30 years ago today (December 11th), Led Zeppelin received the Diamond Award from the RIAA for 10 million sales of Led Zeppelin 4. The first time Jimmy Page ever played a mandolin, “The Battle of Evermore” came out. The song, which features the late Fairport Convention singer Sandy Denny duetting with Robert Plant, was never released as a single. Led Zeppelin created much of their fourth album at a Victorian country house called Headley Grange, where they were able to take a more spontaneous approach to making music than in a regular recording studio. Jimmy Page remembers “The Battle of Evermore” as a product of just that mindset. Here is Jimmy Page:
“I’m not blowing my own trumpet, but even I can’t believe that these sort of things happen. At Headley Grange, John Paul Jones had got a few instruments there, he had a mandolin there. And I remember going to this mandolin and picking it up and I’d never played a mandolin before, I didn’t know the tuning or anything. And literally I just played it and it was ‘Battle of Evermore,’ just like that. The band have been working together for quite a while up to that point and really knew each other. So consequently good things came out of it, because you knew whatever you were coming up with was gonna be good at the end of the day.”
