On Monday February 28, 2005, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck were guests at Buckingham Palace for a reception honouring the UK’s music industry – three rock ’n’ roll heroes, possibly the greatest guitarists this nation has produced, and all former Surrey schoolboys, friends and rivals since their teens.

These guitar gods were not taking themselves too seriously that day. ‘We still think we’re the kids rehearsing in his mum’s garage,’ Beck told another guest, pointing to Page, who smiled quietly.

When Her Majesty was formally introduced to Led Zeppelin megastar Page, she only had one question: ‘Are you a guitarist too?’ Page simply nodded.

Jimmy Page formed Led Zeppelin in 1968, after a stint in The Yardbirds and several years as the best guitarist for hire on the London session circuit

The band would eventually become the second-biggest-selling band of all time, behind only The Beatles

It’s probably just as well the Queen didn’t know quite how far short that description sold her then 61-year-old guest, with his dyed black hair, dark suit and sober tie.

Once a middle-class Epsom boy, Jimmy Page was indeed a famous guitarist. A musical genius, fastidious collector, a reclusive rock ’n’ roll version of Howard Hughes, the owner of palatial residences and vintage cars he was unable to drive – he never passed his test – Page was the mastermind behind Led Zeppelin, the biggest band of the Seventies. But he was also their dark heart: a drug addict, notorious admirer of the occultist Aleister Crowley and infamous lover of very young groupies.

Page formed Led Zeppelin in 1968, after a stint in The Yardbirds and several years as the best guitarist for hire on the London session circuit. The band – Page, fellow session man John Paul Jones on bass, golden-haired singer Robert Plant and Plant’s formidable drummer friend John Bonham – had an instant chemistry and an incredible rock ’n’ roll power.

Derided at first by the critics, in concert they were an instant sensation, achieving seemingly overnight success in America, where they would eventually become the second-biggest-selling band of all time, behind only The Beatles.

But Led Zeppelin’s libidinous pursuits were becoming notorious, and when asked about the abuse of women by his group, Page told a journalist: ‘Girls come around and pose like starlets, teasing and acting haughty. If you humiliate them a bit, they tend to come on all right after that. Everyone knows what they come for.’

The band’s star rose inexorably as they recorded a series of classic rock albums, with Page as the architect, including 1971’s album known as Led Zeppelin IV, which boasted the epic Stairway To Heaven and the raucous Rock ’N’ Roll. In a little over three years, Zeppelin became the biggest group in the world, far out-selling The Rolling Stones. But their reputation for bad behaviour also continued to grow, and one aspect of Page’s part in it was his highly controversial taste in younger women.

In 1973, on tour in the US, Page began a relationship with an underage girl, 15-year-old Los Angeles ‘groupie’ Lori Mattix, who he’d ship to all the band’s American shows. He also styled her. ‘He was always very conventional and conservative,’ she said years later. He wanted me to be such a lady. He used to make me wear long dresses and look gypsy-like.’

Despite having a long-term girlfriend, French model Charlotte Martin, and a small daughter, Scarlet, Page soon took up with 20-year-old Bebe Buell, the girlfriend of musician and producer Todd Rundgren, and later the mother of actress Liv Tyler. Both Page and Buell were staying at the Hyatt House hotel in LA when Page invited her to his suite for breakfast. She arrived in her pyjamas with Rundgren’s pet raccoon.

‘Come in, darling,’ Page said, welcoming her with a bow. ‘Would you like some cocaine?’

‘We hung out,’ said Buell, ‘drinking mimosas, doing some lines and comparing notes on our current problems.’ They finally went to bed together, only to be woken by a frantic Mattix, by then 16, attempting to enter the room before being carried away screaming.

‘We spent a lot of time in bed. Jimmy was never violent, he never tried to practise black magic,’ said Buell of the liaison, which later continued in London, to the consternation of Rundgren, who threw his breakfast at the wall when Page sent his girlfriend flowers, and ranted: ‘He’s bad. He’s evil. He’s dark. He’s the devil. He’s got a woman and a kid.’

The occult was certainly one of Page’s fascinations. He was still a schoolboy when he discovered Crowley, once dubbed ‘the wickedest man in the world’ by the British press. At the peak of his interest, Page owned Crowley’s books, manuscripts, the robes in which he had conducted rituals, and his former abode, Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness.

The band’s manager, Peter Grant, once told of how he would always play the guitarist’s interests in the dark arts to their advantage. ‘Sometimes I’d take Jimmy into the record company in New York and everybody would hide in their offices because they thought he was going to put a spell on them. He was very good at intimidating them.’

As the Seventies wore on, Led Zeppelin’s tours increasingly featured enormous amounts of cocaine: before he performed his nightly drum solo, Bonham would scarf up a handful from a sugar bowl kept by his drum stool. The other group members would step backstage for their own lines of the drug.

Meanwhile, Page’s unsettling reputation only deepened. One February evening in 1975, Page visited David Bowie’s rented house in Manhattan for an evening’s entertainment largely comprising lines of white powder and glasses of red wine.

At this point in his life, Bowie was living on milk and cocaine, and on the edge of madness. He had read the writings of Crowley and believed that Page’s deep knowledge of the occultist had conferred some sort of mystical power, and he wanted to find out how.

But Page infuriated Bowie by simply smiling mysteriously at his questions. When Bowie finally asked him to leave, and suggested he do it via the window, Page just sat there with an enigmatic rictus smile. Finally, he stood up silently and left, shutting the front door forcefully behind him. A terrified Bowie ordered that the house be exorcised, believing it had become infested with demons. When he later ran into Page at a party, Bowie fled the event.

Both Page and Bonham developed heroin habits, and shortly after finishing their seventh album, Presence, Page confessed to road manager Richard Cole: ‘I think I’m hooked. It’s terrible. I’ve tried to stop, but I can’t.’

From this point, Zeppelin’s nosedive was inexorable. The days of Page’s greatest creativity with the group were behind him.

There was still plenty of darkness ahead, however. At a show in Oakland, California, in July 1977, a stagehand was attacked and beaten by Bonham, Grant, Cole and John Bindon, a London gangland heavy.

Far worse was to come. Three days later, Plant received a phone call from his wife Maureen in England: Karac, their five-year-old son, was seriously ill. Then came another call. Karac had died of a mystery infection.

A devastated Plant flew home. At Karac’s funeral, Plant was joined by Bonham and Cole. But there was no Page, who had flown to Cairo, where he ensconced himself in a luxurious hotel. Jones had simply resumed a family holiday, and Grant remained in the US.

‘Shortly after Karac died,’ said Joe Wright, a sometime employee of the band, ‘I bumped into Robert and Maureen and he says to me, “Stay away from Jimmy. He’s evil, he’s evil. It’s his fault that Karac is dead.” And Maureen is crying her eyes out.’

The band toiled on. Yet Page was clearly not well. Recording Led Zeppelin’s final album, In Through The Out Door, he frequently arrived at the studio – as Jones put it – ‘two days late’. Those who encountered Page on the band’s 1979 European tour were shocked by his appearance: the wafer-thin limbs, the junkie pallor and pinned eyes, the chipped and rotting teeth and gums.

Bonham, staying at Page’s house near Windsor, died in his bed in September 1980 at the age of 32 after bingeing on vodka, and the band split.

After Led Zeppelin, Page was a broken man, and he plunged into heroin even more deeply. Visitors to his Grade 1-listed Holland Park mansion, Tower House, there to see his then girlfriend Charlotte Martin and daughter Scarlet, would catch glimpses of him upstairs, clad in a dressing gown, like a spectral character in a gothic novel; for weeks at a time he wouldn’t leave the property.

Page had an affair with 20-year-old Bebe Buell, the girlfriend of musician and producer Todd Rundgren, and later the mother of actress Liv Tyler

It would take him several years to stop using heroin. He would later claim that withdrawal had not been too onerous, taking only four days – although some said he had taken a tip from Keith Richards and gone to a clinic in Switzerland to have his blood changed. For a time, he drank and used cocaine instead.

But by the new century – and even before the 2007 Led Zeppelin one-show reunion at London’s O2 – Page had completed a remarkable turnaround. No longer the feared figure of rock ’n’ roll sword-and-sorcery myth, he somehow re-emerged as a revered and respected classic rock artist.

He has been awarded an OBE for his work with impoverished Brazilian children and tended the legacy of his old band, whom Plant stubbornly refuses to let him reunite one more time.

And since 2015 there has been a new younger woman in his life, Scarlett Sabet, a French-Iranian poet and actor more than 40 years his junior. ‘Scarlett has been very good for Jimmy,’ commented a friend. Then again, part of the attraction may have been her name: Aleister Crowley always gave his girlfriends the nickname ‘Scarlet Woman’. Is there still a touch of darkness to Jimmy Page?

‘Jimmy Page: The Definitive Biography’ by Chris Salewicz is published by HarperCollins, priced £20. Offer price £16 (20% discount with free p&p) until August 18. Order at mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640