Credit: Dangerous Minds / Press / Dina Regine

It’s normal for a teenager to have an Aleister Crowley phase, and Jimmy Page is nothing if not, for better and for worse, an eternal teenager.

After all, this is a man who built his entire life around playing guitar. Despite swearing blind as a kid that he was going to head into a life of biological research (a claim he made on live television, no less), Page wasn’t kidding anyone. Music was one of the things he cared about most in this world, and when he cared about something, nothing else mattered. He pursued it with a bloody-minded intensity, to the detriment of most other things in his life.

Once Led Zeppelin became the biggest band in the world, however, Page suddenly had the time and disposable income to pursue other interests. Not a lot of time, mind you, Zep’s schedule was infamously non-stop, but when he wasn’t on the road or in the studio, he did have time to put his mind to other things.

The former art student had the luxury to now paint and draw as much as he wanted. He could also drop as much money as he wanted on fuelling his passion for history, but one interest above all turned into an obsession.

Page became fixated on the occult, particularly the teachings of Aleister Crowley, the British occultist who wanted to achieve a higher state of being via the use of sex, drugs and ritual magick. As you can imagine, those first two made the British rock scene of the 1960s interested enough to put up with his ravings about the last one. The vinyl pressings of Led Zeppelin III even had Crowley’s infamous motto “do as thous wilt is the whole of the law” etched into the runout grooves.

This wasn’t an excuse to get laid and do drugs either. Page was in Led Zeppelin; he never needed an “excuse” to do either. He believed in Crowley’s teachings wholeheartedly, so much so that when he saw another band taking his guru’s name in vain, he had to do something about it. In 1977, one of the up-and-coming bands of the moment was Essex pub rockers Eddie and the Hot Rods, who took Crowley’s same motto and used it as the inspiration for their song ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’.

One would assume that Page would be thrilled by this. However, everything about the song rubbed him the wrong way. After all, the song was little more than a spirited ode to doing, well, “anything you wanna do”. That’s actually not quite what Crowley is suggesting with his motto, but the reading of the message wasn’t what really made him angry. It was the single’s cover, a portrait of Crowley himself wearing a pair of Mickey Mouse ears.

Page was reportedly apoplectic about this and for their disrespect of The Great Beast. As a result, Eddie and the Hot Rods were told that the Led Zeppelin guitarist had placed a curse on them. A report they probably laughed at initially, but then they were suddenly dropped by their label.

Admittedly, at this time, punk was making their pub rock sound out of date. However, things got weirder when their manager got hooked on heroin and stopped caring about anything other than his addiction. Again, not out of the ordinary, and they did secure another record deal, and were all set to press on with their considerable momentum and large fanbase.

Then their next handful of singles cratered on the charts. ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’ ended up being the last time they troubled the upper reaches of the charts, and that’s when the band started suspecting some foul, otherworldly play. Bassist Paul Gray told Uncut that “weird shit happened after that. A lot of people said we shouldn’t have fucked about with Crowley.’

Now, the truth is that it was probably just Eddie and the Hot Rods‘ time to leave the spotlight. Vanishingly few bands get anything more than a 15-minute stay in the limelight. If Page himself had anything to do with their downfall, it probably came from his high-powered connections in the music industry rather than a mystical curse.

However, if you’re ever given the chance to quite literally print the legend, you should take it!