Inside meteoric rise of Led Zeppelin as new film tells story of their blues roots & formation to becoming rock royalty

WHEN two savvy Southerners hooked up with two West Midlands wild men, it was a case of light the blue touch paper and stand well back.

As legend has it, they were supposed to go down like “a lead balloon”.

But, in 1968, they formed the most explosive and arguably most successful band in rock ’n’ roll history — Led Zeppelin.

Representing the suburbs of London were Jimmy Page (guitars) and John Paul Jones (bass and keyboards).

From the outskirts of Birmingham came Robert Plant (vocals and harmonica) and John “Bonzo” Bonham (drums).

When the four played together, it was — as their incendiary Immigrant Song implied — like hearing the “hammer of the gods”.

By incorporating grinding blues, sultry R&B and delicate folk music into their sound, they offered so much more than the “hard rock” and “heavy metal” labels they came to be saddled with.

Plant once told me: “In the middle of all our madness, we had a Zeppelin style. You could feel it and you could hear it.”

Next week sees the arrival in UK cinemas of the first band-authorised film about their roots, their formation and their meteoric rise, Becoming Led Zeppelin.

The two-hour documentary was written, directed and meticulously researched by Bernard MacMahon in tandem with screenwriter and producer Allison McGourty.

The pair had previously masterminded the mammoth, acclaimed American Epic project, exploring the impact of pioneering 1920s recordings by the likes of Mississippi John Hurt, The Carter Family and Lead Belly through film, soundtracks and a book.

In Becoming Led Zeppelin, MacMahon and McGourty trace the musical journey of each band member from their childhoods in post-war Britain . . . cue for cute family album snaps.

They paint a detailed picture of four characters with contrasting personalities who were ALL music obsessives from an early age.

They provide a blizzard of ­footage of the band’s influences — Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Richard, James Brown and two fired-up acts from this side of the Atlantic, Lonnie Donegan and Johnny Kidd & The Pirates.

We see Page and Jones becoming ace session men while startl­ingly young. Both backed Shirley Bassey on her immortal 1964 Bond theme Goldfinger, for instance.

We witness Plant and Bonham, buddies as teenagers, plough their way through a tangle of bands in the West Midlands with no money and a “whole lotta” passion.

To cap it all, the four musicians collide, the sparks fly and they become world beaters — fast. The film serves as a mesmerising collage of loud, unvarnished live performance, telling insights from Page, Plant and Jones as well as evocative archive audio from the late Bonham.

The release of Becoming Led Zeppelin, after years in the works, inspired me to revisit interviews I conducted for expanded editions of the band’s back catalogue — eight studio albums released between 1969 and 1979 and their 1982 compilation, Coda.

In the first of four illuminating encounters with Page, I remember joining him beside a roaring log fire at a swish boutique hotel, just round the corner from London’s Royal Albert Hall.

By then, with his swept-back white hair, the six and 12-string maestro — the “Pontiff Of Power Riffing” if you will — bore the air of rock royalty.

Like chalk and cheese

Over coffee, he talked with immense pride and encyclopaedic knowledge about the formation of the band, the glory years and its untimely demise following the death of Bonham in 1980.

Ninety minutes later, in stark contrast, I found myself sitting at a scrubbed pine table, having a pint with Plant in an upstairs room at his Primrose Hill local.

With his shaggy mane and easy manner, the singer with the spectacular holler roamed freely between Led Zep, his latest solo album and his beloved football team, Wolverhampton Wanderers.

His first words to me were, “Have you done Jim Bob?” followed by a mischievous, “Laugh a minute?”

Let’s just say that Page, who wrote most of the music, and Plant, who wrote most of the lyrics, are like chalk and cheese, the former an earnest soul, the latter a freewheeling spirit.

It’s well known that they haven’t always seen eye to eye but there can be no doubting their intuitive Led Zeppelin relationship which, of course, ties them for ever.

“Yeah, we were very lucky,” admitted Plant. “For a period of time, Jimmy and I were made for each other.”

Then he added: “But it was also the four of us. Each of us slipped into a role where self-expression was never marred. There was always a free passage to take an idea to the extreme.

“Jimmy was obviously the boss in the beginning. He and Jonesy bankrolled the whole thing when we started playing.

“They were the luminaries but Bonzo and I carried a lot of excitement and raw crap from the Midlands, which in a way stayed with Zeppelin all the way through.

“We were fortunate because we had this thing called ‘chemistry’ — though I hate the term. It was a fantastic and fortuitous accident.”

It was Page who initially drove the band to rise like a phoenix from the ashes of The Yardbirds and he remains the chief keeper of the flame to this day.

He said to me: “Every musician dreams to be in a group like Led Zeppelin and I was really fortunate to have been a founder member.

“It wasn’t one superstar surrounded by other good musicians. Each and every one of us brought in so much. Whether it was all of us playing at the same time — or two, or three — there was this incredible alchemy.”

Filmmaker MacMahon echoed this comment when he told SFTW of his key take-out from piecing Becoming Led Zeppelin together.

He was amazed at “just how extra­ordinary the musicianship was”.

“When you’re actually living with that music over and over again, year after year, you marvel at how they put it together.”

Page gave me another reason why Led Zeppelin were so special.

“We all had substantial roots, we really did,” he affirmed. “John Bonham had been listening to jazz drummers as much as Little ­Richard’s drummer, who was absolutely wonderful.

“John Paul Jones had obviously been into jazz, too. He had extremely eclectic taste.

“Robert’s voice was clearly like another instrument. It was on a different level. And I was constantly listening to music. If it was six strings and it was a guitar, then I was paying great attention to it.”

As for Plant, he’d had a bumpier ride through the Sixties before Page and the band’s forceful manager Peter Grant invited him to be lead singer and his mate “Bonzo” to be drummer.

“From my angle, I was really aware that my dream had arrived,” Plant told me.

“I’d been in lots of bands and people had suggested that a career in accountancy wasn’t over yet. ‘You could still go back and have another pop at it,’ they said.

Sex, catastrophe and things blowing up

“So when this chemical and anatomical combination got together it was like, ‘Wow! So this is what it was all coming to.’”

Plant produced one of his wicked grins as he spoke of “over-singing everywhere” on a live recording from October 1969 at The Olympia theatre in Paris.

It first surfaced officially in 2014 as a companion disc with the expanded self-titled debut album, now commonly re- ferred to as Led Zep I.

“I was gibbering like an ape — but there’s nothing wrong with a good ape!” he exclaimed. “I was so excited and never ever thought I’d hear it again.”

I asked Plant to explain his almost supernatural vocal range.

He replied with a remarkable list: “It came from Steve Marriott [the Small Faces singer] and from Howlin’ Wolf. It came from a tarmac lane in the Black Country. It came from every misty mountain and every silly castle on the Welsh borders.

“It came from me going, ‘I really love what I do and I’m going to over-cook it baby, come on!’

“There were so many ‘ooh baby, babies’ everywhere.”

In turn, Page was keen to highlight Led Zeppelin’s prowess at jamming and improv­isation.

“I’d been used to it in The Yardbirds,” he said. “We’d be creating music one night that we hadn’t done the night before.

“I was very keen to keep that tradition going in Led Zeppelin and these musicians were of such a calibre we really could have a lot of fun.”

Listening to the debut album today, 56 years on, you can’t help being impressed by the freshness and rawness of the sound.

It was housed in what became an iconic cover, displaying a bleached-out image of the Hindenburg zeppelin, pride of the Nazis, going down in flames in 1937.

 Despite printing a caustic review at odds with the positive public reaction, Rolling Stone did say: “The image did a pretty good job of encapsulating the music inside: sex, catastrophe and things blowing up.”

The opening blast of Good Times Bad Times sets the high-octane tone but it’s the sprawling workouts that impress the most . . . Dazed And Confused, You Shook Me, How Many More Times and Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.

Page said: “The first album was done in a matter of hours, across a few days when we got back from touring Scandinavia [where they were still calling themselves The New Yardbirds].”

He singled out one of those aforementioned tracks for its breadth of sounds, an early clue to Led Zeppelin’s mastery of loud/quiet dynamics and his guitar virtuosity.

“Babe I’m Gonna Leave You begins fragile and acoustic, it’s got these little flamenco licks and it’s got a bit of pedal steel here and there.

“It’s got a heavyweight middle section, then it comes back down to the fragility. A whole canvas was being prepared with light and shade to it.”

Plant recalled returning to the West Midlands with his wife Maureen, armed with the first Led Zeppelin album. (He and Maureen divorced in 1983 but are “still really good mates”.)

He said: “Her family all used to sit round the record player and go, ‘F***ing hell! Listen to that! That’s you!’ I’d say, ‘Yeah, I’ll make the tea’.

“It was brilliant to come back home with Bonzo living nearby. We used to have so much fun going, ‘Wow! We can’t let anybody know about this.’”

This brings us to album No.2 and THAT riff — the one that took the band to the next level of success. It also brings Becoming Led Zeppelin to a climactic close.

‘Depths of Mordor’

Reflecting on Led Zep II’s opening track, Page said: “It’s intense, it’s wonderful and the middle section is surreal.”

Plant acknowledged its significance: “The momentum was building all the time but the actual rhythm of Whole Lotta Love was the vehicle that allowed this opening up, this flourish.”

That “flourish” was evident in the wildly ambitious Ramble On which found Plant’s songwriting entering the realms of fantasy with its mentions of “the darkest depths of Mordor” and “Gollum, and the evil one” from Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings.

The singer said: “As far as construction and dynamism and colour, Ramble On was the beginning of something opening up for us that would become Stairway To Heaven or The Rain Song.

“Whereas Whole Lotta Love had THAT riff, the lilt and, of course, the trippy elements in the middle.”

When I met Page and Plant on the same morning in separate places, both were at pains to reflect on their beloved fallen comrade, John Bonham.

His untimely death on September 25, 1980, aged 32, signalled the end of the main Led Zeppelin journey (although the 2007 Celebration Day reunion at London’s O2 with Bonham’s son Jason on drums was momentous).

Page said: “I still marvel at John’s technique and his attitude. He’s way up there with the best drummers and his contribution to the band was unparalleled”

Plant, who praised Bonham for “laying down such sexy grooves”, signed off with a wonderful anecdote about his old, much-missed mucker.

“In the middle of playing, he used to shout out, ‘Cannons!’ And I used to shout back, ‘F*** off!’ Then he’d say to me, ‘Well, you’re not a very good singer but just go out and look good.’”

For more great insights, go and see Becoming Led Zeppelin, a riveting blast of documentary filmmaking at its best.

You’ll be dazed and enthused!