Did Jimmy Page play on the Kinks' hits? Dave Davies sets the record straight

7 July 2026, 11:31 | Updated: 7 July 2026, 11:48

Jimmy Page played on thousands of songs as a session man. But not the Kinks' biggest hits.

Before Led Zeppelin and even The Yardbirds, Jimmy Page was one of the premier session musicians in the country.

It's estimated that he played on thousands of songs ("three sessions a day, six days a week" he told Guitar World in 1993), and was the favoured guitar player for producer Shel Talmy.

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Shel produced The Who's debut My Generation and the first five Kinks albums, so that meant that Page could have featured on some of those formative recordings.

Page has often pointed out that given the sheer volume of sessions he played on means that he can't always remember what he features on – not to mention that he wouldn't be in the mixing room making the final decisions either.

And The Kinks' Dave Davies has, not for the first time, shut down the repeated claims that Page's guitar featured on the band's biggest hits.

"No @JimmyPage did not provide distortion on any Kinks songs period," Dave wrote on Twitter yesterday (July 6), posting a screen grab from Wikipedia that claimed Page played the feedback at the start of 'I Need You', the B-side to 1965 single 'Set Me Free'.

There's also a widespread but frequently debunked rumour that Page played lead guitar on The Kinks' massive 'You Really Got Me'.

The Kinks - I'm a Lover Not a Fighter (Official Audio)

"I'm sick and tired of this misinformation. Jimmy Page did not play on any Kinks hits."

But while Page didn't play electric guitar on The Kinks' most famous records, the liner notes for the Deluxe Edition of The Kinks debut album Kinks did confirm that Talmy enlisted him to play 12-string acoustic on two album tracks 'I'm a Lover Not a Fighter' and 'I've Been Driving on Bald Mountain'.

Both of those songs were written by Talmy for the band.