‘We took them back to the good times: when it started’

The making of Becoming Led Zeppelin’. Stevie Chick talks to the documentary filmmakers who walked with surviving rock legends Plant, Page and Jones down memory lane...

- Stevie Chick

It’s August 1968, and in a poky room beneath London’s Gerrard Street, Jimmy Page is rehearsing his new band. A 24-year-old guitar-for-hire who’d made uncredited appearances on epochal hits by The Who, The Rolling Stones and Van Morrison’s band Them, Page quit a lucrative gig at the Muzak Corporation in 1966 to join The Yardbirds. That band promptly imploded but Page’s instincts were sound. Soon, he’d corralled a new Yardbirds (they’d soon ditch that name in favour of “Led Zeppelin”) with fellow session-muso John Paul Jones and two unknowns from the Black Country, Robert Plant and John Bonham.

In that Gerrard Street basement, they launch into Cincinnati bluesman Tiny Bradshaw’s “Train Kept A-Rollin’’ and the world is pretty much never the same again. Within weeks of that first rehearsal, they’re touring Scandinavia; by Boxing Day they’re playing the US; and less than a year later they’re collecting gold discs for their debut album, which eventually sells a staggering 10 million copies. By 1980 – after seven more smash-hit studio albums, globetrotting tours that shatter all records, legendary on-the-road escapades heavy on the sex and the drugs, and the tragic death of drummer Bonham – it’s all over. Led Zeppelin have left the building, ceding the stage to endless imitators who’ll ape their moves but never approach their magic.

But it’s this first chapter that fascinates Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty, the filmmakers behind the new documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin. “We wanted to demystify that ‘Viking’ image of Led Zeppelin as these marauders laying waste to villages,” MacMahon says. “Forget all the myths – the private jets, the drugs, the stuff bands like Mötley Crüe and Warrant thought Led Zeppelin was about. This is the beginning – the least-known part of the Led Zeppelin story, one shrouded in mystery.”