Led Zeppelin disbanded in 1980 following the untimely death of drummer John Bonham. However, the band was already planning the follow-up to 1979’s In Through The Out Door.

Jimmy Page talked about the details of that album that was never meant to be in a new interview with Rolling Stone. “Well, yeah, we were already doing stuff in 1980,” said Page. “We did a tour of Europe. I think the way to put it is like this: [1976’s] ‘Presence’ was a guitar album. After that record, John Paul Jones had acquired a ‘Dream Machine,’ a Yamaha [synthesizer]. Stevie Wonder also had one. So it had given him a lot of inspiration. He suddenly actually wrote whole numbers, which he hadn’t done before, and I thought the way to go with this is to feature John Paul Jones on the keyboard.”

Page continued, “He’d written some stuff with Robert. I thought, ‘Well, that’s great.’ Obviously, at that time, I thought I knew how this album [‘In Through the Out Door’] is shaping up, but the next album is going to be a departure from the keyboard album.”

Page added, “After the sessions for ‘In Through the Out Door,’ John Bonham and I were discussing how we wanted to do a sort of more riff-based entity, and harder and trickier. And then, of course, I know what sort of drums he liked to play. He liked to play, like, really hard; he liked to play stuff that people heard it, they’d go, ‘Wow, what’s that?’ I like to do that as well with the guitar parts.”

Page then said, “We had a bit of an idea of what we might do, but basically, it was not going to be a keyboard album. There would be keyboards on it maybe, but it was going to go more into another vein. It would be different to anything that had been there before. We didn’t get a chance to do that, obviously, because we lost John.”