Led Zeppelin Interviewed: “We couldn’t do a Led Zeppelin reunion unless the singer was there. Quite clearly we’re there, but he’s not…”

In 2007 Led Zeppelin played what is widely regarded as the gig of the century. Five years later, as the band prepared to release Celebration Day, a document of that legendary night in London, MOJO invited Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones to take us backstage at the O2 and to lay bare the truth behind what happened next. As part of MOJO’s own celebrations to mark 30 years of the world’s finest music magazine, we’ve revisited the interview in full…

The lights go down and, as the arena fades to black, a television screen above the stage crackles into life to reveal a clean-cut, bespectacled American newscaster, hair parted to the left, wearing a blue-grey suit and a long-collared shirt. He is Scott Shuster and he transports us back to May 5, 1973 – the day Led Zeppelin drew “the biggest crowd ever assembled for a single performance in one place in the entire history of the world” at the Tampa Stadium, breaking the record set previously by The Beatles. Up flash the numbers: 56,000 tickets for the Tampa show, yielding $309,000 versus $306,000 grossed by The Beatles at Shea Stadium eight years earlier in front of a slightly smaller crowd. In the summer of ’73, Led Zeppelin truly were the biggest band in the world. Tonight in London, with Paul McCartney watching on from the gods, they are once again.

I HEARD there were 20 million fans that applied,” says a disbelieving Jimmy Page speaking to MOJO a few weeks before the O2 show, referring to the online registration and lottery system used to distribute the £125-per-head tickets. Held as a tribute to Atlantic Records boss and Zep acolyte Ahmet Ertegun, who died at the age of 83 following a backstage fall at a Rolling Stones concert at New York’s Beacon Theatre in 2006, tonight’s show is nominally a multi-artist bill. But the 18,000 ticket holders packed into the venue formerly known as the Millennium Dome are only here to see one act.

To say that the level of excitement is palpable is an understatement. The air is alive with fan-chatter, a sense of uncertainty and a raft of questions: with his fractured finger, leading to the show being postponed from November to December, how well will Jimmy be able to play? Will Jason Bonham cut it compared to his late father John? Will he be able to recreate that vital rhythmic chemistry with John Paul Jones? Can Robert Plant still hit those high notes? Will the show rise above previous ill-fated reunions like the debacle of 1985’s Live Aid and the rusty Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary? And, simplest of all, what the devil will they start with?

In a pitch black arena, Jimmy Page provides the answer to the latter via two trenchant barre chords, underpinned by rhythmic strikes from Jones and Bonham as the stage slams into life with Good Times Bad Times – a surprise opener which Zeppelin never actually played live in its entirety in their 1969-77 heyday.

“In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man! Now I’ve reached that age, I’ve tried to do all those things the best I can!” wails Robert Plant. His vocals are noticeably lower than on the recorded version on the band’s debut album, adding nobility and gravitas to the lyric’s reflective sentiments.

The track ends with a modicum of uncertainty, Page, Plant and Jones triangulating around the drum kit and looking at Bonham for their final cue. The nervous energy that spreads from the musicians into the audience during the thunderous first track is becalmed by Page’s strum of the opening chords to Ramble On – another track previously unaired in full until now, and where tonight the intimacy of the ensemble playing is matched by Plant’s measured, emotional vocal. The celebratory romp of Black Dog follows, with a beaming Page dancing in time to the groove and Plant sharing his call-and-response vocal with the audienceJones straps on his fretless bass and Page turns to a Gibson semi-acoustic to deliver a brutal In My Time Of Dying, Plant’s vocalising combining with Jimmy’s slide work as Bonham adds to the music’s heft. “This is our first adventure with this song in public,” announces Robert Plant as Page strikes up the riff to For Your Life, the band’s lyrically scalding commentary on the LA coke scene. Another tune previously unaired on-stage, its inclusion is startling bearing in mind that the track was recorded in late 1975 and included on Presence – an LP made when Plant was convalescing from a near-fatal car accident on Rhodes and Page, by his own admission, was in the grip of addiction. Tonight, however, the past is almost rendered irrelevant by a heroic, urgent, utterly transfixing performance. Material such as Dazed And Confused (wherein Page retreats, bow-in-hand, into a laser-generated green pyramid to create a tenebrous atmosphere) and a richly textured Stairway To Heaven which moves with both grace and increasing power) is undoubtedly classic, yet is delivered with an inventiveness and authority that brushes aside any sense of nostalgia. Nowhere is this more evident than on the monolithic reading of Kashmir in which Plant finally appears to lose his inhibitions. “Phenomenal!” is how Page will later describe it.

The encores are emotional high points: a frenetic A Whole Lotta Love is followed by the victory procession of Rock And Roll, after which a drenched Page, his white shirt sticking to his torso, seems to kiss his guitar before gathering round with Jones and Plant to applaud a beaming Jason in front of an ecstatic crowd that in places appear emotionally overwhelmed. To MOJO’s right a couple are weeping. The gigantic Led Zeppelin logo that illuminates the stage appears to announce the return of the most formidable rock’n’roll band of all time. Few would guess that it could signal the end…

Robert Plant: “When it finished I got out of there and ended up in The Marathon Bar in Chalk Farm.”

I didn’t think anything of it right after the event, but we actually put right all the kind of fuck-ups along the way. Live Aid, Atlantic 40th…” begins Robert Plant, eschewing small talk to launch straight into a discussion about the O2 show.

Holding court on a warm day in late September 2012 in the top-floor dining room of a pub in Primrose Hill, the 64-year-old singer is the first of the three surviving members of Led Zeppelin MOJO will quiz about the events of five years ago.

According to his publicist, Robert has put an inglorious 20 minutes aside for our discussion, suggesting Plant is a less than willing participant. As it transpires, our time will over-run with ease and without interference, the singer talking with enthusiasm and peppering his conversation with riddles of his own making and the odd moment of obfuscation.

Over the past five years, Plant has concentrated on his solo career. In the wake of Zeppelin’s return he scooped a raft of Grammys for Raising Sand, the 2007 album he recorded with Alison Krauss. Despite that success, a second album with Krauss never materialised. “With the people I was playing with there was maturity and workmanship that was totally different,” he explains. “That said, you could go mad if you got stuck in that for too long because it’s workaday.” Instead of resurrecting his partnership with Krauss he formed the Band Of Joy (confusingly named after his original ’60s outfit) with Americana veteran Buddy Miller and Patty Griffin, and he has emerged latterly fronting the “totally wild” Sensational Space Shifters.

For all his current endeavours, Plant admits he enjoyed watching Celebration Day and he smiles broadly when MOJO offers our approbation, having been treated to a special screening at London’s Soho Hotel with director Dick Carruthers the day before.

“The great thing for the three of us and Jason – and probably because of Jason – was that it really did work,” he smiles. “We were able to creep up through the undergrowth of all the ensuing years and peek through and get back into it.”

Did Jason bring the three of you closer together?

Yes. There was nothing prickly or spiky about Jason. His enthusiasm has always been phenomenal… about almost anything! (Laughs) Sometimes it was artificially inspired, but not now. I’ve known him since he was about 18 months old when John and Pat [Bonham] were living in a caravan behind her mum’s shop in Redditch. We go back a long way.

I’ve got used to Jason’s fantastic bludgeoning of my senses all the time about one thing or another, but he’s brilliant. He came to the rehearsals without any of the trappings, except for the fact that he’s historically obsessive which to me is such a yawn. I mean, who cares what the fuck the difference is [in the set] between Night One somewhere and Night Two somewhere else? You just play it and then you go away.

fine but I’m not. I’m a singer. My adventures with Led Zeppelin are pretty interesting because I’m kind of like a… or I was… like a glider pilot, or a moth. I just kind of land in the middle of something very pretty and then take off again because most of it, construction-wise, is built on a musicality. To make songs in the middle of it all was wonderfully challenging, and so it was on that night. There were songs where my appearance was important but it had to be right. It wasn’t about “bare-chested, flaxen-haired marauder arrives on the scene in bar 99”. It was more like, “Get in there, Planty! Quick!” Jason’s point of view is microscopic which, in its own way, is brilliant. He brought in lots of anecdotal bits and pieces that softened the environment as we worked together.

There’s always been tension between the members of Led Zeppelin. Why?

Yeah, well, I think it’s because we’re really good. Being really good means that nobody should dominate and everybody wants to get their point across, or everybody wants it to go in a particular direction. That’s probably one of the reasons why I’m very happy moseying along heading for Brazil next with the Space Shifters, because it’s a big ask to be part of something like that, especially when you’re in your sixties or even your forties. It’s a magnificent beast that was because the musical options were so amazing. There was so much… not knowledge… that’s not the right word… but derring-do in those days. It was interesting because when Lydon and the guys appeared in ’77 or ’76, we were proclaimed obsolete, but what had actually happened was that we were spreading ourselves thinly all over the place, and then actually also wanting a life because we were that much older… but not that much older, in reality.

You were 32 when Zeppelin split…

Yeah. So, we were always capable of interesting things but we had to interest ourselves primarily. There was no great need for it to be anything more than that. That’s why the O2 thing was such a… I mean, when it finished I quickly got out of there and I ended up in [late-night kebab shop] the Marathon Bar in Chalk Farm.

wanted to go somewhere and have six bottles of Keo, half a bottle of vodka and wake up in another world because the patronising and the momentum that was gathering around – the speculative stuff – was getting in the way. Jimmy said, “It’s just getting in the way of what we’re doing.” It was never like that when you played the Fillmore in a matinée on a Saturday afternoon.

The great thing now, later on in my time, is that it’s about a different energy. It’s just as creative but the expectations are different and it allows me to be dignified in what I do for myself, and within myself. But [the O2] was quite a thing for us to experience because our primary objective was to say: Ahmet fell over at a Stones gig, what a fucking drag. I got to know him more and more but in the Zeppelin years we had so much fun with that guy – all the way through our time Ahmet had been there or thereabouts.

There had never been some kind of crusty moment where it felt that you were dealing with a potentate who had whistled the solo into the ear of the tenor player on Little Egypt during one of The Coasters sessions, or been mouthing into Ray Charles’ ear during Mess Around. You could just talk to him about music the whole time.

When I was doing The stuff he said, “We’ll get [Louisiana musician] Tommy Ridgley and Charles Brown is still playing great piano in Chicago.” I said, “No, no, no! This is a white kid – who is overtly white – who’s just trying to meet Wynonie Harris halfway so don’t bring all this shit in!” So instead [of prolonging the conversation] we went out to some club with Phil Spector to see Barney Kessel. The three of us were standing at the back of the club – I think it was the Bitter End, or the Blue Note – and we were talking about the outro to Gene Pitney B-sides, Town Without Pity and shit like that. Everybody was looking at us going, “Shhhh! Shhhh!” Barney Kessel was up there just playing with his little dickie bow on. Ahmet was just arguing about music and using these mannerisms that I noticed in 1969 when I didn’t know him very well. He had these droopy eye-lids, and a look that told you he was up to no good. Of course, there are people who saw the other side of Ahmet, but to me he was unique.

So, the many great moments that led up to the O2 from many years before, the moments that really inspired the O2, flashed through my mind on the night and it was very emotional.