ON YouTube there is BBC footage from 1957 or 1958 – the exact year has been disputed – showing a fresh-faced young musician, from Epsom, Surrey, playing guitar with his skiffle band.

The show's presenter, Huw Wheldon, asks the well-mannered guitarist, who was then just into his teens, what he wanted to do when he left school. "I want to do biological research" he replied, adding he wanted to find a cure for cancer, "if it isn't discovered by then".

It's a touching little encounter, but as it turned out, the youngster would continue to play guitar and indeed would become one of the biggest-ever rock stars. His name? James Patrick Page. He would become globally famous as Jimmy Page, founder of Led Zeppelin and one of the most influential of rock-guitar virtuosos. He is "the most loved and revered of all classic rock stars," says Chris Salewicz, author of the newly-published Jimmy Page: The Authorized Biography.

Led Zeppelin released their debut album in January 1969 and by the time of their fourth album, in November 1971, they were indisputably the biggest act in the world. That fourth album contains their best-known song, Stairway to Heaven.

Page himself has had all of the vices you associate with moneyed rock stars: groupies, hard-drug use (his former heroin habit has been widely chronicled), and decadent behaviour. He was interested in the occult from an early age, and fascinated by the author and occultist Aleister Crowley, who was once branded "the wickedest man in the world." In 1970 Page bought Crowley's Scottish manor, Boleskine House, on the banks of Loch Ness. He owned it for more than 20 years before selling it, and, says Salewicz, though he never spent more than a total of six weeks in the manor, "he had still been observed driving in the Loch Ness area in a Land Rover, a set of stage's antlers resplendent on the vehicle's bonnet, as though he were a Scottish aristocrat."

He has lived now for many years in a mansion in Hampstead, London, and has fallen out with neighbour Robbie Williams over the latter's development plans of a basement and swimming pool

Page's rakish appearance and reputation, coupled with his guitar-god status and sheer songwriting prowess, made him an immensely appealing figure. As Salewicz writes: "Permanently clad in sensuous velvet and sexy ruffled shirts, his jawline frequently dusted with five o'clock shadow, and always with that aura of androgynous otherness, Jimmy Page looked to many women – and plenty of men too – like dirty sex on a stick."

Page, who was born in Middlesex in January 1944, was a teenage guitar prodigy, and he went on to become one of Britain's most in-demand session guitarists. As a freelance he contributed to a remarkably long list of songs, playing guitar on everything from Shirley Bassey's Goldfinger theme song, and Lulu and the Luvvers's hit Shout, to Downtown, by Petula Clark, and It's Not Unusual, by Tom Jones. He guested on songs recorded by Val Doonican, Van Morrison, pre-stardom David Bowie, The Who, The Kinks, and many others.

In time, Page put together Led Zeppelin with John-Paul Jones, a fellow session musician, on bass guitar, singer Robert Plant and powerhouse drummer John 'Bonzo' Bonham. Their first concerts took place almost 50 years ago this month.

Page, who had done well financially from his freelance work, personally financed the band's first album, while also overseeing the creative process. Salewicz quotes an interview in which Page said: "I wanted artistic control in a vice-like grip, because I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the band."

In addition to their success with their studio albums, Zeppelin were also hugely popular in concert. They made frequent visits to America, and built up a huge army of fans there. The band's live shows – loud and intoxicatingly exciting – broke new ground. "Playing live was the real jewel in our existence," Plant once said.

Like many musicians, Page and his bandmates had their share of eager female fans. Salewicz describes how, on one tour in 1969, a "different story began to emerge about Led Zeppelin on this tour, or an act whose libidinous pursuits were elevated sometimes to the level of an art form. Not least when Page, covered in offal, was wheeled on a hospital trolley by John Bonham into a Los Angeles hotel room filled with groupies, who proceeded to devour him."

Concern was expressed, however, not just about the band's thuggish entourage, which was capable of acts of reckless violence, but also about Page's association with a young woman named Lori Mattix, who has said that she was just 14 when she lost her virginity to David Bowie and that Page was her next lover. The biography describes how Page, in conversation with her in LA in 2014, said, "Oh Lori, we were so young then," prompting her to reply, "Well, I was!"

Led Zeppelin continued until 1980, when John Bonham died, the cause of death being said to be inhalation of vomit after yet another marathon drinking session.

Page has long curated his band's extensive catalogue of re-issues. On December 10, 2007, the band, with Bonham's son Jason on drums, reunited for a strict one-off appearance at London's O2 arena. The promoter, Harvey Goldsmith, claimed that more than 20 million people had tried to buy one of the 18,000 tickets. That, and the huge sales of the subsequent CD and DVD in 2012, spoke to the enormous, lasting popularity of the band put together by Page, now a snowy-haired 74, all these decades ago.

* Jimmy Page, The Definitive Biography, HarperCollins, £20