guitar hero
The 51-year-old singer and John Squire, 61, have topped the Official Vinyl Albums Chart with their eponymous debut 'Liam Gallagher and John Squire', and they've even managed to outsell their closest competition by a ratio of three to one.
Squire calls Page 'the world's greatest living guitar player'
Asked if he looked up to Jimmy Page as a teenager, Squire said: “No, it was later on, in the ’80s. I believed all that punk rock bullshit that you shouldn’t listen to rock dinosaurs. But I know now that all the punk rockers I was listening to were listening to the dinosaurs too.”
Jimmy Page said that he had seen The Stone Roses and rates John Squire as “an intuitive guitarist who plays in the moment.” Squire responded: “I like it when any musician compliments me on what I’m doing, but from Jimmy Page that’s high praise indeed.”
“The reason I started writing songs was because I struggled to play somebody else’s stuff. I was really into Hendrix, and my dad modified a record player so I could slow it down. It put me into depressive moods because I did it for so long that I felt like the whole world was slowing down. But it demystified it a bit. It was like, ‘Oh right, so it’s just that – but a lot better and faster than you’re doing it.’ That gave me hope it was attainable. I spent a lot of time on Red House.”
Page’s association with Crowley, as Salewicz observes, brought “a cachet of sinister glamour to everything Led Zeppelin touched,” and has been cited as the very reason for Page’s towering success. (“Guitar hero makes pact with the devil,” and so on.) In fact, it’s clear from this book that Page would have got on even without any help from the occult.
Ambitious, determined and with a keen interest in making money and holding on to it (Chris Blackwell of Island Records, who turned down the chance to sign the group on the grounds that they were “too dark”,
describes him as “always kinda cheap…”), Page was the son of a personnel manager, who abandoned the family in Middlesex when it was revealed that he had been leading a double life, and indeed had even fathered a separate family with another woman.
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