Some 60 years ago, an English singer named Neil Christian recorded the lone hit of his career with ‘That’s Nice’, a top 20 UK single in 1966. Christian is far better known in rock ‘n’ roll lore, however, as the frontman for Neil Christian and the Crusaders, the band that plucked a teenage Jimmy Page out of obscurity to be their lead guitarist.
According to the 2009 biography Jimmy Page: Magus, Musician, Man, Christian first heard about the 15-year-old Page via word-of-mouth. A few friends “had seen this kid get up with this amateur band in the Epsom hall”, Christian recalled. “They started doing this Jerry Lee Lewis number and it was damn good.”
Once Christian went and saw Jimmy for himself a few weeks later, “I knew the boy had something.”
At the time, around the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960, Christian was merely the manager for a London band called Red E Lewis and the Redcaps. Shortly after recruiting Page to start jamming with the Redcaps, though, Christian personally took over for the band’s original singer, William Stubbs (AKA Reddy Lewis), and re-named the band Neil Christian and the Crusaders.
The Crusaders took themselves seriously and wanted to make a mark in London’s growing rock scene, but Christian knew that Page, who only turned 16 in January of 1960, might not be a reliable member of the group so long as his parents still had a say over his life.
Page confirmed in a separate interview that Christian had essentially sweet-talked his folks, but he considered it “quite a courteous thing to do”, and quite an impressive thing, as well, considering Christian was barely 17 years old himself.
“I was tailored in the mould to do what all young lads do, which was to go through school and pass exams,” Page said. “[Christian] reassured my parents and said he’d keep a watchful eye on the young lad, and anyway the gigs were at weekends.”
Christian also sweetened the pot by promising that young Jimmy would be paid his first proper wages as a musician, a solid 15 pounds per week, which equates to about 300 pounds after inflation.
And so, with his parents somewhat reluctantly and cautiously on board, Jimmy Page briefly became “Nelson Storm,” the new guitarist for Neil Christian and the Crusaders.
It was an important, formative period for Page, playing mostly classic ‘50s style rock to small crowds and developing his chops. This was not, in any fashion, a sneak preview of the sort of fame and glamour that awaited him by the end of the decade.
“We acquired a good reputation,” Page said, as quoted in the 2012 book, Light and Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page, “but touring was very primitive and I found it very difficult at the time. For example, I remember we were driving to a Liverpool club once and the van broke down and we had to hitchhike. By the time we arrived, we were so late that we only had time to play for 45 minutes. And because we had to hitchhike we had only guitars, so we were forced to play through other people’s amps, which sounded terrible. We didn’t really have any money, so we ended up sleeping in this little room in the club, in the middle of the desk chairs and the fucking first aid cabinet, and it was really cold.”
The Crusaders’ big break never really came, and Page, after a couple of years of constant illness and exhaustion, decided to take off for art school instead.
“I was only 18 and hadn’t really made my mind up about what I was going to do with my life.”
There was probably a sense of relief, at least for a moment, in the Page household.
