'Critiques of the album don't matter. What matters is whether you did the right thing …' Jimmy Page, left, and Robert Plant in 1975. Photograph: Neal Preston/Corbis  We had done a lot in 1969. We'd done six months of solid touring in America. We'd performed all over Europe. We'd also done an album on the road. It was exhilarating, but it was nice to be able to stop. We finally had the chance to slow down, and that's reflected in our third album. One of the things that was important about Zeppelin was John Bonham's drumming. I'd played with some incredible drummers in my time, but I knew instinctively that if you're going to have a three-piece band you need to have a drummer who's not just messing it all up, but with the technique to be able to fill in the spaces and allow you to have space. John Bonham knew how to tune his instruments – he'd hit that tom-tom and he'd be tuning the lower skin so that when he hit it, it would project back out again as an acoustic instrument. He had such a wonderful balance in his playing, so he could hit those accents with the bass drum or the snare – you don't want to lose any of that, you wanted all of it because it was an important part of the collective.  I think we produced something really good: a courageous album, a band standing up for its convictions, doing what felt natural without being at the beck and call of record labels or A&R men. We were able, without any hindrance, to keep pushing the boundaries.  I had already written Immigrant Song, and came up with Friends a day or two before we got together at Robert [Plant]'s house in the West Midlands. I was keen to do Gallows Pole because I had an arrangement I wanted to try, and I had Tangerine from a number of years beforehand – before Led Zeppelin.  Then Robert and I went to Bron-yr-Aur, a cottage in Snowdonia. I think Robert had been there on holiday with his mum and dad and knew it was a great place to get away from everything. He had his daughter Carmen and his wife there, and my girlfriend came, too. We had a couple of roadies staying, then the families went home and we carried on. We just had cassette recorders, and That's the Way came out of there as a complete song.  People sometimes misinterpreted my relationship with Robert. For example, not long after this, I met a Belgian girl who was giving out leaflets at Piccadilly Circus. I had a place in Scotland and was keen to take her up there: I was a pretty impulsive fellow. So I thought I might have to let her know who I was. I started to talk about being in Led Zeppelin and she said: "Did you go to that cottage in Wales?" I said: "Yeah." And she said: "You can't be Jimmy Page – he's gay." I said: "What the hell are you talking about?" And she replied that there was an inscription on the album that made Wales sound like a perfect place. I said: "That had nothing to do with any sexual conquests! It was about music!"  With Since I've Been Loving You, we wanted to do a blues track that wasn't a 12-bar, because we'd done that on the first album. So we came up with a blues in a minor key. It wasn't something that took for ever and a day: it came together very quickly and it was perfect, with its sentiment and how it was approached.  It felt right for the album to have a rocky side and a folky side – and the rocky side clearly had to start with Immigrant Song. With that hypnotic riff and Robert's bloodcurdling scream, I thought: "That's the way to open an album."  Reading on mobile? Click here to view Immigrant Song video  Led Zeppelin III shocked reviewers, because they couldn't see what it was all about. "Where's Whole Lotta Love?" Well, that's on the second album, thank you very much. We're moving on. Eventually, you'll get the picture. I wasn't hurt by the reviews, but I remember thinking: "OK, I won't read them any more."  By the end of 1969, it felt as if I was finally doing what I had to do – with the right people, too. I was a very healthy and excited young man, in an artistic environment that I could never have imagined. John Bonham [drummer] and I had spent a long, long time boring the pants off other musicians in the West Midlands, crowing on about how somewhere around the corner we were going to find what we were looking for.  And so, whatever our physical state was at the end of Led Zeppellin II, there was now only one place to go: up into the misty mountains with our families. Jimmy and I packed into an old Austin Champ with Strider the dog to do all the stuff you do when you're 21. The cottage had no electricity, no nothing. This was appropriate, since we were just trying to get some ideas down to bring back and work on. So there we were, up in the mountains with one of the very first Sony cassette recorders and a bunch of Ever Ready batteries, just sitting going: "Well, what shall we do?" Carmen was two and needed bathing. Strider needed feeding. And we needed cider.  Jimmy was much more of a man of the world than I was. He'd travelled a lot with the Yardbirds, he'd done those Dick Clark tours with the Shirelles and Little Anthony and the Imperials and whatever it was. And he was the face, so I was master at arms at that point in the development of our relationship – it was all developing before me. It was a very easygoing and very unaffected time – miraculous really.  I had no idea what I wanted Zeppelin to be at that point. I hoped we could combine acoustic and electric, which was not that easy to do live, and also lean towards that North African thing. I felt we started getting there with Friends. My wife's family were living in a part of the West Midlands where there were a lot of Gujaratis, so you heard this great music all the time around you, as well as bands from America, like Big Brother, or Kaleidoscope and their album A Beacon from Mars. We were aware of Bert Jansch, Davy Graham and early Fairport Convention stuff, too.  Reading on mobile? Click here to view Since I've Been Loving You video  Immigrant Song was written after we had been to Iceland. It was a cultural exchange – although who they sent over here, I can't imagine. The song was a vignette of what it was like being there. Of course, it ended up spawning generations of guys with crossed axes tattooed on their arms. It's slightly funny now.  From what little I can remember of the subsequent recording sessions at Olympic Studios in London, it was a case of using mic placement and the right engineers to capture the rawness, energy and attitude of each track. Sometimes it was a bit of a struggle, but we did things quickly and were serious about making something pretty as well as powerful. The outro of Gallows Pole is great, with all the manic singing I'd overcooked horrendously prior to that. It started having some meaning. I was learning how to syncopate. I was flourishing.  Critiques of Led Zeppelin III don't matter. What matters is whether you did the right thing, whether you were with the right people, and whether everybody was doing their best. The contributions were all heartfelt and well-founded. That was the great thing about early Led Zep.  • Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II and Led Zeppelin III will be released in remastered versions with bonus tracks on 2 June on Atlantic/Swan Song.
The baby needed bathing, the tape recorder needed batteries and the band needed cider … the veteran rockers tell Michael Hann about the classic Led Zep album that began life at a cottage in Wales