“Jimmy was up and running and in great shape – he was in fantastic form. I thought, ‘Job done’”: Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page and Bad Company singer Paul Rodgers’ 80s supergroup should have been huge. The reality was very different

The Firm’s Jimmy Page and Paul Rodgers performing onstage in 1983.

A better idea on paper, perhaps, than it eventually proved to be musically, the teaming up in 1984 of Jimmy Page and Paul Rodgers as The Firm succeeded unequivocally in at least one regard: it got Page out of the personal and professional rut he had mouldered in since the demise of Led Zeppelin four years earlier Or, as Jimmy put it to me not long after the band dissolved in 1986, The Firm was what “saved” him.

In fact he had been racked with doubts about forming any sort of band following the drink-related death of drummer John Bonham in September 1980. “Oh, well, obviously,” he said. “I was shattered at the time. I lost a very, very close friend.”