The story of Led Zeppelin

Four roads to one room

Jimmy Page was born on the ninth of January 1944 in Heston, on the western edge of London, and grew up in Epsom in Surrey. He found his first guitar in the family's new house, left behind by nobody knew who. Elvis Presley's Baby Let's Play House made him want to play, and he taught himself from records. In 1957, at thirteen, he appeared on a BBC talent show with a skiffle group. Asked what he wanted to do after school, he said he wanted to do biological research to find a cure for cancer. Instead he left school at fifteen to play guitar, toured with a singer called Neil Christian, and then fell ill with repeated bouts of glandular fever. He stepped back and went to art college in Sutton to study painting.[1]

Page never stopped playing, and by 1963 he was one of the busiest session guitarists in London. His first job for Decca was Diamonds by Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, which went to number one. To avoid confusion with the other top session man, Big Jim Sullivan, he was nicknamed Little Jim Pea. He played three sessions a day, on records by the Who, the Kinks, Them, Petula Clark and Shirley Bassey, and later became house producer for Andrew Loog Oldham's Immediate label. He also learned how records were made, noticing that drums recorded in tiny booths sounded like cardboard boxes. He quit sessions around 1966, when the calls started coming for Muzak. He said he simply could not live that life any more.[1]

John Paul Jones was born John Baldwin in Sidcup, Kent, on the third of January 1946. His father was a big band pianist and arranger, and his parents toured as a vaudeville act, so he was sent to boarding school. He started piano at six, and at fourteen he was organist and choirmaster at a local church. The same year he bought his first bass. In 1962 he joined Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, and from 1964 he became a session player and arranger for Decca. He arranged the strings on the Rolling Stones' She's a Rainbow and worked on Donovan's Sunshine Superman. His stage name came from Andrew Loog Oldham, who had seen a poster for a film about the American sailor John Paul Jones. By 1968 he was arranging fifty or sixty pieces a month, and it was wearing him out.[1]

Robert Plant was born on the twentieth of August 1948 in West Bromwich, in the Black Country, and grew up in Halesowen. His mother was of Romani descent. As a ten year old he hid behind the curtains at Christmas pretending to be Elvis. He trained as a chartered accountant for about two weeks, then gave it up for the Midlands blues scene and left home at sixteen. He cut three obscure singles for CBS, laid tarmac on roads for the builders George Wimpey, and sang in band after band, including the Crawling King Snakes and the Band of Joy. The 2025 documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin says his parents threw him out for rejecting a respectable career, and that by 1968 he was effectively homeless.[1] [2] [3]

John Bonham was born on the thirty first of May 1948 in Redditch, Worcestershire. At five he was drumming on containers and coffee tins, copying Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. His mother gave him a snare drum at ten and his father bought him a full kit at fifteen. He never had a formal lesson. His headmaster wrote that he would end up either a dustman or a millionaire. He worked as an apprentice carpenter for his father while drumming in Birmingham bands, and in 1966 he married Pat Phillips. Their son Jason was born that July. Bonham played with Plant in the Crawling King Snakes and the Band of Joy, and by 1968 was drumming for the American singer Tim Rose. According to the 2025 documentary, Pat thought Plant was a disaster and told her husband to stay away from him.[1] [2]

From the New Yardbirds to Led Zeppelin

In June 1966 Page joined the Yardbirds, first on bass, then on twin lead guitar beside his friend Jeff Beck. A month earlier, on the sixteenth of May, Page, Beck, Keith Moon, John Paul Jones and Nicky Hopkins had recorded an instrumental called Beck's Bolero. Page dreamed of a supergroup with Beck and the Who's Moon and John Entwistle, and one of them joked it would go down like a lead balloon. The group never happened, but the joke stuck in Page's head. After Beck left, Page steered the Yardbirds towards a heavier live sound, with long jams and a slow, menacing number called Dazed and Confused. The band played their final show on the seventh of July 1968 in Luton, leaving Page with the name and a batch of booked dates in Scandinavia.[1] [2] [3]

Page's first choice of singer was Terry Reid, who said no but pointed him to a young singer in the Midlands called Robert Plant. Page went to hear him, then invited him to his boathouse on the Thames at Pangbourne. They played records and worked on Joan Baez's Babe I'm Gonna Leave You, and they clicked. Plant suggested his old friend John Bonham on drums. Bonham was reluctant. He had better paid offers from Joe Cocker and Chris Farlowe, and Plant sent eight telegrams to his local pub, followed by forty more from the manager Peter Grant. In the end Bonham said he simply liked their music better. John Paul Jones, nudged by his wife, asked Page for the bass job during a Donovan session, and Page jumped at the chance.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In August 1968 the four met for the first time in a cramped room below a record shop on Gerrard Street in London. Page suggested the old rock and roll number Train Kept A Rollin'. Jones later said that as soon as he heard Bonham play he knew it was going to be great, and that they locked together straight away. Before leaving the country they backed the singer P. J. Proby on a track called Jim's Blues, the first studio recording with all four of them. On the seventh of September 1968, billed as the New Yardbirds, they played their first show in front of an audience, at a teen club in a school hall in Gladsaxe, Denmark. Page later described that first rehearsal as life changing.[1] [2]

Back in London they went straight into Olympic Studios, starting at eleven at night on the twenty fifth of September 1968. The whole first album took about thirty six hours and cost one thousand seven hundred and eighty two pounds, paid by Page and Grant themselves, so no label could interfere. Page's childhood friend Glyn Johns engineered. Then the old Yardbird Chris Dreja sent a cease and desist letter, saying the New Yardbirds name was only for Scandinavia. Page remembered the lead balloon joke, and Grant dropped the a from lead so Americans would not say leed. On the twenty fifth of October 1968 they played their first show as Led Zeppelin, at the University of Surrey in Guildford.[1] [2] [3]

No British label would take the album, so Page and Grant flew to New York. In November 1968 Grant secured a one hundred and forty three thousand dollar advance from Atlantic Records, then the biggest deal of its kind for a new band. Atlantic signed them without ever seeing them play, partly on the word of Dusty Springfield, a friend of Jones who was finishing Dusty in Memphis for the label. The contract was remarkable. The band decided when to record and tour, controlled their album covers and chose which songs, if any, came out as singles. They set up their own publishing company, called Superhype. Grant, a former wrestler and film extra, would run everything else, on a handshake.[1] [2] [3]

Conquering America, 1969

At the end of 1968 the band flew to America for their first tour, organised by their tough, hard partying tour manager Richard Cole. Cole brought their own gear and an all British crew, which later became standard practice. The debut album, Led Zeppelin, came out in the United States that January, with a picture of the Hindenburg airship in flames on the cover. It reached number ten there and number six in Britain when it was released on the thirty first of March. Plant helped write several songs but was not credited, because he was still tied to a CBS contract. On that first tour Bonham befriended Carmine Appice of Vanilla Fudge, who introduced him to the Ludwig drums he used for the rest of his life.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In their first year Led Zeppelin completed four American and four British tours, and they made their second album in the gaps. Led Zeppelin II was cut in hours snatched between shows, in studios in London, Los Angeles, New York, Memphis and Vancouver, where one room was so basic it was credited as a hut. Engineer Eddie Kramer described the famous mix of Whole Lotta Love as him and Page flying around a small desk twiddling every knob known to man. Released in October 1969, the album went to number one in both Britain and America. Its cover, by Page's art school friend David Juniper, pasted the band's faces onto a photo of a German First World War air squadron.[1] [2]

Whole Lotta Love opened the album and was built on a Page riff that he said came to him on his Thames houseboat. In America, Atlantic released an edited single without the band's blessing, and it reached number four on the Billboard chart in January 1970, their only top ten hit there. In Britain, Grant cancelled the single outright. The band saw albums as complete works and refused to chop them up. Ironically, a mostly instrumental version by the group CCS became the theme of the BBC chart show Top of the Pops, so everyone in Britain knew the tune anyway. Years later, in 1985, the bluesman Willie Dixon sued over lyrics taken from his song You Need Love, and the case was settled with Dixon added to the credits.[1] [2] [3]

The shows grew longer and wilder. Some early concerts ran for more than four hours, with Dazed and Confused stretching past half an hour as Page played his guitar with a violin bow, and Bonham's drum solo Moby Dick lasting twenty minutes or more, sometimes played with his bare hands. They also shunned television, arguing that fans should see them live. Off stage, a reputation for excess took hold almost immediately. Cole introduced groupies he knew from earlier tours, booked the band into the Chateau Marmont and later the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset Strip, soon nicknamed the Riot House. Stories from those hotels, some true and many exaggerated, would follow the band for the rest of their lives.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A cottage in Wales and a stairway, 1970 to 1971

In early 1970, exhausted after another American tour, Plant suggested a break at Bron Yr Aur, an eighteenth century cottage in the hills above Machynlleth in Wales, where his family had spent holidays in the 1950s. It had no electricity and no running water. Page and Plant went with Plant's wife Maureen, their baby daughter Carmen, Page's girlfriend Charlotte Martin and two roadies. They took acoustic guitars into the countryside and wrote. Page later said it was the first time he really got to know Plant. That June the band flew to Reykjavik to play a concert for the Icelandic government, just as the country's civil servants went on strike. The trip gave Plant the lyric for Immigrant Song, about Vikings sailing from the land of ice and snow.[1] [2] [3]

Led Zeppelin III came out on the fifth of October 1970, in a cover with a spinning cardboard wheel that showed different pictures through holes. Much of it was recorded at Headley Grange, a damp old country house in Hampshire that had been built in 1795 as a workhouse for the poor. Alongside Immigrant Song and the slow blues Since I've Been Loving You, it leaned heavily on acoustic folk songs like That's the Way and Gallows Pole. Critics were confused, and the band grew more hostile to the music press. The album still went to number one in Britain and America, though it spent less time at the top than any of their first five records.[1] [2] [3]

Work on the fourth album began in December 1970 at Island's new studio in Basing Street, London, then moved to Headley Grange with the Rolling Stones' mobile studio parked outside. Page said they needed somewhere they could have a cup of tea and wander round the garden. A black Labrador that roamed the grounds gave its name to Black Dog. Rolling Stones pianist Ian Stewart joined a jam that became Rock and Roll. For When the Levee Breaks, Bonham's kit was set up in the tall hallway, with two microphones hanging above the stairwell, and that huge echoing drum sound was later sampled endlessly in hip hop. Fairport Convention's Sandy Denny sang on The Battle of Evermore, the only guest singer ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Stairway to Heaven grew from pieces of music Page had taped over many months. Plant wrote most of the words by the fire at Headley Grange while Page strummed the chords, and he later said a huge share of the lyric came out there and then. Jones added four overdubbed recorder parts for the opening, and Page played the solo on the Telecaster Jeff Beck had given him, choosing the best of three takes. They first played it live at the Ulster Hall in Belfast on the fifth of March 1971. Jones remembered the crowd being bored stiff, waiting for something they knew. Atlantic begged to release it as a single. Grant refused, in 1972 and again in 1973, so millions bought the whole album to get it.[1] [2]

Stung by the reviews of the third album, Page decided the fourth would have no title and no band name on the cover, just four symbols, one chosen by each member. Atlantic hated the idea, and the band refused to hand over the master tapes until the label gave in. A press agent warned Page it would be professional suicide. The record came out on the eighth of November 1971 and is usually called Led Zeppelin IV, though it has also been sold as Four Symbols and nicknamed Zoso, after the look of Page's symbol. It became their biggest seller, with around thirty seven million copies worldwide, and Stairway to Heaven became the most requested song on American FM radio in the 1970s.[1] [2] [3]

The biggest band in the world, 1972 to 1975

Houses of the Holy followed in March 1973. Page and Jones now had home studios and arrived with finished arrangements, and the band recorded at Mick Jagger's country house, Stargroves. The Rain Song came about after George Harrison complained that Led Zeppelin never did ballads, and its opening chords echo his song Something. Bonham built The Crunge on a funk beat that was deliberately impossible to dance to, and the band thought about printing dance steps on the sleeve as a joke. The cover, by the design group Hipgnosis, showed two naked children, Stefan and Samantha Gates, climbing the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland, and it was controversial even then. Like the fourth album, it carried neither the band's name nor its title on the front.[1] [2]

The 1973 American tour broke records everywhere. On the fifth of May at Tampa Stadium in Florida they played to fifty six thousand eight hundred people, beating the Beatles' famous 1965 crowd at Shea Stadium. After a frightening flight through turbulence, Grant hired the Starship, a converted Boeing 720 airliner with Led Zeppelin painted along the side, so the band could base themselves in big cities and fly to each show. The stage now had lasers, dry ice, mirror balls and fireworks, and Page wore suits embroidered with stars and dragons. The last three nights, at Madison Square Garden in late July, were filmed for a movie. Page later said that by the end he did not know where he was.[1] [2]

The excess of these years had a side that is hard to hear today. Tour manager Richard Cole said Page's attitude to groupies was the younger the better. Lori Mattix, a Los Angeles teenager, told the website Thrillist in 2015 that she was fourteen when she met Page, who was in his late twenties, at the band's hotel, and that a relationship followed. Some accounts put her age at fifteen. Either way she was a child, and her story became part of the Me Too reckoning in music. Cole himself was later accused by the band of inventing and embellishing stories, but the Mattix account comes from her own mouth. It sits alongside the music as part of the band's history.[1] [2] [3]

By late 1973 John Paul Jones was worn out by touring and time away from his family, and he told Grant he was thinking of quitting. He joked that he fancied becoming choirmaster at Winchester Cathedral, and some newspapers printed it as fact. Grant talked him into taking time off instead. In 1974 the band's deal with Atlantic ended and they launched their own label, Swan Song, named after an unreleased song, with a winged figure on the logo taken from an 1869 drawing by William Rimmer. Its first American release was the debut by Bad Company. Swan Song also helped fund the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. When its offices were cleared out in 1983, unplayed demos by Iron Maiden and Heart were found on the shelves.[1] [2] [3]

The first Swan Song release by the band was Physical Graffiti, a double album that came out in February 1975. They had recorded eight new songs at Headley Grange in early 1974, found they filled nearly three sides, and added seven leftovers from earlier sessions. The centrepiece was Kashmir, built by Page and Bonham, with orchestral parts arranged by Jones. None of them had been to Kashmir. Plant wrote the words while driving through the desert in southern Morocco. The album went to number one in Britain, and soon afterwards every earlier Led Zeppelin album re-entered the American chart at the same time. That May they played five sold out nights at Earls Court in London, then the biggest arena in Britain.[1] [2] [3]

Crash, exile and loss, 1975 to 1977

On the fourth of August 1975, on holiday on the Greek island of Rhodes, Robert Plant and his wife Maureen were badly hurt in a car crash. Plant broke his ankle. Maureen's injuries were far worse, and a blood transfusion saved her life. The autumn American tour was cancelled. Because the band were living as tax exiles, Plant could not recover at home, so he went first to Jersey and then to Malibu in California, where Page joined him and they began writing. Plant's lyrics from that time were full of doubt about the future. Plant later said the record they made next was absolutely wracked with pain.[1] [2] [3]

That album was Presence, recorded in eighteen days at Musicland in Munich in November 1975, in a studio in the basement of a hotel. Plant sang from a wheelchair and felt claustrophobic and homesick. The Rolling Stones were booked in straight after them, so Page borrowed two of their days and did every guitar overdub in a single marathon session, working up to twenty hours a day. Plant suggested calling it Thanksgiving, because it was finished the day before the holiday. It opens with the ten minute Achilles Last Stand and has no keyboards at all. Released in March 1976, it reached number one on both sides of the Atlantic but became their lowest selling studio album.[1]

According to Richard Cole, Page started using heroin in 1975, and the two of them took it during the Presence sessions. Page has since denied that it affected his work, though by 1977 he had lost a great deal of weight and his playing was widely seen as suffering. With no tour in 1976, the band finished their concert film, The Song Remains the Same, built around the 1973 Madison Square Garden shows plus fantasy scenes for each member. Bonham drag raced at Santa Pod, and Page climbed a mountainside by night behind Boleskine House on Loch Ness, the former home of the occultist Aleister Crowley, which Page owned. The film premiered in New York on the twentieth of October 1976 to lukewarm reviews, and Plant and Jones disliked it too.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1977 they returned to America for their biggest tour ever, with tickets selling at seventy two thousand a day. On the thirtieth of April they drew seventy six thousand two hundred and twenty nine people to the Pontiac Silverdome near Detroit, a world record for a single act. But trouble followed them. In Chicago Page fell ill and left the stage after sixty five minutes. In Cincinnati more than seventy people were arrested as about a thousand fans without tickets tried to force their way in. In Tampa on the third of June a thunderstorm stopped the show, a riot broke out, police used tear gas, nineteen people were arrested and around fifty were injured. The security chief that year was John Bindon, a London gangster hired with Grant's approval.[1] [2]

On the twenty third of July 1977, at Bill Graham's Day on the Green festival in Oakland, it all turned violent. Graham's security man Jim Matzorkis was said to have hit Grant's eleven year old son Warren over a dressing room sign. Bonham kicked him, then Grant and Bindon beat him badly in a trailer while Cole guarded the door, and he needed hospital treatment. Grant, Bindon, Cole and Bonham were arrested, later pleaded no contest and got suspended sentences. The next day's show was the band's last ever in America. On the twenty sixth of July, in New Orleans, Plant learned that his five year old son Karac had died of a sudden stomach virus back home. The tour was cancelled, and Plant flew home to grieve.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The last flight, 1978 to 1980

After Karac's death Plant considered walking away from music, and it was more than a year before the band worked again. In late 1978 they recorded In Through the Out Door at ABBA's Polar Studios in Stockholm, in about three weeks. By now Page was struggling with heroin and Bonham with alcohol, and both often missed rehearsals. Jones, inspired by a new Yamaha synthesiser, worked closely with Plant for the first time. He later said there were two distinct camps, and they were in the relatively clean one. The album's title described how hard it felt to win back the British public after years of tax exile, like trying to get in through the out door.[1] [2]

The album closes the circle on grief with All My Love, written by Plant and Jones in memory of Karac. It is one of only a handful of original Led Zeppelin songs Page did not help write. The record came wrapped in a plain brown paper bag, like a bootleg, hiding one of six different cover photos, so buyers never knew which one they had. The inner sleeve changed colour when brushed with water. Released in August 1979, it went to number one in America in its second week, and the band's whole catalogue sat on the Billboard album chart at once that autumn.[1] [2]

Grant decided the comeback had to be grand, so after two quiet warm up shows in Copenhagen, Led Zeppelin headlined Knebworth Park in Hertfordshire on the fourth and eleventh of August 1979. It was their first British show in four years, on the largest stage ever built there, and the fee was reported to be the biggest ever paid to a single act. Both nights overran and brought noise complaints from seven miles away. Several music papers called the band sluggish and out of date in the age of punk, and Plant mocked the reviews from the stage. He was harsh himself afterwards, saying they were not ready and that Knebworth had been a management decision.[1] [2]

In the summer of 1980 they toured Europe with a stripped back show, without the long solos. Richard Cole had been fired before it began because of his drink and drug use. Sent to Italy to detox, he was briefly jailed after being mistaken for a suspect in the Bologna railway station bombing. On the twenty seventh of June in Nuremberg, Bonham collapsed on stage during the third song and was rushed to hospital. The press blamed drink and drugs, the band said he had eaten too much. On the seventh of July 1980 in Berlin they played what turned out to be their last full concert with him. The final song was Whole Lotta Love. An American tour was booked to start in Montreal that October.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twenty fourth of September 1980, an assistant named Rex King drove Bonham to rehearsals at Bray Studios. On the way Bonham stopped for breakfast and drank four quadruple vodkas, and he kept drinking all day. That night the band went back to Page's home, the Old Mill House near Windsor, where Bonham fell asleep and was put to bed on his side. The next afternoon, the twenty fifth, John Paul Jones and tour manager Benji LeFevre found him dead. He was thirty two. The inquest found he had drunk around forty measures of vodka and choked on his vomit, and recorded accidental death. No other drugs were found. His ashes were buried at Rushock church in Worcestershire on the twelfth of October.[1] [2] [3]

There were rumours of replacements, with drummers such as Cozy Powell and Carmine Appice mentioned in the press. But on the fourth of December 1980 the band issued a short statement saying that the loss of their dear friend, and the sense of undivided harmony they and their manager felt, meant they could not continue as they were. It was signed simply Led Zeppelin. Page was so shaken that for a time he would not touch a guitar. Jones had just moved his family to Devon and said later that he did not miss the business at all. The band that had rewritten the rules of touring was over, twelve years after that first rehearsal on Gerrard Street.[1] [2] [3]

Separate ways and shaky reunions, 1981 to 1999

Page came back slowly. He joined Jeff Beck on stage in London in March 1981, tried a short lived group with Yes members Chris Squire and Alan White called XYZ, and scored the Michael Winner film Death Wish II. In 1982 a collection of outtakes called Coda closed the Led Zeppelin catalogue, including a Bonham drum piece called Bonzo's Montreux. Page was arrested for cocaine possession in 1982 and again in 1984, receiving a conditional discharge and then a fine. Around 1983 he reportedly told friends he had ended seven years of heroin use. At the charity concerts for Ronnie Lane in 1983, he shared a stage with Beck and Eric Clapton, and he went on to form the Firm with Bad Company singer Paul Rodgers.[1] [2]

Plant went solo, helped by Phil Collins, who drummed on Pictures at Eleven in 1982 and The Principle of Moments in 1983, the album with Big Log. Plant and Maureen divorced in August 1983. In 1984 he formed the Honeydrippers with Page, Jeff Beck and friends, and their cover of Sea of Love reached number three in America early in 1985. Then came Live Aid, on the thirteenth of July 1985 at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. Page, Plant and Jones played with two drummers, Collins and Tony Thompson, with almost no rehearsal. Plant's voice was hoarse and Page's guitar was out of tune. Plant called it an atrocity, and Page later blamed Collins for not knowing the songs, which Collins has disputed.[1] [2] [3]

On the fourteenth of May 1988 the three played Atlantic Records' fortieth birthday concert at Madison Square Garden, with Bonham's son Jason on drums. Page and Plant argued right before going on about whether to play Stairway to Heaven, and Jones's keyboards dropped out of the television feed. Plant called the gig foul. Jason fared better in private: at his wedding in April 1990 all three surviving members jammed together. A remastered box set that year revived interest in the band. In 1993 Page made an album with Whitesnake singer David Coverdale, while Jones built a varied career as an arranger and producer, writing the string parts for R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People in 1992.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1994 Page and Plant reunited for an MTV special called Unledded, reworking old songs with Egyptian and Moroccan musicians. It drew the highest ratings in MTV's history, became the album No Quarter, and led to a world tour. Jones was not even told. When Led Zeppelin were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in January 1995 by Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith, Jones thanked his friends for finally remembering his phone number, and the room went awkward. Page and Plant made one studio album of new songs, Walking into Clarksdale, in 1998, and won a Grammy for Most High, but sales disappointed and the partnership ended before a planned Australian tour.[1] [2] [3]

Peter Grant never fully recovered from the end of the band. Diabetes, a cocaine addiction, a failing marriage and Bonham's death all took their toll, and after Swan Song folded in 1983 he withdrew to his estate in Sussex. Late in life he beat his addiction, lost a lot of weight and became a respected speaker at music industry conferences. He even played a cardinal in the film Carry On Columbus in 1992. His last public appearance was at the final night of the Page and Plant tour at Wembley in July 1995. On the twenty first of November 1995 he died of a heart attack while driving home with his son Warren. He was sixty. He was buried on the fourth of December, fifteen years to the day after the band announced its end.[1]

One night at the O2 and the long afterlife, 2000 to 2026

In 2003 the triple live album How the West Was Won and a five hour Led Zeppelin DVD appeared, and the DVD became the best selling music DVD in history. Honours followed, including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005, the year Page was made an OBE for his charity work for Brazilian street children, and Sweden's Polar Music Prize in 2006. In 2007 the band finally made their catalogue available for legal download. Meanwhile Plant had found a new partner in the bluegrass singer and fiddler Alison Krauss. Their album Raising Sand, produced by T Bone Burnett, came out that October and later won the Grammy for Album of the Year, with Please Read the Letter named Record of the Year.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the tenth of December 2007, Led Zeppelin played a full concert for the first time since 1980, at the O2 Arena in London, in memory of Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun. Jason Bonham played his father's parts. The show had been set for late November but was postponed after Page broke a finger falling in his garden. Around twenty million people applied online for fewer than twenty thousand tickets, a Guinness world record for demand. Pete Townshend pulled out of the support bill, saying they really didn't need him. The band played sixteen songs over about two hours, opening with Good Times Bad Times, and critics were thrilled. For once, a Zeppelin reunion lived up to the legend.[1] [2] [3]

Page, Jones and Jason Bonham wanted to carry on. Plant did not. He went back on the road with Alison Krauss and said he did not want to tour like bored old men following the Rolling Stones around. The other three rehearsed with singers including Myles Kennedy of Alter Bridge, and Steven Tyler's name was linked too, but the project was abandoned in January 2009. Jones instead formed Them Crooked Vultures with Dave Grohl and Josh Homme. In 2012 the O2 show was released as the film and album Celebration Day, which later won the Grammy for Best Rock Album, and that December all three received the Kennedy Center Honors from President Barack Obama. In 2014 Page told the New York Times he was fed up with Plant playing games.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The old question of borrowing came back to court. In 2014 the estate of Randy California of the band Spirit sued, claiming the opening of Stairway to Heaven copied his 1968 instrumental Taurus. Spirit had shared bills with Led Zeppelin on their first American tour. In June 2016 a Los Angeles jury found no infringement. An appeals panel ordered a new trial in 2018, but in March 2020 the full Ninth Circuit ruled for Led Zeppelin, and that October the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, ending it. Separately, the songwriter Jake Holmes, who wrote the original Dazed and Confused, settled with Page in 2011, then sued again in 2025 over the song's use in a documentary, and settled again that August.[1] [2] [3]

In 2025, for the first time, the three surviving members took part in a documentary about themselves. Becoming Led Zeppelin, directed by Bernard MacMahon, covers their childhoods and first year, with Bonham heard through long lost interviews and home movies. It opened in IMAX in February 2025 and became the highest grossing documentary of the year. That September Plant released Saving Grace, an album with his acoustic band and singer Suzi Dian, and as of 2026 he is touring America with them, with a fall run between mid September and mid October. Jones keeps playing experimental music, Jason Bonham tours his own Led Zeppelin evening, and there is no reunion planned as of 2026. Stairway to Heaven still tops listener polls, and the band's albums have sold an estimated two to three hundred million copies.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Led Zeppelin

Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. Page chose Plant after Terry Reid turned him down, and their partnership really formed at Bron Yr Aur in 1970, with Page writing the music and Plant the words. After the split they worked together as the Honeydrippers and Page and Plant, but Plant's refusal to tour after the 2007 reunion caused friction. In 2014 Page said he was fed up with Plant playing games, and Plant said he was baffled and offered to work with Page acoustically instead.[1] [2] [3]

Robert Plant and John Bonham. They were young Black Country musicians together in the Crawling King Snakes and the Band of Joy, and Plant was the one who brought Bonham into Led Zeppelin, bombarding his local pub with telegrams. Bonham's wife Pat was wary of Plant at first. Twelve years later Bonham's death ended the band, and Plant, Page and Jones decided they could not carry on without him.[1] [2] [3]

Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones. They were fellow session men long before the band, crossing paths on records like Donovan's and on Beck's Bolero. Jones asked to join during a Donovan session, and Page leapt at having a trained arranger. In later years Jones felt sidelined. He was not told about the 1994 Page and Plant reunion, and at the 1995 Hall of Fame induction he thanked them for finally remembering his phone number. He and Page stood together wanting to tour after 2007.[1] [2]

Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin. Grant managed the band on a handshake, split profits five ways with the four musicians, and reportedly won them ninety percent of the gate at concerts, changing the balance of power between artists and promoters. He protected them fiercely, sometimes violently. Jones said Grant was a sensitive, very smart man who could out talk anybody. The Music Managers Forum later named its award for outstanding achievement after him.[1]

Richard Cole and Led Zeppelin. Cole was the band's tour manager from 1968 to 1980, a pioneer of bringing a whole British crew to America and a central figure in the band's wild reputation. He was fired before the 1980 tour over drink and drugs. His later accounts in Hammer of the Gods and his own book infuriated the band. Page said Cole's book made him ill, and Jones vowed never to speak to him again. Still, he was invited to the 2007 reunion. He died of cancer in December 2021, aged seventy five.[1]

Robert Plant and Maureen Plant. Plant married Maureen Wilson on the ninth of November 1968, just as the band began. He wrote Thank You for her on the second album. They survived the 1975 Rhodes car crash, in which she nearly died, and lost their son Karac in 1977. They also had a daughter, Carmen, and a son, Logan. The couple divorced in August 1983. In 1991 Plant had a son, Jesse Lee, with Maureen's sister Shirley.[1] [2]

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. Plant teamed up with the American bluegrass star in 2007 for Raising Sand, produced by T Bone Burnett. It won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2009, and touring with her was the reason he gave for not rejoining Led Zeppelin after the O2 show. They reunited for Raise the Roof in 2021 and toured North America together again in 2024.[1] [2] [3]

Jimmy Page and Kenneth Anger. The underground filmmaker, like Page an admirer of Aleister Crowley, commissioned Page to score his film Lucifer Rising. Page delivered twenty three minutes of music. Anger said it took three years and sounded like droning, and publicly called Page a dabbler in the occult who was too strung out on drugs to finish. Page said he had done everything asked of him, even lending Anger his editing equipment, and released the music himself in 2012.[1]

Peter Grant and Bill Graham. The American promoter Bill Graham hosted Led Zeppelin at his Oakland festival in July 1977, where Grant and security man John Bindon beat one of Graham's staff. Graham signed a letter clearing the band so the second show could go on, then changed his mind, pressed charges and sued for two million dollars. Grant later said letting Bindon be hired was the biggest mistake of his managing career.[1] [2]

John Paul Jones and Dave Grohl. The Foo Fighters leader is a huge Led Zeppelin fan, and when Jones played mandolin and piano on the album In Your Honor, Grohl called it the second greatest thing that had ever happened to him. In 2008 Jones and Page joined the Foo Fighters at Wembley, and in 2009 Jones, Grohl and Josh Homme formed the supergroup Them Crooked Vultures.[1] [2]

John Bonham and Jason Bonham. Jason was seven when he was filmed playing a small drum kit for his father's scenes in The Song Remains the Same. He was fourteen when his father died. He went on to fill John's seat at the 1988 Atlantic show, the 1995 Hall of Fame and the 2007 O2 reunion, and as of 2026 he still tours his own Led Zeppelin evening.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Led Zeppelin

• At thirteen, Jimmy Page told BBC television he wanted to do biological research to find a cure for cancer. In 1957 Page appeared on the talent show All Your Own with a skiffle group. When the host Huw Wheldon asked about his plans after school, Page said he wanted to do biological research into cancer, if nobody had cured it by then.[1]
• As a session player, Page was nicknamed Little Jim Pea to tell him apart from Big Jim Sullivan. London studios in the early 1960s had two go to session guitarists, both called Jim. Big Jim Sullivan was the veteran, so the younger Page became Little Jim Pea.[1]
• John Paul Jones took his stage name from a film poster spotted by Andrew Loog Oldham. John Baldwin became John Paul Jones on the suggestion of the Rolling Stones' manager, who had seen a poster in France for the 1959 film about the American naval hero. His first single under the name came out in 1964.[1]
• John Paul Jones arranged the strings on the Rolling Stones' She's a Rainbow. Before Led Zeppelin, Jones was one of London's busiest arrangers. His string arrangement is heard on She's a Rainbow from Their Satanic Majesties Request, and he worked on Donovan's Sunshine Superman and Mellow Yellow.[1]
• John Bonham's headmaster predicted he would end up either a dustman or a millionaire. The comment appeared on Bonham's school report at Lodge Farm Secondary Modern in Redditch. He left school in 1964 and worked as an apprentice carpenter for his father while drumming.[1]
• Plant sent eight telegrams to Bonham's pub, and Peter Grant followed up with forty more. Bonham was reluctant to join and had better paid offers from Joe Cocker and Chris Farlowe. The telegrams went to the Three Men in a Boat pub in Walsall. He said in the end he just preferred their music.[1]
• The first recording with all four future members was a P. J. Proby track called Jim's Blues. Before their Scandinavian dates in 1968, the four backed the American singer P. J. Proby on his album Three Week Hero. Plant played harmonica on Jim's Blues.[1]
• Atlantic signed Led Zeppelin without ever seeing them, partly on Dusty Springfield's recommendation. Springfield, a friend of John Paul Jones, was finishing Dusty in Memphis for Atlantic in 1968. Her word helped persuade the label to give the unknown band a record advance.[1]
• The first Led Zeppelin album cost one thousand seven hundred and eighty two pounds to make. It took about thirty six hours of studio time at Olympic in London in late 1968. Page and Peter Grant paid the bill themselves, which meant no record company could tell them what to record.[1]
• Peter Grant was once an uncredited extra in A Night to Remember, The Guns of Navarone and Cleopatra. Before managing bands, the former bouncer worked as a wrestler under names like Count Bruno Alassio of Milan, and as a film extra and stunt double. He was also the regular body double for actor Robert Morley.[1]
• Peter Grant once destroyed what he thought was bootleg gear, which was really a city noise meter. At a 1971 concert in Vancouver, Grant spotted equipment on the floor and had it wrecked, believing someone was taping the show. It turned out to be a noise pollution unit run by city officials.[1]
• When a festival boss invited Led Zeppelin and his backing group, Grant replied with a full page advert. In 1972 the head of the Midem music fair wrote asking for Mr Zeppelin. Grant printed the letter in a trade paper under the headline Mr Zeppelin Regrets, and the whole industry saw it.[1]
• Grant turned down an offer to manage Queen in 1975. He preferred to stay focused on Led Zeppelin and the Swan Song acts. In 1977 Colonel Tom Parker also approached him about a European tour for Elvis Presley, but Elvis died just as talks began.[1]
• Black Dog is named after a Labrador that wandered around Headley Grange during recording. The dog would disappear every night and come back worn out in the morning. Plant joked it was visiting a lady friend. The song itself never mentions a dog.[1] [2]
• The Rain Song exists because George Harrison teased that Led Zeppelin never did ballads. Page wrote it at his home studio in response, and its opening chords are the same as Harrison's song Something. Its working title was Slush.[1]
• Nobody in Led Zeppelin had been to Kashmir when they wrote the song. Plant wrote the lyrics on a drive through the desert in southern Morocco after the 1973 tour. Jones arrived late to the sessions and so was not credited as a writer.[1]
• The end of In My Time of Dying keeps a cough from Bonham on the record. His off microphone cough made the band fall apart, and Bonham shouted that it had to be the one. They left it in to show fans they were a real working band.[1]
• A squeaky bass drum pedal can be heard all through Since I've Been Loving You. Page only noticed it when compiling the first box set around 1990. He joked that it sounds louder every time he hears it.[1]
• Plant sang the vocals for Presence while sitting in a wheelchair. He was still recovering from the 1975 Rhodes car crash when the band recorded in Munich. He also suggested the album be called Thanksgiving, as it was finished the day before the American holiday.[1]
• In Through the Out Door was sold in a brown paper bag hiding one of six different covers. Each version showed the same bar scene from a different angle, so buyers could not tell which one they had. The inner sleeve changed colour permanently when brushed with water.[1]
• Plant once gave ten thousand dollars to a radio station in exchange for it never playing Stairway to Heaven. Driving a rental car in Oregon, he heard Portland community station KBOO offer that promise during a pledge drive. He later said he did not dislike the song, he had just heard it before.[1]
• A town hall carillon in Fürth, Germany, plays Stairway to Heaven every day at four minutes past noon. The bells in the historic tower of the Bavarian town's hall chime the tune daily. The song is also said to be the best selling piece of rock sheet music ever.[1]
• Readers of Rock Scene magazine voted Robert Plant the winner of its Chest O Rama award. The poll asked who had the best chest in rock. Plant replied that he was greatly honoured, though it was hard for him to be eloquent on the subject of his chest.[1]
• Swan Song Records helped pay for Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Led Zeppelin's label partly funded the 1975 comedy. When Swan Song's offices were emptied in 1983, early demos from Iron Maiden and Heart were found unplayed on the shelves.[1]
• Jimmy Page's black Les Paul Custom was stolen in 1970 and not recovered until around 2015. Page even placed adverts asking for the heavily modified guitar back. Gibson made a limited run of replicas in 2008, years before the original resurfaced.[1]
• The house where Bonham died had once belonged to the actor Michael Caine. Page owned the Mill House near Windsor from 1980 to 2004. In 1972 he had also bought the Tower House in London from the actor Richard Harris.[1]
• John Bonham was best man at Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi's wedding. The two were fellow Birmingham area musicians. Bonham also drummed for friends outside the band, including Roy Wood and Paul McCartney's Wings on the Rockestra sessions.[1]
• John Paul Jones once fell asleep with a joint and set his New Orleans hotel room on fire. The story inspired the song Royal Orleans on Presence. Jones told Mojo he woke to a room full of firemen, but said the claim that he mistook a drag queen for a woman was rubbish.[1] [2]
• Immigrant Song came from a trip to Iceland where a strike almost cancelled the gig. The band went to Reykjavik in June 1970 as guests of the Icelandic government. Civil servants struck the day before, so a university hall was prepared instead, and the show inspired Plant's Viking lyric.[1]
• Jack Black filmed a video plea to get permission to use Immigrant Song in School of Rock. Led Zeppelin rarely licensed their music. Black and a crowd of fans recorded a short video asking the band directly, and it worked, so the song appears in the 2003 film.[1]
• The 1979 Knebworth shows reportedly cost Sainsbury's one hundred and fifty shopping trolleys. According to Knebworth House, a nearby Tesco lost three quarters of its stock, noise complaints came from seven miles away, and the estate's owner ended up in court.[1]
• Led Zeppelin's last song with John Bonham was Whole Lotta Love, in Berlin on the seventh of July 1980. It had closed their shows for years. The Berlin concert was also their last full length show until the O2 reunion in 2007.[1] [2] [3]
• Sandy Denny, the only guest singer on a Led Zeppelin album, died in 1978 at thirty one. The Fairport Convention singer duetted with Plant on The Battle of Evermore in 1971. She died from head injuries after a fall down a flight of stairs. Jones sang her part live on the 1977 tour.[1] [2]
• While in Italy to detox, Richard Cole was briefly jailed as a suspect in the 1980 Bologna bombing. He had just been fired as tour manager over his drink and drug use. Italian police mistook him for a terrorist linked to the railway station attack before releasing him.[1]
• Peter Grant was buried fifteen years to the day after Led Zeppelin announced their split. The band's break up statement came on the fourth of December 1980. Grant, who died of a heart attack in November 1995, was buried on the fourth of December 1995.[1]
• In 2008 Jimmy Page played Whole Lotta Love with Leona Lewis at the Beijing Olympics closing ceremony. It was part of London's handover as the next host city, with David Beckham arriving on a double decker bus. Some lyrics were changed because they made little sense from a female singer.[1] [2]
• A two and a half tonne bronze statue of John Bonham stands in Redditch. It was unveiled on the thirty first of May 2018, what would have been his seventieth birthday. His childhood home had received a blue plaque the year before.[1]
• Plant is a vice president of his boyhood football club, Wolverhampton Wanderers. He was named the club's third vice president in 2009. He says he was hooked at five, when his dad took him to Molineux and captain Billy Wright waved at him.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.