The multimilliondollar question, the one that follows Jimmy Page around like relentless feedback from an amp, is this: can Led Zeppelin fans hold on to any lingering hopes of a reunion tour? Well, it remains not entirely out of the question, as far as Page is concerned. But don’t get your hopes up. Slightly more than two years since the reunion gig of the biggest, loudest and best rock band of them all made front pages globally, Page has this to say on the matter: “At the time of the run-up and rehearsals towards the show I think we assumed that there were going to be more dates. It would have been nice to have played more concerts. But, even while I was going round doing Christmas shopping people were still coming up and saying: ‘Is there a chance of a reunion?’ I don’t have any real answer, apart from that it doesn’t look like it.” His gentle, middle-class tones, with a slightly raddled edge, can’t conceal a tinge of disappointment.

Given the demand for tickets for that single gig at the O2 — the official website for tickets crashed after 25 million hits in the first 24 hours, while one punter paid £83,000 in a charity auction — it would be about as big a tour as any in history, whatever one thinks of the whole idea.

But if it’s hard to imagine the venerable magus of rock going Christmas shopping in his local high street, it’s easy to see that Page’s life has increasingly become a frustrated quest to perform Zeppelin’s music again. In the band’s 1970s heyday, he was its Byronic overlord, an indefatigable sonic adventurer during their marathon live gigs, an inspiration for every guitarist who saw him, a genius in the studio and a man whose enigmatic character acquired an aura of swirling myths and rumour.

However much he frowns about the more exotic speculations laid on him — that he was an occultist, that he carried a collection of whips for use on gleeful groupies, that he spent a tour living on nothing but daiquiris and heroin — they play a formidable role in Page’s irresistible mythos. That and his enduring, brilliant music. Thirty years since the death of Zeppelin’s drummer John Bonham after a mammoth drinking bender slammed the lid down on the waning Zep era, the band’s reputation rides as high as it ever did.

My interview with Page, conducted over the phone, was offered by Royal Mail of all people. A new set of postage stamps is being issued featuring ten classic album covers. The cover of Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album is one of them. “It’s the most unexpected experience,” Page says. “Having been a kid learning about stamps ... well, it’s quite a shock to be honest with you — A pleasant shock! I’m thrilled!”

It comes with some relief that this white-haired “Merlin of rock”, as an awed Steve Tyler of Aerosmith recently called him, is so amenable — if cautiously so, and there are certainly a few sweaty-palmed moments as we trade euphemisms around the odd elephant in the room over the next hour. Me in T-shirt in a cluttered study, he dressed in black crushed-velvet suit and silk scarf in a darkened chamber of his Gothic West London residence. Or so my rioting imagination tells me.

Page sums up his band’s brilliance with a dash of the mystical allure that defined him — and a touch of Spinal Tap, too. “When you had four musicians of that calibre and who played really superbly as a band, it inspires you to write and to visualise beyond the norm. That whole aspect took on a fifth element. This alchemy of it was really ripe for creation.”

I wonder if he has been offered huge sums of money to write his autobiography. “I’ve had a lot of offers,” he says, with a quiet cackle, adding: “The idea of a posthumous book appeals to me . . .” How much of those, ahem, libertarian days of yore can he even remember? “When I look back at it it’s still in focus. Most of it is clear.”

Page, who grew up with a love of rock’n’roll in peaceful Epsom in Surrey, is held to be a naturally introspective character, but with Zeppelin he also showed a clear-eyed, near-ruthless sense of creative ambition. Years as a young session player on just about everybody’s records in the mid-Sixties led to a stint in the Yardbirds; when they fell apart in 1968 he recruited the 19-year-old Robert Plant, the genial session bassist John Paul Jones and Bonham, a drummer of brawny brilliance. The instant chemistry was such that Led Zeppelin’s first album — all heavy blues, acoustic drama and psychedelic experimentation — was recorded in 36 hours straight. It was a platform for fearless musical adventuring on eight further albums over 12 years.

If any Zep album could be called career-defining, then it would be the stampadorning fourth, containing Tolkien-esque lyrics, enigmatic runes on the album sleeve, Plant at his most swaggering and Page’s most famous song, Stairway to Heaven. “I think every track on it has proved to be an absolute classic,” Page says. He courteously indulges me with his slightly hazy memories of the album: of recording Stairway (“In the rehearsal, Robert was very quiet while he wrote most of the lyrics; then he just let fire!”), of Rock’n’Roll being done off the cuff, of how the trance-like tumble of Four Sticks was avant-garde and how the spookily atmospheric location of Headley Grange, Hampshire, where they recorded the album, was an inspiration.

The gatefold sleeve’s iconic symbols and inside illustration based on a Tarot card of a hermit holding a beacon of light were a conscious effort by Page to create the band’s own quasi-mystical mythology. The effort worked almost too well, and the variously absurd rumours of devilry around Zep remain a source of perpetual fascination. Even in the most recent band biography, by the seasoned rock journalist Mick Wall, there are lengthy explorations of occult resonances in the album’s imagery. Is there, for example, really a two-headed beast drawn into the rocks below the hermit, seen only if held up to a mirror?

Somewhat evasively, Page explains: “The point about the music and the album covers was to be something that would be thought-provoking, hopefully on an intellectual or an emotional level. Whatever Mick Wall’s written about the hermit is probably so off. It doesn’t matter. The cover was supposed to be something that was for other people to savour rather than for me to actually spell everything out, which would make the whole thing rather disappointing on that level of your own personal adventure into the music.”

If Page is ever irked by the speculation concerning this side of the Zep he surely can’t find it surprising. During the 1970s he famously became something of a scholar of the life and work of “wickedest man in the world”, Aleister Crowley, extending to Page owning an occultist book shop and buying the Great Beast’s manor, Boleskine House, on the shores of Loch Ness (he sold it in the early 1990s). Does he still have such an interest in, shall we say, magick? “Well, I’d prefer not to talk about it, really.” It’s hard to tell if the question affronts him, but it feels as though he half-expects it.

Crowley’s credos of self-liberation, not least via sex and drugs, fitted well with Page’s rock-star existence and the level of success the band experienced. Stories of the band’s groupie-tastic, coke-fuelled, booze-binging exploits on tour have captivated the imagination of rock fans ever since. If their excess wasn’t really anything their peers weren’t doing too, then Led Zeppelin’s imperious, untouchable manner, their private jet, the accompanying chaos set them apart, evoking to this day the ultimate rock-stars-on-the-road fantasy. Anecdotes concerning Page being served on a room-service trolley to a room of nubile young women sound like any lusty young man’s dream. But Page has never and won’t substantiate — or deny, it should be said — any of the wild tales.

“The tours took a lot ... well, did it take a lot out of me? I don’t know whether it did. It gave as much to me as it took out,” he says. “It was like being on a permanent adrenalin drip, d’you know what I mean?” Playing live, at least, was “to be right on the edge of the moment”.

Indeed, by 1973, on stage Page was a marvel to behold, whipping himself into rock-star poses as he improvised virtuoso solos with tireless, sweat-pouring intensity, even employing a violin bow drawn over his Gibson Les Paul guitar strings to create eerie, ear-bleeding effects. His costumes became more flamboyant, embroidered with glittery moon and stars, poppies and dragons. Today, they are very much part of rock iconography — I wonder if he still has the famous suits. “Yes I do. Oh, yeah! Carefully stored. The only thing is I’ll never get in ’em again! I think the waist on them is 26in. Absolutely ridiculous!”

What does he make of the rock biographies, such as Stephen Davis’s infamously salacious Hammer of the Gods or, most recently, Wall’s “definitive” tome? “I don’t actually read them, I just hear about them from other people. I did see Wall the other day at one of those award ceremonies and I just told him: ‘I wanted you to know I’m writing a book on Mick Wall . . .’ ”

As we linger on this stuff, though, his sense of humour starts to desert him. The mood darkens as I get on to the subject of the bad energy and harder drugs that crept into the Zeppelin picture in the late 1970s, when Page became near-skeletal in appearance and the Zep juggernaut was shaken by a chain of tragedies, including the death of Plant’s five-year-old son Karac from a viral infection.

Sidestepping any facts, Page offers instead an irritated broadside at biographers perpetuating a lurid fascination with the bad stuff: “Wall’s just writing a book designed to cash in on something he didn’t have anything to do with. He wasn’t a creative force in Led Zep. I’m at something of a disadvantage because I haven’t chosen to read that book, but I hear it’s totally distorted from people who do know about Led Zeppelin.”

But doesn’t he accept that people are interested in the darker side of the Zep legend? “In this day and age there is a sensation that people feed off — towards that aspect of things — with a voracious appetite. It’ll be interesting to see what’s more important at the end of the day — the salacious gossip or the music. I know what I went into it for in the first place. What’s important about Led Zeppelin is the music.”

By now I feel that my questions are starting to goad him — an inquiry into the possible direction the next Zep album might have taken had Bonham not died is met, quick as a flash, with a curt: “I don’t know because we didn’t do it.” He is far more voluble about that 2007 Zeppelin reunion gig, reserving special praise for Jason Bonham, who played in the drum stool vacated by his late father. “It’s great that we did it. I look back on that night with a great amount of fondness, but Jason was the hero. For me that gig was about him.”

Since then, Plant and Jones have forged ahead in new directions — Jones most recently in the supergroup Them Crooked Vultures (“It has great promise, but I’ve only heard what they did on Jonathan Ross,” Page says. “I need to really listen to what they’ve done”) and Plant with the country siren Alison Krauss on the Grammy-laden Raising Sand. It would have taken only an OK from the reluctant Plant for that Zep tour to have been on. Indeed, Page’s will for the tour was so strong that reportedly there was even a brief, mad idea to find a replacement singer.

The area is suddenly sensitive, Page saying that he and Plant get on “fine” and stressing that “the one thing I don’t want to do is to try to make it look as though I’m trying to be controversial about what they’re doing. Whatever anyone else does is fine. Theirs [Plant and Krauss’s] was a really acclaimed album, and it’s really good.”

Understandably, he is more enthusiastic about discussing his own plans for solo work, which would be his first since 1988. “I think it’s very important to do some musical statements with new material and that’s exactly what I plan to do over the forthcoming year. Musically it will be a different picture in quite a radical frame, I hope. I’d like to try some ambitious projects. But we’ll see.”

I can’t help but sense that this hitherto undisclosed news — exciting as it is for rock fans — comes with a slight sense of resignation too. As if to emphasise that he has closure on the idea of a Zeppelin reunion, he finishes up with further warm, wistful remarks of how Zeppelin was “a remarkable time and the fact that we could remanifest it again was terrific”.

Today, his once softly handsome features somewhat creased, he has the air of a coolly distinguished elder; he was even appointed OBE in 2005 for charity work on behalf of street children in Brazil (a concern he set up with his third and current wife, Jimena Gomez-Paratcha, 37, with whom he has had two children).

He bids me such a disarmingly affable farewell that the idea of some Prince of Darkness on the other end of the line couldn’t be more absurd. If the glory of his legendary band may for ever define him, fulfil him and perhaps frustrate him, Page really couldn’t be more of a gentleman about it all. And that posthumous book? Maybe some things remain most powerful when left in the dark.

More from this interview at timesonline.co.uk/music. Royal Mail’s Classic Album Covers stamps are available at post offices or online. View them at www.royalmail.com/stamps

Pete Paphides on five more axe-men fit to jam with Jimmy

Scotty Moore

Elvis may have had the wild, wounded Southern croon, but it was Scotty Moore’s feral tomcat guitar on early Sun sides such as Trouble and Mystery Train that lured out the goosebumps, introducing the hitherto obscure idea of having a dedicated lead guitarist to willing teenagers such as Keith Richards and George Harrison.

Chuck Berry

Rock’n’roll had several singers, songwriters and guitarists, but few who could do the whole lot at the same time. Berry’s influence was incalculable. He alchemised country, blues and boogie-woogie and added showmanship to the mix. “If you tried to give rock’n’roll another name,” John Lennon said, “you might call it Chuck Berry.”

Hank Marvin

In terms of influence, no British guitarist in the infancy of rock’n’roll matched the Shadows’ iconic frontman. Five decades on, hits such as FBI and Wonderful Land continue to radiate an air of space-age modernity worlds away from the group’s work backing Cliff Richard. Jimmy Page cites Marvin as a key influence.

Link Wray

With unlimited creative freedom and a converted hen coop in which to exercise it, the songs recorded by the North Carolina guitar legend form a vital link in a chain that goes back to Scotty Moore and forward, via Jeff Beck, to Jack White. For the uninitiated, the predatory punk racket of Jack the Ripper or Wray’s 1958 hit Rumble make for scintillating entry points.

Jimi Hendrix

When Clapton and Page played you could hear the years of hard work. Hendrix fast-tracked to a place beyond any of his peers. Why do people want to pick up an electric guitar? Hendrix’s Monterey performance of Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone is why. As D. A. Pennebaker remembers thinking when he shot the footage of it, “Well, that’s a kind of blues I’ve never seen before.”

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