Illustration by Asker Mursaliev for EastWest Review / SHL
by Alissa Ordabai
Two men yanked British rock out of its infancy and made it into something that could stand on its own: Nicky Hopkins and Jimmy Page. Both session musicians, both prolific, both shaping its very first steps, building it from the ground up. One, a classically trained prodigy who could make a cheap pub piano sound like it belonged in the Vienna Philharmonic. The other — self-taught, chasing something bigger than borrowed blues licks, hunting for power where others wouldn’t, where other couldn’t, desperate to give weight to a genre not yet strong enough for the ambitions of his generation.
Rock was a restless, unformed thing at the time, but thanks to Hopkins and Page it grew muscle and memory. They didn’t just contribute to the evolution of rock in the UK — they were the architects of its very possibility, the ones who were busy building the stage while everyone else posed on it. And when they were done — when their work had been absorbed into the DNA of what followed — it became something that would last.
The music business viewed rock’n’roll in its early days as still something of a half-baked hustle — packaged rebellion for kids, a quick-cash scheme for record labels looking to sell three-chord songs to teenagers before they outgrew them. But then came Hopkins, and suddenly, the whole thing sounded legitimate. He wasn’t just good — he was virtuoso good, the kind of musician who could take a garage-band jam and make it sound like high art. His elegant, expansive piano wasn’t just decoration. It was a statement that rock could be intricate, expressive, profound. And — shock horror — world-class, not some throwaway teenage racket.
Take his piano on the Who’s “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” — a blast of avant-garde audacity shoved right in the fabric of a pop song, notes flying at unexpected angles, the kind of expressionism that is both subversive and essential. He is toying with atonality, comping in unexpected places, throwing in ominous minor seconds and chaotic, unresolved figures that add tension more than relief.
This is 1965 — rock is still figuring itself out, and yet Hopkins is already deconstructing it, playing inside the music and against it at the same time, predating prog, post-punk, and any movement that would later take a knife to rock’s rulebook. And what is most striking is that his piano is barely behaving like a rock instrument. It doesn’t sit politely in the mix, isn’t playing ball. Instead, it’s full of abstract splashes of pure sound. This is not Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis pounding out predictable boogie patterns — this is an artist treating the piano as an instrument of true freedom, of wild possibilities. And that’s why “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” never gets old, never fades into the quaint nostalgia pile — because it operates in a dimension beyond rock itself.
Jimmy Page at the time wasn’t just playing sessions either — he was everywhere, absorbing ideas whenever he could find them, soaking up sounds, imitating, waiting for the moment when he could finally unleash something no one ever heard before. Before he was a household name, he was already the guy, like Hopkins, his guitar slashing through records by the Who, the Kinks, Donovan. Basically, if it mattered in the Sixties London, either Hopkins or Page likely had their fingerprints on it.
They were circling each other’s orbits since the very early 1960s, when British rock was still crawling out of its crib — all jittery limbs and stolen American moves. Neil Christian (a rockabilly crooner) was a gravitating force for both, as well as Cyril Davies, a blues purist of whom Page once said that he “pioneered a sound that was to give incentive to every group of the time.”
Christian and Davies played their parts well enough, but they borrowed where the Americans created, followed where the Americans led. While both lived off lifted licks, Hopkins was the one who still managed to make the whole thing compelling. Even then, before he stamped his name across the greatest records of the era — before the Stones, the Who, Lennon, and all the rest realized they needed him — he already sounded like he belonged to the world, not some half-baked British backroom scene. His playing wasn’t just competent — it was alive, weightless, sophisticated and light years ahead of the predictable churn of the local sound.
***
The first real collision between Hopkins and Page happened in 1965, and Hopkins had just staggered out of hell to be there, having spent the previous year and a half in the hospital, enduring fourteen surgeries — the kind of brutal reality check that would shadow every step of his life from then on. Crohn’s disease wasn’t just a diagnosis — it would dictate everything in his life from then on: his career, his relationships, his very existence. But here he was, barely out of the ward, thrown straight back into music.
The session was for a singer named Andy Anderson — one of those names that drift through history. Page was producing. Hopkins wasn’t even supposed to be there. Some other pianist had the gig, but he bailed, and Hopkins got the last-minute call. Five tracks, cut fast, and Hopkins, despite everything he’d just been through, was already playing like a man who had nothing to lose: firing on pure instinct, charging straight into the improvisation like he was making up for lost time. Jeff Beck played on two tracks and Page on another pair.
On “LA Breakdown,” Hopkins doesn’t just drive the track — he slaps the reins, kicks it into overdrive, and sends it hurtling down the highway. He’s the engine, the momentum, the whole fiery thing, shaping a surge of relentless forward motion that’s all dashing exuberance, perfectly formed, and never cautious. It’s not just skill, it’s certainty — Hopkins plays like a man who knows exactly where he’s going, and he’s getting there fast.
Page pulls out every bit of sass and swagger he can summon, jangling his way through a solo that’s as cheeky as it is wiry. And it’s got fire — Page was always good at throwing gasoline on a track. But then Hopkins answers him, and the whole thing just explodes. Not just bigger, but beyond. He doesn’t just match Page’s energy — he absorbs it, elevates it, and sends it hurtling into something beyond exhilaration. Page, for all his best efforts, is left eating dust, the guitar solo trailing off like an afterthought in the wake of Hopkins' tidal wave of joy.
And here’s the thing — Hopkins listens to Page. He takes in every spark of that teenage bravado, that cocky, jangly, restless energy, but then he answers with something so far above and beyond that Page almost disappears. Hopkins doesn’t just play back — he responds, fully, deeply, with the kind of generosity that must have left Page reeling. Because Page had never — never — been answered like that before. Later, in Zeppelin, whenever he and Plant did their so-called "call and response," it was just repeating each other and a lot of theatrics. But Hopkins? Hopkins plays like the universe is responding. And the way he gave Page his entire heart here — fully, truly heard him must have left an impression, because a few years later, Page asked Hopkins to join the band that would become Led Zeppelin. Hopkins, after some hesitation and ambiguous advice from Peter Grant, went with Jeff Beck Group instead.
Both Hopkins and Page have spent endless hours of sessions playing on countless forgettable, factory-line pop songs — songs designed not to inspire, but to be harmlessly consumed and forgotten. Sure, there were gems — the Kinks, the Who, the Stones — but the session world was a grinder. And they both were only too aware of the constraints of this session world, where music was stripped of danger, physicality, and raw force. “LA Breakdown” was something else. It was reckless. It was raw. It was a full-tilt rebellion.
And let’s be honest — Page doesn’t catch up to Hopkins here. Not in technique, not in ideas. If anything, “LA Breakdown” is a stark reminder of how rudimentary rock guitar still was in 1965. Page was good — great, even — but he hadn’t yet cracked the code. It took him another three years to make the kind of leap that would blow the world open with Led Zeppelin I. But don’t think that he didn’t know he was behind. Page was always aware of what he lacked, and in that 1965 session, he saw it laid bare — Hopkins had the thing he didn’t: authority.
Hopkins grew up knowing exactly how harmony worked, how counterpoint worked, how the language of music had been evolving for centuries before rock’n’roll was even a whisper in the air. When he plays on “LA Breakdown” it isn’t experimentation — it was execution. It is fluency. It is precision backed by history — intrinsically beautiful, emotionally direct, and structurally perfect. He wasn’t fumbling toward power — he was power.
Page, on the other hand, didn’t have that backing of centuries-old history, wasn’t standing on anything fundamentally solid, because rock’n’roll was barely a decade old. Because it had no real roots yet — at least, not the kind of roots that went deep enough to be a real source of power. He was pulling from blues, sure. But he wasn’t grounded in it, not the way a true bluesman was. He was fascinated by it, inspired by it, but he wasn’t born into it. And when you don’t have a foundation, you start looking for something to hold onto. Page started looking early — by fifteen, he was already into Crowley, already trying to find another kind of power, something that could make up for the lack of grounding. And by the time Zeppelin arrived, he wrapped himself in the occult and the esoteric, because he needed something to hold onto.
And it worked. Whatever he tapped into, whatever “magick” he was playing with, it unlocked something colossal. By 1969, Page wasn’t just playing songs — he was building worlds. By that time he didn’t need to catch up to Hopkins in technical fluency because he’d discovered a different kind of power. But Hopkins wasn’t playing for power. He was playing for truth.
And Hopkins was no stranger to metaphysics — not by a long shot. His was forged in the slow torture of Crohn’s disease, an affliction that carved into him, twisted his life into something fragile and painful, and forced him to ask the kind of questions most people spend their whole lives avoiding. While Page sought power, Hopkins sought meaning. Why had he been given a gift as vast as his musical ability, only for it to be shackled by a curse of his illness? His quest for answers had nothing to do with countercultural trends or occultist play-acting. Hopkins went straight to the source: the Bible. He was a deeply Christian man, not out of some inherited tradition or social obligation, but because he needed to know. And he remained a seeker until the day he died, always searching for a dialogue with something greater than himself.
And in that, his music made perfect sense. Because where did classical music — his true foundation — come from? The Church. And what was at the heart of that? Humility. The great composers didn’t write symphonies to drape themselves in mystique — they were serving something. They understood that music was a bridge between the human and the divine, and that it demanded reverence, not domination.
But rock bands of the time weren’t interested in kneeling before anything. Page didn’t want to serve something higher. He wanted to own it. By the end of the Sixties, rock was in desperate need of its own metaphysical grounding. The music was evolving, expanding, reaching for something bigger than just rebellion and teenage kicks. But instead of looking upward, so many bands looked downward. Why? Because it was easier. The occult didn’t ask you to kneel — it let you pretend you were the power.
Page follows the Promethean model — grabbing fire from the gods. Hopkins didn’t need any of that. Music, for him, was truth, unadorned, unmediated. It was not something to be mediated through symbols or esoteric forces. It required no additional enhancement.
Both of them walked through fire. But Hopkins’ fire was imposed on him — a trial, a burden, an endless struggle he never asked for but endured anyway. Page, on the other hand, built his fire. Fed it, shaped it, turned it into something intoxicating and dangerous. And by the age of 36 it was all over. Hopkins, despite everything, played until the very end — until his untimely death at the age of 50 in 1994. Because his music was never about power. It was about being.
***
Hopkins also knew that the blues came straight out of Sunday morning church and Saturday night sinning, all tangled together. He knew it was gospel, prayer, dirt-road confession — not some midnight handshake with Old Scratch. He saw right through the mythologizing, through all those critics drooling over dark crossroads deals and satanic mojo. He knew the truth: Robert Johnson's rumored midnight bargain was a playful joke spun by Son House and Willie Brown, later picked up by feverish imagination of rock scribes. He knew that songs like “Hellhounds on My Trail” wasn’t some dark incantation but a straight-up cry of fear and exhaustion, the weight of racism and poverty gnawing at a man’s heels.
Many white British kids needed the blues to be dangerous, but they were post-war boys starving for something, anything that felt like rebellion. And what’s more forbidden, more thrilling, than a music whispered about in the same breath as the Devil? Their own passage out of repressed, grey, ration-book England? Jagger wanted to piss off the old guard; Page prodded Plant into whipping those Delta moans into some sweaty pagan rite. But it sure wasn’t Robert Johnson’s blues — it was something else entirely, wild and twisted and stripped of humility.
***
If you want to know what Led Zeppelin with Nicky Hopkins might have sounded like, “Burn Up” from Keith De Groot’s No Introduction Necessary (1968) is your portal to the alternate universe where it happened. This is Hopkins’ own track — driven by him, credited to him. Unlike those 1965 sessions where Page conveniently released the material taking advantage of his role as producer, paying Hopkins nothing for the music that he built, shaped, ignited, being the engine that powered the whole thing — on “Burn Up,” for once, Nicky gets his due.
And isn’t just a great track — it’s a glimpse into what could have been. If Hopkins had taken Page’s offer to join what would become Led Zeppelin, this is the kind of swaggering, authoritative proto-metal foundation he would have laid. You never hear him this self-assured anywhere else, laying down a riff that never quite repeats itself the same way twice, but always lands with precision. He’s not just playing — he’s commanding, sculpting the entire structure while making it sound as effortless as flipping a switch. Those little fills? They aren’t just embellishments. They’re architectural reinforcements — sharp, strategic, devastating — dropped with control that makes it clear: Hopkins isn’t just playing with form, he’s owning it.
And then he solos. And if your jaw isn’t on the floor, you’re not listening hard enough. Hopkins doesn’t just rip through a solo, he burns through it — urgent, burning, blistering. His shimmering trills pour out in silver-toned cascades, crystalline-sharp, precise yet fluid, tumbling like a shower of diamond beads, flashing with color yet never losing their drive. He grounds the track and elevates it, both architect and decorator. This is what real power sounds like. Not forced. Not summoned from some external source. But owned. Internalized. Innate.
Then it’s Page’s turn. And sure enough, you can hear already Zeppelin being born. The hunger for something bigger, the ideas that would later bloom across Led Zeppelin II and III. But what’s truly staggering isn’t just what Page plays — it’s what Hopkins does with it. He doesn’t just back Page. He supports him, lifts him, encourages him with every fiber of his impossibly rare heart, with a generosity, a goodness that is so Nicky, it hurts. He plays like he wants Page to be great, like he knows the kind of musician Page could become and is pushing him towards it — but without ego, without force, just pure musical generosity. He nudges him without overpowering him, exalts him without eclipsing him. And you realize something chilling — Page would never again have this kind of support in his career. He would never again play alongside someone who could not only match his playing, but elevate it with such open heart, such giving nature, with such driving, yet light force. Hopkins plays with world-class excellence, but more than that, he plays with love.
And the balancing act Hopkins pulls off here is something else. He fuses proto-heavy-metal with the deep blues, then drenches it all in the sheer luxury of the conservatoire. This isn’t just some rock pianist throwing in a few flourishes — this is a classically trained musician co-creating a genre in real-time, shaping hard rock at its very roots. And Page listens. He hears what Hopkins is doing and responds with total attentiveness. The way the two of them communicate is a masterclass in jam interaction — the kind of give-and-take that’s all but extinct in today’s world, where people have lost the ability to hear each other, let alone support each other.
And make no mistake — Hopkins isn’t some old-world relic, playing like a man from a bygone era. On “Burn Up” he sounds like he belongs here, right at the dawn of heavy rock, shaping it, defining it, owning it. And he is so good you understand why he never sought power outside of his real, tangible skill and his innate talent. Because he already had it.
If you want to know how Hopkins would have handled Page the composer — if they’d ever had the chance to work as bandmates — just listen to “Beck’s Bolero.” Specifically, listen to how he responds as the track spirals into controlled chaos. While the guitars dive into mayhem, he’s right there balancing the whole thing, countering the low-end growl with glistening high-register trills, pouring cascades of light into the darkness, a fluid architecture that refuses to let the ostinato drone of the guitars sink into monotony. At least, that was the idea. The real tragedy is that his piano is buried so deep in the mix, it barely gets to do its job. But his idea is to provide the counterweight, the necessary push against all that downward motion, injecting light, color, and movement into something that might otherwise just become a long, drawn-out, one-way descent.
And it’s a shame that you can barely hear him and that his piano is suffocated. Because Hopkins knew what he was doing. And this right here is the lesson Page could have learned from him: restraint. Hopkins understood something that classical music had mastered for centuries — don’t hammer a small idea into the ground. Don’t over-explain. The best solos, the truly great ones, don’t overstay their welcome. They strike, they dazzle, and then they leave. Because if you spell everything out, if you sit on a phrase too long, if you repeat the same damn thing until it collapses under its own weight — then it loses its magic. Classical music never over-explains. And Hopkins never did either. He could drop something devastatingly brilliant and then just — move on.
And this is where Zeppelin — where Page — so often teetered on the edge of excess. Holding on for too long. Squeezing every last drop out of an idea until it stopped being beautiful and just became… a lot. And Page wasn’t just a musician — he was a type of man. These endlessly repeating ostinato passages, these long, hypnotic breakdowns — this was his method. This was where he thought he could tap into something other, something beyond just notes and rhythms. He wanted the repetition to generate power the way a shamanic ritual, a trance, a vision quest does. For Page, music wasn’t just music — it was something to be harnessed, controlled, directed. Look no further than “Dazed and Confused,” the epitome of his philosophy — music as a force to be commanded, manipulated, stretched, elongated, weaponized. Ritualistic, designed to summon, to channel, to bend music into submission.
Hopkins had no interest in harnessing music. Because to him, music was already complete. It didn’t need myth, didn’t need mysticism, didn’t need anything but itself. Page needed to wrap his music in something larger — grandeur and spectacle — as if deep down he believed music alone wasn’t enough. Hopkins knew it was. And that’s why his playing, though woven into some of the most defining records of all time, never demanded attention for itself. He wasn’t out to create a myth. He was just playing. And yet — here we are, decades later, and do the myths hold up? Do the young care about grandiose spell-casting? Or do they care about what actually holds up? Because when you truly give yourself to something greater — whether it’s music, faith, or something beyond yourself — you don’t think about yourself first. You just serve.
And this is exactly the kind of magic Hopkins and Page cooked up together on another collaboration — Degree of Murder, the 1967 film soundtrack that never saw an official release but still lingers in the shadows of rock history, waiting for those hungry enough to find it. This was Brian Jones’ project — his soundtrack for the film starring his then-girlfriend Anita Pallenberg. But in reality, it was a summit of minds: Jones, Hopkins, Page. And at 18:52 in the surviving scraps of this lost masterpiece (thank YouTube for its archaeological efforts), Hopkins and Page conjure something that only they in the entire world could create.
Page comes in first, revving up a raucous R&B groove straight from the Yardbirds playbook — urgent, raw, electric. But Hopkins? He doesn’t jump in right away. He starts not with some predictable blues riff, not with a flashy rock piano run, not with jazz-fueled comping, but with something else entirely. Sparse. Terse. Sharp, shimmering phrases that seem to hover in the air like neon light reflecting off rain-slick pavement. It’s raucous, and atmospheric, and something that defies classification. It’s Hopkins, pure and simple — completely outside of genre, outside of anything but the moment itself.
And this is what makes it brilliant — his playing doesn’t just complement Page’s guitar, it elevates it, creating contrast so sharp you can practically feel the edges. Page is all grit and drive, hammering forward with his full-body force. Hopkins responds by stabbing into the mix, with abandon that only ever seemed to take hold of him when he played with Page. It’s rhythm and blues, it’s psychedelia, it’s rock, it’s avant-garde, it’s telepathic chemistry rolled in one. And it still sounds as fresh and untamed today as the day it was recorded.
***
Both of them were masters of collaboration. They weren’t just players — they were absorbers, translators, creators. But while Page spent the Seventies discovering and constructing new galaxies, Hopkins stayed in the trenches, shaping the very bones of rock’s greatest works. Lennon, the Stones, Harrison, the Who, Joe Cocker — you name it. The difference? Page was a builder of sonic landscapes, Hopkins was the guardian of the genre, the one making sure rock as didn’t collapse into bloated, dumbed-down, mass-produced mush. The one who didn’t chase the biggest stage, but made sure the music on every stage had something real, something pure.
And maybe that’s the real story here. Two guys who made sure rock didn’t become cheap, toothless, pre-packaged slop. One built worlds. The other kept them from falling apart. Page was the manipulator of structure. He shaped, directed, conjured. His power was strategic. Hopkins, though? His power was organic. It flowed. It was.
And getting back to the eternal what if — what if Hopkins had joined Led Zeppelin? The answer is simple. He wasn’t wired for that kind of life. The touring machine, the endless cycle of stadiums and excess, where everything is disposable — including love. Hopkins was never a rock god. He was something rarer. Something purer. And in the end, maybe that’s why his music still feels alive, while so much of what was once called revolutionary has faded into nostalgia. And that’s why his playing, decades later, still rings clear as a bell, sharp as a diamond, untouchable as ever.
Links:
“Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” by the Who: https://youtu.be/XNfg8ava4II?si=q6pRM5ZRyOd2J8gs
Cyril Davies official website: http://cyrildavies.com/
“LA Breakdown” featuring Nicky Hopkins and Jimmy Page: https://youtu.be/VbIdWaCO74E?si=UcuY3pyUB96QzXSI
“Down in the Boots” featuring Nicky Hopkins and Jimmy Page: https://youtu.be/7e_X69EFxuE?si=Lb9pMF9fhKgpDhoU
“Burn Up” featuring Nicky Hopkins and Jimmy Page: https://youtu.be/03HPIWZyDuE?si=AkUO6BNXkN5BxJpG
“Beck’s Bolero” featuring Jeff Beck, Nicky Hopkins, Jimmy Page, and Keith Moon: https://youtu.be/LLkLcnu_e_g?si=MiNiVm43xEQT2ETP
Nicky Hopkins and Jimmy Page on the Degree of Murder soundtrack begins at 18:52: https://youtu.be/3m4sthopbSI?si=eInxL7aa4tHb7IFh
“Goodnight, Sweet Josephine” by the Yardbirds featuring Nicky Hopkins and Jimmy Page: https://youtu.be/0vkp57lJ2zE?si=T-sInRzI90LioNr0
“Brightest Light” from Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends (Smoke and Fire) featuring Nicky Hopkins, Jimmy Page, John Bonham, and Noel Redding: https://youtu.be/ycQ4nAeRVmc?si=_MJZnsO21SAwxHto
