Ozzy Osbourne nearly got the holy trinity of of British guitarists on his upcoming album. We know that Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton are guests on Oz’s upcoming record, but in a recent interview, Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers (who played drums on Ozzy’s last album, and who plays on the new one) told Chris Jerico that Jimmy Page turned down an invitation to contribute to the LP. On the Talk Is Jerico podcast, Smith said, “We tried to get Jimmy Page — we tried to get the holy trinity — but I don’t think Page plays anymore too much, unfortunately.” (Clapton, Beck and Page are all former members of the Yardbirds).
Ozzy’s album, which is now finished features a number of big name artists including Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo and Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan, Tony Iommi, Zakk Wylde, Josh Homme of Queens Of The Stone Age and Mike McCready of Pearl Jam.
But Ultimate Classic Rock postulates that the reason why Page turned down the invite may be that he’s working on an album of his own. As he told Classic Rock, “There’s various things I’m working towards… It’s not just one thing, it’s multiple things, and I don’t want to even give a hint, because if you do … you give a one-sentence sound bite, and then if it doesn’t materialize, it’s like: ‘Why didn’t you do a solo album?’ So I don’t want to say what it is that I’ve got planned, because I don’t want to give people the chance to misinterpret it.”
Page has not released much new music at all in the past few decades: his last full album was his 1998 collaboration with Robert Plant, Walking Into Clarksdale (by contrast, Plant has released five solo albums and two duo albums with Alison Krauss in that time).
On the other hand, it may be that Page doesn’t want to work with the metal icon. Being lumped in with heavy metal has always rankled Page, who apparently refused to appear on VH1 Classic’s That Metal Show and the show’s host said on record that “Jimmy Page would not appear on That Metal Show because it was called ‘That Metal Show.’ He refuses to do anything with the word ‘metal’ in it.” It’s worth mentioning that Robert Plant also doesn’t like being classified as metal.
