Dreja was one of the Yardbird’s initial members, joining the band in 1963 and staying with it all the way up until 2012. The band’s 1960s era would give a platform to three guitarists who would go on to become some of the most acclaimed in rock’s history: Eric Clapton, Jeff Page, and Jimmy Page. Throughout his time in the band, Dreja first played rhythm guitar and bass.
Born in the Surbiton neighborhood of London in 1945, Dreja met fellow Yardbirds founder Anthony “Top” Topham as child, per Deadline, and began playing music together, playing in the Metropolitan Blues Quartet before forming the band that would make them famous. “Discovering that music was like the genie coming out of the bottle really,” Dreja would reflect in a 2005 interview with Classic Rock Radio. “In those days we had really rather kitsch pop music with no free fall and very little emotion back in the depressing fifties and sixties post war.”
After the Yardbirds split in 1968, Page would go on to form Led Zeppelin, which Dreja declined to join. “Well I was feeling increasingly pissed off that I was being manipulated by all these other people,” he said later. “I had little control in my life. Some of them were into drugs, alcohol, and extreme egos or were just plain crazy. I was finding it all a bit uncivilised to be honest.” He would instead pursue a career in photography, and was “proud” to have shot the back cover for Led Zeppelin’s first album. In the 1980s, he would co-found the band Box of Frogs. In 1992, he reunited with the Yardbirds, and stayed with them for another 20 years. “I have no regrets, I must be honest,” he told ClassicBands.com. “The passion, the love for the art form did provide me with a living and that’s all you need really.”
