“Really Quite Erotic”: Jimmy Page Remembers His Most Unusual Gig (And It Wasn’t Even With Led Zeppelin)

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that Jimmy Page encountered his most unusual gigs during his tenure as Led Zeppelin’s lead guitarist, but nevertheless, it would be wrong. That “most unusual gig” took place years before, when a young Page was playing with Neil Christian and the Crusaders.

Even after years on the road with one of the biggest British rock bands of all time, Page still looks back on his November 1961 gig as one of his strangest, memorable, and, interestingly, erotic.

Jimmy Page Recalls His Most Unusual Gig

Jimmy Page was only 17 when he traveled to HM Prison Holloway in London with Neil Christian and the Crusaders. He hadn’t been playing with the rock group for very long when they booked the gig, and it quickly became one of the future Led Zeppelin guitarist’s most memorable performances.

Although Holloway Prison was first a mixed-sex prison, it transitioned to female-only by 1903. Some notable inmates throughout the prison’s history include Oscar Wilde, Kitty Byron, and Victorian actor Isabella Glyn. When Page and the rest of his band arrived on the prison grounds, an escort led the musicians to the warden’s office, where they were sworn to secrecy.

The warden instructed the band that if they recognized any of the inmates, they were not to disclose this information to anyone outside of Holloway Prison. After agreeing to their vow of silence, the musicians set off to begin their performance.

Very Interesting and Really Quite Erotic

Jimmy Page shared the memory of his Holloway Prison performance in a 2019 Instagram post celebrating the anniversary of Johnny Cash’s iconic Johnny Cash at San Quentin album. “When we went on stage in the hall, all the inmates were seated. I remember they were wearing faded flower print dresses. Some of them had used burnt matches to do their eyeliner because they weren’t allowed to have proper makeup.”

“We did our show, and there was lots of cheering and whistling,” Page continued. “Neil Christian was a really good-looking guy.” In an interview with Classic Rock magazine, Page called the gig “very interesting and really quite erotic. After we left, there was a riot. It was probably because Neil Christian had wound the girls up. It was a terrific experience—though not quite like Johnny Cash at San Quentin.”

Page dove into the riot a bit more on Instagram. “When we’d finished our set, we went to the warden’s office,” he explained. “She said how nice the concert had been, but we could hear this terrible racket. The prisoners were back in their cells, banging tin cups against the bars and shouting. It was still going on when we left. Doing things like that while I was a teenager was fun!”

Five years after a teenage Jimmy Page walked out of the Holloway Prison grounds, tin cans still clanging against the bars of the inmates’ cells, he joined blues rock band The Yardbirds. The band enjoyed a successful if not arduous, run before disbanding in 1968. Shortly thereafter, Page formed Led Zeppelin, which would later see all the wild debauchery, intensity, and eroticism typical of rock ‘n’ roll of that era.

Still, for Page, nothing was going to beat the women at Holloway.

Photo by Andre Csillag/Shutterstock