After Karac’s funeral, Robert Plant left Led Zeppelin far behind and simply, as he later put it, ‘went away for a year … when you’ve gone through something like that and come out the other end, all the godhead shit and the affectations of a rock star pale away. You tend not to take yourself too seriously.’
Speaking in 2005, it’s a wonder, I said, he actually came back at all. ‘Yeah, well … as you get older, your shoulders get broader and you have to be prepared to go into territories that you’ve never been before for the sake of the people you love.’
Yes, I say, but you weren’t really ‘older’ then, you were just twenty-nine.
‘That’s right, yeah. But it was me that seduced Bonzo to join The Yardbirds, and it was he that brought me back to go down to Clearwell Castle to piece together something that became In Through the Out Door. And it was he that played so beautifully on [it]. So he worked on me, saying it was …’ He faltered as the memories came flooding back. ‘You know, all I was doing was just parading around with a shotgun and a bottle of Johnnie Walker, trying to shoot at the press.’
It was Bonzo talking to you that got you past that? I asked.
‘Well, yeah. I didn’t want to leave my family, you know? I didn’t want to leave Carmen and Maureen. And also I didn’t know whether it was worth it, to be honest. John came over and nuanced all the reasons why it was a good idea. And then fell asleep on an Afghan cushion and was woken up twelve hours later!’ He paused. ‘I think it was just … at no detriment to anybody who was around me then, it’s just that he had the history with me outside of the success.’
It wasn’t just Plant who found the aftermath of Karac’s death difficult to get through, of course. With his beloved Zeppelin once again put on hold, this time possibly for good, Jimmy Page was left with nothing but time on his hands – a disastrous circumstance for someone with a raging heroin habit and all the money he needed to regularly keep it fed. Aware of the mire he was slowly sinking into, Jimmy booked a two-week holiday in Guadeloupe, in the West Indies, for himself, Charlotte and Scarlet, inviting Richard Cole along too, who he suggested join him in trying to get off smack by staying drunk on white rum for the duration of their stay. Miraculously, as a makeshift cure it worked – temporarily, at least. Back in England in September, relatively ‘straight’ though still drinking heavily and snorting coke, Jimmy tried to keep his mind off the heavy gear by staying active, performing for a kids’ charity called Goaldiggers and working in his home studio, sifting through endless hours of Zeppelin live tapes going all the way back to the Albert Hall in 1970 for a prospective ‘chronological live album’ he’d convinced G would be just the thing to plug the gap while they waited for Robert to put his life back together.
But it all came to nought as the weeks and months dragged by, and by Christmas 1977 the project was no longer a talking point as he slipped back into a serious funk, taking heroin again and doing … not very much at all. When, not long after that, Grant had to be taken to hospital late one night after he’d suffered a minor coronary, or ‘heart scare’ as he put it to the band and anyone else that needed to know (‘all down to pressure,’ he explained dismissively, conveniently overlooking the ruinously large amounts of cocaine he was still ingesting on a daily basis), it seemed there was no point fighting it. Despite the ‘Zeppelin to Split’ stories that were again now doing the rounds, Page had no choice but to sit back and bide his time, filling the void that opened up before him each day with drugs and drink. Even his occult ‘studies’ no longer interested him in the same way. He still had Boleskine and all his treasured Crowley artefacts; he still read the books, drowsing over them into the small hours most nights. He just no longer had the outlet to somehow make it all make sense.
‘That was such a terrible time, of course,’ says Phil Carson now. ‘That was so horrible for Robert. It was not handled at all well by Jimmy who never called Robert to say, “I’m sorry you lost Karac”. He just didn’t call him. And time went on and time went on. I would say to Jimmy, “You’ve got to call him”. But it had gone on so long he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He just couldn’t make the call. Eventually somehow I got the two of them together. I met Jimmy quite by chance; he’d gone to see Joni Mitchell at a show. And I hadn’t seen Jimmy for a while. This is over a year after Karac had passed away, as far as I remember. I said, “Look, you’ve got to give him a call’. And eventually he did. So they got back together. It wasn’t easy. It was terrible.’
By spring 1978, however, Maureen was pregnant again and the healing process of the Plant family was finally underway. It was also around this time that Roy Harper gave an interview to a farming magazine, mostly about the sheep he kept on a smallholding, but in which he also mentioned he’d been working with Jimmy Page, helping write lyrics for the next Zeppelin album. When Robert, who in his guise as gentleman farmer happened to subscribe to the magazine, read the article he was furious, phoning Jimmy for the first time in months and demanding an explanation. Taken aback, but not entirely displeased as it showed how deeply his singer still apparently cared about his role in the band, Jimmy denied the story but suggested that maybe it was time the band did finally get back together, just to see each other again, see how it felt. Robert, who had also had John Bonham working on him, dutifully obliged, agreeing to a meeting at Clearwell Castle, an eighteenth-century neo-Gothic mansion in the Forest of Dean, near his home on the Welsh borders.
Reputedly haunted by a mischievous female ghost who would mess up locked rooms and sing lullabies to her ghost child on the landing at night while playing a tinkling musical box, the vibes surrounding Zeppelin’s brief visit were not promising. Taking over the basement, the band tentatively jammed for a few days, playing anything Robert felt comfortable singing along to, but despite Jimmy’s constant urging and Grant’s forcedly avuncular encouragement, sparks steadfastly refused to fly and the band went their separate ways again.
John Paul Jones, who had filled in the previous nine months building up his own newly acquired farm in Sussex, ‘cooling out’ with his wife and daughters ‘and just taking stock’, found the Clearwell get-together decidedly ‘odd’, he said. ‘I didn’t really feel comfortable. I remember asking, “Why are we doing this?” We were not in good shape mentally or healthwise.’ The only positive benefit from his point of view was that he became closer to Plant. ‘If I was a little down Robert would try to cheer me up, if he was down I’d do the same and pull ourselves through … It’s not that we didn’t have a laugh at Clearwell, it just wasn’t going anywhere.’
Two months later Robert Plant finally stepped on a stage again, his first time since the nightmare of Oakland a year before. Not with Led Zeppelin at some enormous sold-out stadium, though, but with an unknown local band called the Turd Burglars before a nonplussed audience of a couple of hundred at a small pub in Worcestershire, performing ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and a handful of similar covers. A few weeks later, while holidaying with the family in Ibiza, he also got up at a club called Amnesia and sang with his old chums in Dr Feelgood – again, not Zeppelin songs but a clutch of storming R&B covers. A month after that, he repeated the trick, this time with fellow Swan Song artist Dave Edmunds, at a concert in Birmingham.
Slowly but surely, Plant was feeling his way back onto the boards. Watching from afar, cautiously excited, was Jimmy Page. The band did not meet again until September, though, when they all attended Richard Cole’s wedding reception in London – a lavish party co-hosted by Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke who had also got married that day. Still, no one broached the subject of getting the band back together directly with Robert for fear of frightening him off. But for the first time in over a year, positive feelings were beginning to emanate from the Swan Song offices in Chelsea. Then things turned weird again when Who drummer and long-time Bonzo cohort Keith Moon died after attending a party at the Coconut Grove, in London, hosted by Paul McCartney to celebrate the release of the movie The Buddy Holly Story. Word was that Moony had taken an accidental overdose of a drug he had been prescribed to help him combat his alcoholism, wound up by being unable to join in with the revelry of the other party guests. Whatever the truth, Richard Cole, who had hung out with Moon at the Grove, was shaken when, at the funeral, Pete Townshend came up to him, demanding ‘What the fuck is going on? Keith is dead and you’re alive …’
Once again, the ‘Zep to Split’ stories started circulating, helped along by suggestions that with Keith Richards facing seven years in jail for his now infamous drug bust in Toronto and Zeppelin apparently in abeyance as Robert considered his future, Jimmy was being lined up to tour with the Stones. Whether he would have, or how that would have worked, being a raving junkie himself at the time, is not known. Clearly, things were starting to acquire a desperate edge. Zep chronicler Dave Lewis, who had first begun visiting the Swan Song offices in 1978, recalls ‘a very weird vibe at the time, everything was very inconclusive. Peter was never around, no one could get hold of him, and it was just … strange. Here you were, at the headquarters of the biggest band in the world and there was just nothing happening at all.’
Despite taking off like a rocket, the Swan Song label also began withering on the vine as the tangled personal lives of its owners saw them lose interest. Apart from Bad Company, only Dave Edmunds (Robert’s old mucker from Rockfield, signed in 1976) enjoyed success, scoring UK hits with the singles ‘Here Comes The Weekend’, ‘I Knew The Bride’ and ‘Girls Talk’. Page’s old drug buddy Michael Des Barres’ short-lived band, Detective, was also signed but disbanded after just two albums: Detective in 1977 and, a year later, It Takes One to Know One. ‘Once we were signed we never saw any of Led Zeppelin for two years,’ said a disillusioned Des Barres.
Even Page’s cherished Equinox shop closed down after the lease expired and he could no longer rouse himself to renew it. ‘It obviously wasn’t going to run the way it should without some drastic business changes and I didn’t really want to agree to all of that,’ he shrugged when asked about it. All he had ever wanted was for ‘the shop to be a nucleus,’ he said, for his own occult studies. Timothy d’Arch Smith believes the truth behind Equinox’s closure was more prosaic. ‘He had problems with the manager; I think that’s what he told me. And it all went really rather wrong. They reprinted a couple of things but I think it was really rather a disaster.’
It wasn’t until November 1978, sixteen months after the death of his son, that Robert Plant finally felt able to go back to work with Led Zeppelin. The first priority, it was decided, should be a new album. It had been nearly three years since they’d last released a collection of new material. A lot had changed since then, both for Zeppelin and the music world in general. It would be important to come back with a strong musical statement. But when they arrived at a rehearsal room in London, it soon became clear that the musical ideas cupboard was embarrassingly bare. Worse, Page, to whom they had always looked for direction, was so untogether now, the long months of inactivity with just his heroin habit to keep him company having sapped whatever creativity he had left. It quickly became apparent to John Paul Jones that with the band’s principal songwriters both having been incapacitated this past year – albeit for very different reasons – it would be up to him to take up the slack and at least try to get the ball rolling again with some ideas of his own. Fortunately, Jonesy had been storing up ideas of one sort or another for years. That they weren’t all necessarily ideal for a Led Zeppelin album hardly mattered; at this point, the important thing was to get something going, and quick, before the other three members of the band – now all so fragile in their various ways – took off in different directions again.
With Abba’s Polar Studios in Stockholm booked for December, the band was ready to try anything. As with the Musicland sessions three years before, work proceeded extremely quickly. It wasn’t Page cracking the whip this time, though, it was Jones. Indeed, of the seven lengthy tracks which eventually emerged from the sessions as ‘keepers’, only five would be co-credited to Page – the first time any Zeppelin album would feature original material not at least part-credited to Jimmy – while all but one would be co-credited to Jones; another first. The only one not credited with any input at all was Bonham, which seems harsh as his drums are one of the few consistently good things about what would be the last, and least impressive, Zeppelin album.
The other change under Jones’ stewardship was that they kept more regular hours. Page was still a creature of the night, nothing was going to change that, but instead of waiting for him to show up, or even Bonzo on those days he wanted to sleep it off after a heavy night on Sweden’s extra-strength chemical beer, Jones and Plant simply cracked on, in charge of the sessions with everyone else’s implicit, if unvoiced, blessing. ‘There were two distinct camps by then,’ Jones told Dave Lewis, ‘and we were in the relatively clean one. We’d turn up first, Bonzo would turn up later and Page might turn up a couple of days later.’ He and Robert, he said, ‘spent much of the time drinking pints of Pimm’s and waiting around for it to happen. So we made it happen.’ Says Lewis now: ‘By then Jonesy and Robert ruled the roost. With Jimmy immersed in his various problems, someone needed to take charge of the music and that was Jonesy. Meanwhile, anything Robert wanted he got, everyone was walking on eggshells around him.’
While Page would still be credited as producer, in reality Jones and to a lesser extent Plant were now calling the shots there, too. Hence the over-reliance on certain tracks on Jonesy’s new toy: a Yamaha GX-1 synthesiser, which had just then come onto the market, anticipating the Eighties move towards electronic studio-generated sounds over the organic natural-talent-will-out musicianship epitomised by Zeppelin’s generation of bands. Page was also becoming obsessed with this new technology and favoured a much more treated sound to his guitars throughout the album, which he chose to layer to unusual degrees even by his own intricate standards.
Every Friday afternoon the band would fly back to London where they would be met by four separate limos waiting to whisk them home. Every Monday morning the journey would be repeated in the opposite direction. Not even Richard Cole, still scuffing around for heroin (and finding it with a dealer living literally across the road from the studio in Stockholm), could get anyone interested in a party. When the new workmanlike approach succeeded – as it did most spectacularly on the track that would open the album, the desolate yet weirdly majestic ‘In the Evening’ – it seemed possible the band might actually have found a way through the emotional and spiritual morass of the past few years, discovering a new realm in which their music might still find meaning. However, the weaknesses in the new approach – above all, Page’s apparent abdication of his role as band leader, his presence so subdued as to be positively ghostly – were all too plain on obvious filler tracks like Jones’ and Plant’s second-rate Elton John-style romp, ‘South Bound Suarez’, or the lightweight country hoedown parody cooked up by Page and Plant, ‘Hot Dog’. Even its other cornerstone track, ‘Carouselambra’, was a let-down, Jones’s parping synths ladled over everything like gravy disguising the lack of meat on the plate, swamping whatever drive and energy the original idea possessed until it became an inky vacuous dirge …
You’d first met Grant back when you were touring with Tony Meehan and Jet Harris, and Peter was tour-managing Gene Vincent for Don Arden. Apart from the fact he was a big chap, there was nothing that struck you that was particularly special about him. It wasn’t until you started doing regular sessions for Mickie that you got to see the other side of his partner, sitting there at the Oxford Street office shouting the odds down the phone. There was Peter and Mickie and an accountant whose name no one knew cos he was never introduced to people and Irene the receptionist, who was wonderful. Peter and Mickie liked to come on like the tough guys of the music biz but Irene ran both of them! Peter was managing the New Vaudeville Band and Mickie was doing so many things you couldn’t keep up with him.
It was through Mickie you met Jimmy Page properly, too. You were quite surprised when he actually rang you back about the New Yardbirds gig. But when you got to that first rehearsal at that pokey little room in Chinatown, you took one look at the other two he’d invited down and knew you’d never fit in with that lot. You just turned up and did what was required, quietly and efficiently, made sure you got paid then went home afterwards, alone …
But you plugged in and started playing, like you always did, and … something happened. It was really quite odd. You’d never been into blues or rock or any of that stuff, though you did like Cream but that was different, they could actually play and had more in common with jazz, really, if you listened. But you plugged in as you always did and actually began to feel what was going on, feel it way down inside. It was the drummer. He was one of those who played loud – bloody loud! – but he didn’t just do it for effect. It wasn’t, wait till you hear this, it was wait till you hear us. You realised he was actually listening to what you did, that he was actually leaving space for you. On a basic level, you were both just doing a rhythm, but there was something about the way you phrased the bass line that led to something about the way he would play. Next thing you knew you were both just locked into it – together. It didn’t matter what the name of the song was or even whether either of you knew how it went. You just listened to the drummer listening to you and, crikey, it just exploded!
And that was just that first rehearsal. You thought, blimey, if we can keep this up, we’ll be able to do it with our eyes closed. This bloke’s great! ‘My name’s John,’ you said, holding out your hand, during the break. He sat there on his drum stool, smoking a cigarette and sweating, looking you over. Then he took your hand and shook it. ‘Me, too,’ he said, and smiled, and you noticed he had an accent.
The only one co-credited on all seven tracks was Plant, whose lyrics are the most consistently intriguing aspect of the entire album, clearly dealing as they do – unsettlingly explicitly on occasion – with the tragedies he has been through since the death of his son. ‘I hear you crying in the darkness,’ he sing-screams on ‘In the Evening’, ‘Don’t ask nobody’s help, ain’t no pockets full of mercy baby, cause you can only blame yourself …’ ‘Fool in the Rain’, one of the album’s better moments, with its lilting piano riff, nice Spanish guitar and unexpected excursion towards the end into full-blown samba – replete with whistles, kettle drums and handclaps – also contains unveiled references to tragedy and altered perspective. While ‘Carouselambra’, with its off-puttingly self-regarding shape, seems to specifically target Page in its plaintive cries of: ‘Where was your helping, where was your bow?’ Even the clearly dashed-off ‘South Bound Suarez’ contains nagging references to having ‘feet back on the ground’.
The most moving moment, though – musically, lyrically, emotionally – was the second of the two songs Page had nothing to do with: Jones and Plant’s ‘All My Love’. Built around a swooning synth figure that – unlike other moments on the album – fits the mood of mourning and hoped-for redemption all too well, Bonham’s sometimes too-brutal drums are restrained and understated, as ceremonious as a guard of honour, Page’s layered acoustic and electric guitars equally tastefully applied, while Plant simply opens up his broken heart and cries, as if directing the entire piece to his beloved son. ‘Yours is the cloth, mine is the hand that sews time,’ he sings, the sob in his voice all too detectable, ‘his is the force that lies within. Ours is the fire, all the warmth we can find. He is a feather in the wind …’ Even the neo-classical synth solo in the middle – soon to be a cliché of the Eighties’ over-fondness for synths-as-orchestral-magma – doesn’t spoil the mood. Page would later disparage ‘All My Love’ as something ‘I could just imagine people doing the wave and all of that … I wouldn’t have wanted to pursue that direction in the future.’ But it was, with ‘In the Evening’, one of only two tracks of sufficient quality to have graced any of the earlier, much greater Zeppelin albums.
The final track on the album, ‘I’m Gonna Crawl’, was of a similar ilk, though more of a musical pastiche, its echoing vocals and cartwheeling guitars redolent of Elvis at his most melodramatic, the echo of footsteps down an alley after the swelling river of keyboards that usher the song in. Page’s coruscating blues solo – excavated from some dark corner of his smacked-out soul – almost makes up for his lack of ideas elsewhere on the album, while Plant’s heartrending lyrics are directed this time not to his lost son but to his wife, newly with child and the key, he seems to suggest, to their escape from a pain that can never truly leave, but can, perhaps, be better understood, with time. And love.
Three other tracks were also recorded during the Stockholm sessions but left off the final running order of the album: two of which, ‘Ozone Baby’ and ‘Wearing And Tearing’, were cringe-making attempts to reinvigorate the classic Zep sound with the ripped-and-torn energy of the new wave which so despised them. The former, full of the ‘ain’t’s and ‘don’t wanna’s that were the lingua franca of early Brit-punk, finds Plant actually trying out some inept punk phrasing while the others do their best to keep it tight. The latter, which Page and Plant were both so pleased with they considered releasing it as a stand-alone single – once considered sacrilege; now the prerequisite of legitimate anti-album punk – was an overworked revamp of ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’, and again found the band bending over backwards trying to rein in their natural inclination to stretch out and groove while Plant croaks away, his voice sounding horribly shot. The third track, ‘Darlene’, was the best of a second-rate bunch, and harked back to an earlier, more easy-fit, pre-punk era, when rockers rolled unselfconsciously and girls were actually called Darlene and really did dance with their ‘tight dress on’.
Ultimately, In Through the Out Door, as it was jokingly and unhappily prophetically titled, was an unsatisfying mishmash of half-baked ideas and barrel-scraping make-do. Instead of making some grand statement that would both see off the punks and underline the band’s continued creative health, as it was clearly intended to, it did as Page had once said he hoped all Zeppelin albums would and showed precisely – in this case, painfully – where the four individuals members were at, at the time it was written and recorded: down in the dumps. Even its best material – ‘In the Evening’, ‘Fool in the Rain’, ‘All My Love’ – sounded wan and elegiac; the party over but nobody quite wanting to leave just yet. ‘I don’t think it was really a Led Zeppelin record,’ Plant told me in 2005. ‘It was the four of us but I don’t think it was as Led Zeppelin as it might have been, for a myriad of different reasons.’
It was certainly Jimmy Page’s least impressive outing on a Zeppelin album, his playing to an expectedly high standard, but displaying remarkably few interesting new ideas, almost as if he were back to playing sessions – on his own album. There wasn’t even the until-now almost obligatory blues rip-off. The nearest he came was the recycling of some of the themes from his precious soundtrack to Lucifer Rising for the eerie instrumental intro to ‘In the Evening’ (with Plant stealing its first line, he later confessed, from ‘Tomorrow’s Clown’ by Marty Wilde). As producer, Page was even less impressive, the sound on In Through the Out Door being conspicuously atrocious in places; the appallingly bad vocal mix on ‘In the Evening’ being its most glaring offence, just when it most needed help, too, Plant’s voice now showing the wear and tear of his years on the road, as well as the side-effects of so many drugs and cigarettes and – yes – tears.
‘It was a transitional period,’ argued Jones, not unjustly. ‘It was a chance to see what else we could do. The next album would have been even more interesting had we followed that direction.’ Speaking about the album at the time, Page was typically more gung-ho. ‘It’s not like we’ve felt we had to change the music to relate to any of the developments that have been going on,’ he said, conveniently ignoring the laboured attempts at updating the sound on ‘Ozone Baby’ and ‘Wearing and Tearing’. ‘There’s no tracks with disco beats or anything …’
With mixes for the album completed back in Stockholm after the Christmas break, the only thing holding back the release of In Through the Out Door was general agreement on how best to promote it. With Plant still antsy about the thought of embarking on any long tours – refusing point-blank to even contemplate returning to America – Grant bided his time before making any definite plans. Logistically, there was still a lot to do first anyway; decisions still needed to be made regarding the sleeve – with Hipgnosis brought in again to suggest ideas – and whether or not to release a single. Plant was strongly in favour of releasing ‘Wearing and Tearing’ with either ‘Ozone Baby’ or ‘Darlene’ as a possible B-side, while Page thought it a better idea to simply release all three tracks as an EP – another retro concept back in favour with the New Wave crowd. In the event neither suggestion would be pursued as attention turned instead to the idea of the band making their second ‘comeback’ in two years with a brace of enormous outdoor shows in England – at Knebworth Park – an idea suggested by the man who had promoted the two Bath Festival appearances and who had helped launch the band in Britain a decade before: Freddy Bannister.
Bannister had begun the by now annual Knebworth Festival in 1974, which Grant had originally agreed to Zeppelin headlining that year before a leaked news item in the music press led to a row with Bannister, who he wrongly blamed for deliberately leaking the story, and the immediate withdrawal from the project of the band. Bannister had been trying unsuccessfully every year since to lure Zeppelin back. ‘But the timing was never right,’ he says. ‘So we’d always end up going with someone else.’ Over the years, ‘someone else’ had included Pink Floyd, Genesis and the Rolling Stones. His original plan for 1979 had been The Eagles, then at the height of their popularity. He had also been considering the possibility of another appearance by Pink Floyd. ‘But then all these stories started appearing in the music press about Zeppelin releasing a new album, their first for three years, and I thought: why not? Let’s give it another go …’
In an attempt to grab Grant’s attention, Bannister wrote to him suggesting Zeppelin do two consecutive Saturday shows – on 4 and 11 August – something that had never been done at Knebworth before, reinforcing the idea that Zeppelin was the biggest band in the world. He also decided to double all his previous financial offers. Grant phoned him a couple of days later. With G still at a loss as to how best to promote the new Zeppelin album without being able to send the band on tour, Freddy’s offer was well-timed for once and the two agreed to meet at Horselunges later that same week. Bannister recalls being taken aback at the security cameras and floodlights that had been installed since his last visit a few years before. Grant liked the idea of two weekends but thought the promoter’s offer still too low. G wanted £1 million, he said. Freddy demurred but eventually agreed that a higher than normal ticket price of £7.50 (two pounds more than had been charged for Genesis the year before) might make it ‘manageable’ – assuming, of course, that both shows were a sellout. With Bannister estimating the 36.4-acre Knebworth site capable of holding approximately 4,000 per acre – or roughly 290,000 people in total over two weekends (an overgenerous estimate, as it turned out) – Zeppelin’s huge fee, plus VAT, equipment hire, fees for two full support bills, plus agent commissions, site rental to David Lytton Cobbold, whose family owned Knebworth Palace, plus the salaries of the numerous site staff that would be required both weekends and various other sundries (advertising, catering, transport, hotels, etc.) – there would still be enough left over ‘to make my own cut at the end of it reasonably attractive’.
What had not been taken fully into consideration was that no Knebworth bill had ever attracted more than the approximately 100,000 paying customers that had attended the Stones show in 1976. The chances of Led Zeppelin beating that figure appeared good when one considered it would be their first British appearance since the Earl’s Court shows four years before and their first anywhere in the world since the debacle of Oakland in 1977. Whether they would be able to do so over consecutive weekends remained to be seen. Eager as he was to commit Grant to the shows, Bannister was savvy enough to get him to agree to the outlandish fee ‘strictly on the understanding’ that they would only go ahead with the second show if the first was a guaranteed 145,000 sell-out. Hence the decision, later regretted, to initially advertise only one show. As was normal with Grant, the deal was sealed on a handshake. Something else Bannister would later bitterly regret.
On the surface, at least, 1979 had begun more positively for the members of Led Zeppelin than any year since 1975. In January, Maureen Plant gave birth to another son, named Logan Romero, and with the announcement of a new album in the can and two mammoth comeback shows looming on the horizon, despite a predictably sceptical reception from the punk-obsessed UK music press (‘The manner in which old superfart Led Zeppelin have consistently presented themselves has made the band’s name synonymous with gratuitous excess,’ blared the NME), Page was back in London giving interviews for the first time in four years. Drinking beer and chain-smoking Marlboros, he sat in the Swan Song offices and boasted of receiving letters from New Wave fans who ‘got interested in the actual musical content and wanted to go one step further, which is how they discovered bands like us’; and how the new album had moved the band on musically ‘sufficiently to be able to see the next horizon’; but that Knebworth would be ‘far more important’ because ‘the LP’s a frozen statement which can be always referred to, but Knebworth’s going to be different’. There would be further concerts to come after Knebworth, he was quick to assure everyone, though ‘not necessarily in England’. Instead, in an echo of the now-abandoned plans of 1975 to tour ‘new stops on the map’, they were now considering ‘playing Ibiza … just so we’ve got a chance of trying out new ideas and new riffs and arrangements and songs’.
In an attempt to underline his own right-on credentials and deflect attention away from the long period of drug-induced indolence that had followed the disastrous end to the 1977 tour, Page also went to some length to discuss his involvement with community politics in Scotland, where he had lent support to the utilisation of raw materials to build a harbour wall as part of a local job recreation scheme, attending the unveiling ceremony. He admitted, however, to voting Tory in the 1979 general election that would bring Margaret Thatcher to power – a veritable act of treason in the politicised punk world of the late Seventies – though he insisted it was ‘not just for lighter taxes – I just couldn’t vote Labour. They actually stated that they wanted to nationalise the media – so what possible criticism of them would you be able to have?’ The fact that the Tory Party then held effective control of the British print media anyway seemed lost on him. But then, as he also revealed, as a young multi-millionaire entrepreneur he had voted Conservative at the previous election, too.
Meanwhile, plans for the Knebworth shows in August were not proceeding nearly as smoothly as either Peter Grant or Freddy Bannister had envisaged. Despite the first Knebworth show being announced by Bob Harris on The Old Grey Whistle Test (then the most respected album-oriented weekly music programme on British TV), followed a week later by blanket coverage in the music press, initial demand for tickets was so much lower than Bannister had anticipated it now looked unlikely that a second show would be feasible after all. There was also a tortuous twenty-six-hour negotiation with Grant and Showco chief Jack Calmes regarding the budgeting for sound, lights and other necessities – such as the lasers Jimmy wanted, which would need to be flown in from the US – with Grant ‘keeping himself going with long lines of cocaine plus the occasional Mogadon to maintain the balance,’ Bannister recalls.
The promoter also experienced unexpected problems booking support acts. ‘No one, it seemed, wanted to play with Led Zeppelin. It was at this point, rather belatedly, that I began to realise just what a reputation the band enjoyed for their egotistical behaviour.’ Turned down by J.J. Cale, Little Feat, Roxy Music and Ian Dury and the Blockheads, in the end Bannister settled for, in ascending order, Chas and Dave, the New Commander Cody Band, South Side Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, and Todd Rundgren’s Utopia. Hardly the most scintillating bill, even by Seventies standards, but it was the best Bannister could do. (Grant had suggested Fairport Convention, who agreed but could only do the first show.)
The band was kept in blissful ignorance about the unexpected difficulty in selling tickets. Indeed, Page still believes now that Knebworth was a great success; proof that the band was bigger than ever. ‘Everyone said, “Oh, they’re bigger in the States than they are in England”, and all of that,’ he told me in 1999, adding that he never doubted for an instant they would sell out both shows. ‘Actually, I was always confident. Everyone else said that we didn’t have the following [any more], but I knew we did, there was no doubt about that.’
In fact, there was now considerable doubt. By the first week of July, just over 115,000 tickets had been sold for the first show; far short of the 150,000 Bannister had viewed as the bare minimum needed to trigger the announcement of a second show. But Grant was adamant; he had told the band they would be doing two shows; he was not prepared to tell them that would no longer be the case as they could not sell enough tickets to do so. It was a matter of face – about all Grant had left at this precarious stage of the game. As a result, Page still maintains, as he told me, that ‘there was more there than what there were officially [declared]’ and that, as a consequence, ‘we were partially paid … Peter Grant told me and the rest of the band that Freddy Bannister reneged on it.’
In fact, in a last-gasp attempt to stimulate more interest, Bannister announced that the first show was now sold out but that a second show had been scheduled for the following weekend to deal with the ‘extra demand’. To try to kick-start sales for the second show, he took 15,000 ticket applications for the first show – leaving just 100,000 paid for tickets for the first show – and sent them tickets for the second show along with a letter guaranteeing refunds if they could not attend. Unfortunately, a large swathe of disappointed fans did demand a refund. ‘What we hadn’t allowed for was that so many people had already booked their holidays,’ he says now. Fearing the worst, Freddy plucked up the courage and phoned G with the news that they would have to cancel the second show. But G wasn’t having it. Promising to ‘see you all right’ he persuaded Bannister to go ahead with the second show – which the promoter took to mean a renegotiation of their fee. Grant also promised to line up his own ‘big attraction’ to help generate ticket sales for the second show, which turned out to be the New Barbarians, the part-time band fronted by Ronnie Wood and featuring Keith Richards.
A few weeks before the first show, Richard Cole phoned Bannister to say the band wanted to inspect the site. Specifically, Page wanted to view the memorabilia of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the novelist, also known for his interest in the occult, and one of Knebworth owner David Lytton Cobbold’s forebears. During the visit, they had their photograph taken for the festival programme by Storm Thorgerson. ‘Next to him, posturing for all she was worth, was a naked young woman obviously placed there by Storm to make the band less conscious of the camera,’ recalled Bannister in his memoir, There Must Be a Better Way. ‘Rumour has it that amongst the many photos taken that day is an interesting one of Jimmy Page minus his trousers, but regrettably I have never been able to confirm this.’ The photos were later touched up because the sky was cloudy, superimposing a sunny blue Texan sky.
The plan had been to release In Through the Out Door prior to the Knebworth shows. But delays over the cover – yet again – forced the release date back to 15 August, four days after the second show. Designed again by Hipgnosis, the album would come in no less than six different sleeves: all variations on the same New Orleans bar scene, featuring a trilby-, suit-and-tie-wearing man looking wasted at a seedy bar, being served drinks by a tattooed, vest-wearing bartender. In the background an older black man sat at a piano, a middle-aged black woman laughing and holding a drink and, over by the slatted window, a younger mulatto tart-with-a-heart in figure-hugging dress, a look of utmost indifference on her face. Each sleeve was sepia-tinted with a slash of colour daubed across it like a brush stroke – ‘like you were looking inside the bar through its dusty window and the smear was where you’d wiped the pane with your sleeve to peer through,’ explained Storm Thorgerson. The inside paper bag holding the vinyl contained two black-and-white line drawings – before and after scenes – of a shot glass, an ashtray, a cigarette and a lighter, which changed colour when water was added to them, an idea Jimmy had gotten from one of his daughter Scarlet’s colouring books (though thankfully not one present on the modern CD version). Perversely, the finishing touch was to put each sleeve in a plain brown paper bag, the band name and album title added like a postal stamp. Conceived, ostensibly, as a way of preventing the buyer from knowing which of the six sleeves they were purchasing, it was also an in-joke on Thorgerson’s part, who was ‘fed up,’ he said, ‘with the band and the label telling us that it didn’t matter what we put on the cover because a Led Zeppelin album would sell anyway. Peter Grant said we could put it in a brown paper bag and it would sell anyway. So we did and he was right!’
Indeed, In Through the Out Door sold over a million copies in the US within forty-eight hours of going on sale, going straight to No. 1 in Britain and America. Over the next few months it would sell more than five million copies in the US, where senior industry figures were now quoted as saying it had ‘almost single-handedly saved the American music industry’, which was then experiencing a serious drought in record sales after the deluge of much more niche-oriented New Wave signings made by all the major record labels in the preceding eighteen months. In the words of writer Stephen Davis, in America at least, punk and the New Wave was ‘for losers and nerds’, while Zeppelin still represented, as fellow American scribe David Owen put it, ‘a vague continuum of big money, fast cars and prestige’.
Back in Britain, reviews of In Through the Out Door were as eloquent but much more damning. Even Sounds, along with Melody Maker the only music paper left still regularly giving positive coverage to hard rock and heavy metal, now brought the hammer down on Zeppelin. Under the heading, ‘Close The Door, Put Out The Lights’, resident rock expert Geoff Barton’s damning two-star review of the album concluded, somewhat sadly, if prophetically: ‘I’m not proud to say it, but the dinosaur is extinct.’ Grant, predictably, was furious. Having already banned Sounds from having their own tent at Knebworth, he now ordered the record company to pull all its advertising from the magazine’s pages. But as then Sounds editor Alan Lewis now recalls: ‘That generation of bands were now so out of favour, it didn’t really mean much to us any more. These days you’d crawl over broken glass for a Jimmy Page interview, but they were past their peak in 1979. By then we had bands like AC/DC and Blondie setting the pace, in terms of what we put on the cover. We certainly wouldn’t have lost any sleep over Zeppelin.’
The Knebworth shows themselves were strange, forcedly triumphal, occasionally brilliant, more often ramshackle occasions, ultimately eventful for none of the reasons the band had hoped they would be – and the cause of enormous hype both then and even more so in the decades that have followed. Fondly recalled now as two of the most successful, best-attended festival shows of the Seventies, with wildly inaccurate estimates of how many people attended; in reality, while the first show attracted a decent, if unspectacular by previous Knebworth standards, turnout of approximately 104,000, the second show was an unmitigated disaster, with barely 40,000 people in attendance on a day full of heavy rain and even heavier vibes.
Following two small warm-up shows in Copenhagen, the band had helicoptered into the first show so rattled by nerves that they could barely speak to each other, let alone any of the other acts appearing that day, or even their own backstage guests. With only two new numbers added – ‘In the Evening’ and ‘Hot Dog’ – to the set they had been trawling around America two years before, it wasn’t the performance in itself that made them nervous, it was the heavy gravity of history they now felt dragging them down and slowing their steps. Not only was the crowd hyped up beyond reason at the prospect of seeing the first Zeppelin show on British soil for four years but so was everyone behind the scenes, too. Seated in a special area at the side of the stage for all Grant and the band’s guests was Ahmet Ertegun. Truly, it felt like their future was in the balance. Robert Plant, for one, no longer felt sure the band was strong enough to tip that balance their way. ‘I didn’t believe there was anything I could do that was really good enough to fulfil people’s expectations,’ he said afterwards. ‘It took half the first show to get over the fact that I was there, and over everything that was going on. My voice was all clammed up with nerves.’
The day had begun badly for Freddy Bannister when a ‘rather embarrassed-looking’ Richard Cole had walked into the production office that morning and ‘insisted’ he sign a waiver for the film rights to the event. Still smarting over the critical backlash to The Song Remains The Same three years before, and painfully aware that if Plant carried through his threat never to tour America again a promotional Plan B might need to be activated at some point, Grant had hired director Mike Mansfield – whose weekly Supersonic pop show had become commercial TV’s answer to the BBC’s long-running Top of the Pops – to film Knebworth for a new feature-length film the band planned to make. As such, Bannister had agreed to allow more than a dozen cameras and crew to position themselves strategically around the site. As Knebworth promoter, Bannister might have expected some sort of royalty or fee from any resulting commercially available film. However, he was not, in principle, against waiving his rights – for an appropriate ‘consideration’. When Cole told him he would be doing so for the princely sum of ‘one shilling’ (five pence) Bannister was outraged, not just at the insultingly derisory offer but the offensive manner in which it was made. ‘Get lost!’ he told Cole. ‘No fucking way!’ But Cole insisted, pointing out that the offer came from Grant and that ‘with the mood Peter’s in these days you really don’t need the aggravation’. Bannister duly signed, in the knowledge, he says now, that ‘Grant’s meanness’ would also be his undoing. ‘If he had given me £250, the agreement would have been quite legal. However, the only way someone signs their rights away for five pence is under duress, as I was, and this, I was told sometime afterwards, totally invalidates the contract.’
Opening with ‘The Song Remains The Same’, and finishing more than three hours later with ‘Stairway To Heaven’, which Plant mucked up the lyrics to – deliberately, some speculated – no one in the crowd could have guessed at the tensions whirling about the stage like the giant pyramid of green lasers surrounding Page during his violin bow showcase – now used as the prelude to ‘In The Evening’. Jonesy’s bass wasn’t even switched on for the first three numbers (due to a technical fault that took time to repair). And when Plant launched into a garbled speech halfway through the first show, concluding, ‘We’re never going to Texas any more … but we will go to Manchester,’ he did so while eyeing Grant at the side of the stage. ‘He was in a difficult frame of mind,’ said G.
For Jimmy Page, though, this was a great occasion. ‘The first one was very special,’ he told me in 1999, ‘I remember the audience singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” [as the band re-emerged for the encores]. And I mean, that was a very … an extreme emotional moment, you know? It really was incredible, a wonderful feeling and very emotional. There was tears in the eyes, believe me …’ Another fond memory, he said, was of John Bonham’s then thirteen-year-old son, Jason, sitting at his father’s kit bashing away on the drums during the soundcheck. ‘We were doing “Trampled Under Foot” and I was playing along, concentrating on the guitar, and I looked round and there was Jason on the drums! It was so John could go out front and listen to his sound balance. I remember Jason playing and John just standing there laughing.’
Mingling backstage in the VIP area were members of the same punk groups that had spent the past three years slagging bands like Zeppelin off: Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols, Mick Jones of The Clash, Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders … Not that Jimmy said he noticed. ‘To be honest with you, I didn’t mix with anybody. I spent most of my time being on my own, vibing up for the show. Even the other bands that were on, like Keith and all of that … I mean, I love Keith, but I remember I didn’t even get to see him.’ Also in the crowd was a teenage band from Sheffield named Def Leppard, who saw the first show and decided, as guitarist Steve Clark later told me, that ‘we’d just witnessed the Second Coming,’ then drove back to Sheffield and signed their first record contract with Phonogram Records the very next day. Years later, Robert Plant would look back on Knebworth and sigh. ‘Although we were supposed to be the arch criminals and the real philanderers of debauchery and Sodomy and Gommorah-y, our feet were much more firmly on the ground than a lot of other people around. But you wouldn’t have believed that to see us swaggering about at Knebworth because Knebworth was an enormous, incredible thing. I patrolled the grounds the night of the first gig – I went out with some people in a jeep – and people pushed the stone pillars down, with the metal gates attached, because they wanted to get in early. Those gates had been there since 1732 and they just pushed them over. It was a phenomenally powerful thing.’
More, however, was expected from the second show a week later. But it was not to be. Reneging on his promise to see Bannister ‘all right’ over the lack of ticket sales, Grant now demanded the band be paid in full – on the basis that, as Grant’s accountant Joan Hudson told the promoter, ‘You did have 250,000 last Saturday at the first show, so of course there will be plenty over to pay the band in full for the second show.’ What’s more, G wanted the money now, in advance of the second show. Aghast, Freddy and his wife and business partner Wendy demanded a meeting with Peter in person, which was duly arranged for the following day at Horselunges. But with Grant behaving ‘rather like a character in a Tarantino film’, the meeting quickly degenerated into threats of violence – and worse. Convinced the Bannisters were lying about the number of fans at the first show – Freddy insisting there were no more than 104,000 tickets sold, G sticking to his claim of ‘a quarter million’ – and Wendy ‘close to tears’, Grant suddenly ‘jumped up and began waving his fist in her face. “Don’t get smart with me,” he yelled.’
The Bannisters, now frightened for their lives, got up and left immediately. But worse was to follow. The next day an American purporting to represent Grant and Zeppelin turned up at their home. Clad in a ‘black suit, black shirt and dark sunglasses’, he looked like ‘a typical Mafia bully boy,’ says Freddy. ‘Although I think he was probably just a private detective, there was all this talk of “people from Miami”. Then afterwards he just sat outside the house in this big black car with tinted windows. It was very upsetting.’ Accompanied by ‘a rather seedy-looking Englishman introduced to me as a former Metropolitan Police superintendent,’ the pair claimed to have aerial photographs of the first show that had been analysed by NASA scientists, ‘proving there were a quarter of a million people there’. Seated now over lunch at a smart Chalk Farm restaurant, Freddy laughs at the memory. ‘I mean, really! What rot! Even if it were true, how on earth would we have fit a quarter of a million people into thirty-odd acres? They would have to have been standing on top of each other.’
Again, the matter didn’t rest there, and the following day – forty-eight hours before the second show – Grant turned up at the Bannisters’ home in person, accompanied by the American and ‘a great bull of a man’ introduced as their driver but clearly there, in Freddy’s view, ‘to add an air of intimidation’. However, Grant was more amenable than before, and while insisting that he still didn’t believe there were less than a quarter of a million people at the first Knebworth show, he told them he was prepared to reduce Zeppelin’s fee for the second show, in order to allow the rest of the bands on the bill to be paid off. There was, however, one proviso: he would be taking over the running of the show from the Bannisters and putting his own ‘people’ on the gates. Freddy was ‘furious’ but agreed. ‘I didn’t see that we had much choice,’ he says now, ‘and frankly I’d had enough by then anyway. I just wanted the whole thing to be over.’
Even though the crowd, by Freddy’s estimation, was ‘roughly a third’ what it had been a week before, Zeppelin’s second show should have been better, technically, the band having overcome some of their nerves. However, the performance was desultory by comparison, the mood far less buoyant than it had been at the first show. As Jimmy put it to me years later: ‘It wasn’t horrendous, the second show. It was a very fine show, but the first one had the edge on the second, definitely.’ There were also strange vibes front and back. It rained heavily and the New Barbarians reputedly refused to go on until they had been paid, causing a long delay. When, late in the afternoon of the second show, Joan Hudson confirmed that the total number of tickets sold for the event came to no more than the 40,000 Freddy had predicted, ‘rather than lightening the atmosphere [it] seemed to make it worse’, Grant was furious no doubt to be so starkly confronted by the awful truth. The years that had elapsed between those five sold-out Earl’s Court shows and these two undersubscribed Knebworth events had taken their toll, not just in terms of personal cost, but in the sheer weight of history. The world had not hung on for Robert Plant’s leg to heal or his heart to mend; nor had the world shown patience while Page, Grant and Bonham got deeper and deeper into their own personal drug hells. Most of all, rock music had shown that it was quite prepared to move on with or without Led Zeppelin. Far from being the glorious comeback Jimmy and G had envisaged, Knebworth sounded the first sombre toll of the death knell for the band. From here on in it would be downhill all the way …
‘It was all such a shame,’ says Freddy Bannister now, ‘and all so unnecessary. When I first knew Peter, as well as his natural astuteness and innate charm, he had judgment and taste that belied his humble origins. I am sure that he would have been successful in almost anything he undertook, not just in the music business, but also as an international art or antique dealer. But he changed over the years. Drugs changed him, success changed him. If I’d have known this I wouldn’t have done the last Knebworth shows …’ He breaks off into a sigh.
It’s a remarkably philosophical attitude from someone whose dealings with Grant and Zeppelin, he says now, ‘basically put us out of business’. The Zeppelin Knebworth shows were his and Wendy’s last as promoters. A month later, the American had demanded another meeting, this time at the Dorchester Hotel in London, where he asked Freddy to sign a pre-typed letter – later reproduced in a page advert in Melody Maker – absolving Grant and the band from responsibility for any ill-effects of the Knebworth shows. News of some of the bad feeling backstage had begun filtering out and, as Bannister later wrote, after the suspended jail sentences Grant, Bonham and Cole had received for their part in the Oakland debacle, ‘it wouldn’t be that easy for them to obtain American work permits and if I made too much fuss about the way I had been so unjustly treated, it would probably aggravate an already delicate situation.’ In fear of his life – ‘By this time Peter Grant was in such a terrible state, both mentally and physically, we thought he was on the way out and would be delighted to take us with him’ – he reluctantly signed the statement.
The final twelve months of their existence were far from good ones for Led Zeppelin. Just two months after Knebworth, a nineteen-year-old photographer name Philip Hale died of a heroin overdose at Page’s Plumpton mansion. The matter made the British papers only briefly; had it happened five years before, when the group was at the zenith of its popularity, this would not have been the case. Now, at the fag end of the decade they had once ruled, they were so far off the media radar it barely rated a mention outside the provincial press. An inquest was held in Brighton, at which Page was required to give evidence: the outcome a verdict of ‘misadventure’. The hearings happened to coincide with the Melody Maker Readers’ Poll Awards, which the band had been invited to attend, having swept the board. The band may not have been popular enough to sell out two nights at Knebworth but there were still more than enough fans to vote for them. The MM’s trendy young staff were not best pleased, but the MM’s readers – the kind that could be counted on to vote in such polls – were not like those of the much more punk-radical NME and still liked their rock gods to be long-haired and exceptionally good on their instruments. As if to rub it in, all of the band bar Page attended the ceremony; the first time they had done so since 1971. Plant driving himself in his Land Rover; Bonzo and Jonesy turning up in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce; the latter in a witty Rock Against Journalism badge (ha, yeah …). Dave Lewis, who was also there, recalls ‘they told everyone that Jimmy was on holiday in Barbados, but the truth was he was at the inquest for Philip Hale. Jimmy definitely got away with that one …’ At the party afterwards, a drunken Bonham staggered around yelling that The Police should have won the Best Band Award and began singing ‘Message In A Bottle’ at the top of his voice. As ever, Bonzo saw to it that nobody would forget him in a hurry. On 29 December that year, all but Page appeared at the UNICEF charity show, Rock For Kampuchea, at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, Jimmy’s absence again explained as being on ‘holiday’. And again, nobody from the press batted an eye, nor cared overmuch either way …
There was to be one last hurrah when, six months later, the band, seemingly out of the blue, embarked on a three-week tour of Europe. But even that nearly got scuppered by Peter Grant’s inability to get it together long enough to sign off on the deal with promoter Harvey Goldsmith. As Phil Carson now relates, ‘Jimmy always had trouble really in later years dealing with the outside world in general. I hear he’s got a lot better at it now. But there was a time when he was almost a hermit, as it were. And Peter, you’ve got to realise, during this period, he was like Howard Hughes. I’d be trying to get records out or decisions made, and the band would look to me to get it done. I’d get a call once in a while, “You’ve got to go down and see Peter. We’ve got to get this record out”. He wanted to approve stuff. You know, Jimmy’s approved it, I’ve approved it, and I’d have to drive down to Peter’s house but knowing what it was going to be like I’d take an overnight bag with me and all my work. And I’d carefully get an appointment to see him, say 2.30pm Wednesday. And I’d get there on time knowing that if I was very lucky I might get home for the weekend.’
As if he were some eighteenth-century aristocrat comforting himself through a particularly bleak winter by taking to his bed with just a bottle of laudanum for company, Grant now spent his days and nights in bed at his sprawling country mansion, Horselunges. ‘Harvey Goldsmith was the promoter for the Summer 1980 European tour. But Peter is not signing off on anything! And no one will do anything unless Peter says it’s okay. That’s the way it was. It’s like being in the bunker with Hitler. I say that and I’m not joking, because it was intelligent people, like me and Harvey, surrounding the führer, but no one would dare do anything unless Peter said it was okay. So Jimmy’s onto me, Robert’s onto me. But nothing is happening with the European tour. It’s six weeks away and nothing has been signed off on. So I get down there and sit downstairs waiting. Horselunges is a big medieval house, creaking floorboards. I used to commandeer this room as office space on the ground floor. Peter’s bedroom was directly above and you could hear the creaking of the floors as he would wander to the bathroom and back. And I’d be there for Wednesday afternoon, into Wednesday night, then Thursday, Friday … and I’ve got to go home. I’ve got a life to lead.
‘Eventually, I get to see him. He’s in Howard Hughes-type almost squalor, living in this incredible medieval moated manor house. And he lumbers out of bed and sits in an armchair and I sit opposite him. I said, “Come on, man, we’ve got to talk about this tour. Harvey needs to know what’s going on”. And he says, and I’ll never forget it, “Here, I hear you do an impersonation of me”. I said, what? Where did you hear that? He’s like, “Don’t fucking give me that. I know”. And it was absolutely true. Everyone used to do them but mine was absolutely perfect. So he said, “What you’re gonna do is get on that fucking phone to Harvey, and you’re gonna be me. We’ll finish it up like that, cos I don’t wanna talk to him”. I then sit in this armchair and dial up Harvey Goldsmith and fake being Peter in order to finish off the details of the tour. And off we went to Europe. It wasn’t until years later that I told Harvey that he’d done the entire deal with me. It wasn’t long after that, though, that it all went sideways.’
Beginning with the modestly sized Westfallenhalle in Dortmund, Germany, on 17 June. Informally dubbed by the band as the ‘Cut The Waffle’ tour, gone were the lasers, big screens, smoke bombs and lights, in their place a stark black backdrop, a greatly reduced PA and the decision to drop lengthy show-stoppers like ‘Dazed and Confused’, ‘No Quarter’, ‘Moby Dick’, even Page’s violin showcase: anything that might be construed in the post-punk world as ‘waffle’. Even the venues were scaled down; the smallest theatres they had performed in since 1973. The clothes the band now wore on stage also reflected their painful attempts to contemporise their image; out went the flared jeans and open-necked jackets and shirts; in came straight-legged trousers and regular shirts, even the occasional ‘skinny’ tie. And they had all had a haircut. All of which had the converse effect. Instead of making them look young and trendy, suddenly Led Zeppelin looked very, very old.
The problems that still surrounded them were also not new. Despite reports now claiming he was in fine form musically, three numbers into the show in Nuremberg on 27 June, Bonham collapsed behind his kit and the rest of the show had to be cancelled. He only just about made it through the rest of the tour. According to Cole – whose own heroin habit was now so out of control Grant had omitted him from the tour – Bonzo was taking smack right up to the start of the tour. Could it be he was still withdrawing when he collapsed in Nuremberg? The band have never confirmed nor denied the stories. Plant later told me, in fact, that Bonzo played beautifully on that tour.
He wasn’t well, though, was he, I asked Plant in 2005? ‘No. He collapsed … I don’t know what happened. I know he had to eat fifty bananas immediately. He had no potassium in him. You see, the only reason that we ever had a doctor around [on tour] in Led Zeppelin was to get some Quaaludes. So we never had anybody checking us up saying, “Oh man, the blood test says you’re really low in minerals.” I mean, every day now I have omega 3 oil for my joints so that I can play tennis and [perform well]. But we had no thought about that then. It was a very, very large Jack Daniel’s and Coke – and on and on and on.’
Bonzo was joined on stage for the penultimate show of the tour at the Olympiahalle in Munich by Simon Kirke of Bad Company, who jammed with him on ‘Whole Lotta Love’. Kirke recalled: ‘The last time I saw [Bonzo] he was packing up little dolls he had collected from different countries for his daughter Zoë, wrapping up these little dolls, one from Austria, one from Switzerland …’ The final show of the tour was at the Eissporthalle in Berlin on 7 July, the band responding to punk’s accusations of obsolescence by cutting down on the more ‘improvisational’ aspect of what till then was regarded as the quintessential, over-the-top Zeppelin live experience, in favour of a more down-to-earth approach that saw Page bantering with the audience and – unheard of till then – actually introducing songs personally from the stage.
‘The state of mind was this,’ Jones told Dave Lewis, who followed the tour in person, ‘let’s sharpen up, cut the waffle out, take a note of what’s going on and reinvent ourselves … it did seem that Robert and I were holding it together, while the others were dealing with other matters. The thing was it seemed to be such a shame to let it go down the toilet.’ For Robert, it was all about showing they’d ‘learned a hell of a lot from XTC and people like that. I was really keen to stop the self-importance and the guitar solos that lasted an hour. We cut everything down and we didn’t play any song for more than four-and-a-half minutes.’ Or as he told me years later, ‘By the late Seventies, everything had become so overindulged, not just with the drugs, which it was, but the music itself. It had gone from this tremendously exciting burst of energy at the end of the Sixties, to this overindulgent monster looking for a place to die.’ Something he still wanted to save Zeppelin from doing.
The other thing he was still trying to avoid on that 1980 tour was the decision to return to America that he knew the others were desperate for him to agree to. On the way home from the European dates, he finally relented and within days Grant had already formulated the next US campaign, giving it the working title: ‘Led Zeppelin: The 1980s Part One’. Plant did, however, lay down some strict deal-breaker conditions: no tour should take him away from his family for longer than a month; the band would play a maximum of two shows back-to-back followed by a day off; and, as with the European tour, Superdomes were out, more modest venues in; the aim to re-establish ‘contact’ with the audience (and, by definition, themselves). Grant and the others wearily complied. ‘I reckoned once Robert got over there and got in the swing of things he’d be okay,’ said Grant.
Scheduled to open in Montreal on 17 October, there would be a further twenty shows climaxing with four nights in Chicago in November. ‘Europe was “Let’s please Robert cos he won’t go to America,”‘ says Dave Lewis. ‘Once he agreed to do America, though, everything kicked up a gear again.’ He recalls talking on the phone to a delighted Bonham and being in the Swan Song office while Jimmy was there looking at a model of what was to be the new American stage show. ‘After all the incoherence of the past few years, it was like all systems go again.’
Well, almost. Behind the scenes, Bonham was the one now panicking at the thought of returning to America. Whether it was the prospect of leaving home again that depressed him is unclear, but according to insiders, he had now kicked his heroin habit and was taking a pill called Motival, a mood-altering drug designed to reduce anxiety. He was, however, still drinking heavily. It was in this state of mind that he told Plant on the eve of rehearsals for the US tour: ‘I’ve had it with playing drums. Everybody plays better than me. I’ll tell you what, when we get to the rehearsal, you play the drums and I’ll sing.’
The first day of rehearsal was scheduled for 24 September – just another day to Rex King, who drove Bonham down the M4 from his farm to the Old Mill House, Jimmy’s new mansion (by the river) in Windsor, purchased earlier that year for £900,000 from the actor Michael Caine. Rex later recalled Bonzo telling him to stop off at a pub, where he downed four quadruple vodka-and-oranges and quaffed a couple of ham rolls. ‘Breakfast,’ he called it. When John got to rehearsals that day he wasn’t feeling any brighter, moaning about how long they would be away in America. He continued drinking until he literally became too drunk to play; unheard of in his heyday. He then downed at least two more large vodkas before crashing out on the sofa at Jimmy’s place, where everyone was staying, at around midnight. He was then half-carried, half-dragged to bed by Jimmy’s assistant, Rick Hobbs, who had seen this movie many times before. Hobbs laid the comatose drummer out on his side supported by some pillows. Then turned out the light and left Bonzo to sleep it off.
When, the following afternoon, Bonzo still hadn’t risen from his lair, John Paul Jones and Benje Le Fevre both went to rouse him. But there was a bad smell in the room, Bonzo’s inert body unresponsive to touch and they realised with mounting horror that he was dead. An ambulance was summoned but it was already too late. The police also showed up but reported no suspicious circumstances. Paramedics deduced he’d probably been dead for several hours. Robert Plant immediately drove to the Old Hyde Farm to console Pat, Jason and Zoë. John Paul Jones went home to his own family, ‘terribly shocked’. Jimmy Page stood inside his house – the second time someone had died under his roof in less than twelve months – watching at his window as a gathering group of Zeppelin fans arrived to hold a silent vigil outside his gates. The news was already on the radio and his phone was ringing non-stop but he didn’t answer it.
In Los Angeles, eight hours behind England, Bonzo’s old mate from Brum, Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward, woke that day with a terrible hangover from ‘a bender the night before’ and ‘junked out’ – withdrawing from heroin. Bill, who had walked out on Sabbath some weeks before and would spend ‘the next year staying in my bedroom getting high’, was given the news of his friend John Bonham’s death by his drug dealer. ‘The dope dealer came around every morning with the allotted amount of stuff for the day. And one morning she came round and she was absolutely in bits, crying her eyes out because she was a major Led Zeppelin fan. I thought, “Oh, man, what’s going on?” She said, “Bonham’s dead.” The very first thought I had was a selfish one, and it was: “I’ll be next.” Like, “I’m right behind you, Johnny. I’m right behind you …”’
*
As you lay there, the room spinning, your mind wandered off again … back to where the Worcestershire countryside blossoms, to the big ranchstyle name board at the bend in the road and the twin white fences either side of the long, straight driveway to the farmhouse, where your dad did all the wood-panelling and your brother Mick helped build the extensions, surrounded by a hundred acres of sheep and cattle and trees and fields, to your beloved Pat and Jason and Zoë, to the bloody cats always under your feet and your cars, your pride and joys, all lined up in the converted barn, to your drum kits and your pub jukebox and your ale and your fags … to home. No way had you ever intended ending up a bloody farmer but then you’d seen this place, seen the look on Pat’s face and bought it.
Planty was just a few miles up the road, too, with his flaming goats that ate everything, old boots, you name it. Not that you saw much of him when you weren’t working. Your real mates were people like Bev and his wife Val, getting dressed up and going to each other’s houses for dinner and a few bottles of wine. You liked getting dolled up in a nice suit and tie. None of that hippy shit when you were out for the night with Pat. She’d be in her gladrags too, and you’d both jump in the car and drive over to Redditch to take your mum and dad out down the working men’s club in Evesham and buy everybody a drink. You did it once in the white Rolls you’d bought after you’d first made a bob or two, and when you came out some fucking skinheads had smashed the bastard up, kicked in the windows and gobbed all over it, little cunts. You didn’t make that mistake again but you did like to turn up looking nice in a smart motor. All your jewellery and everything, Pat on your arm in her diamond earrings and princess shoes, looking like a million bucks, your mum and dad so proud of you at last.
They knew it was all shit, what they wrote about you in the press. They knew you weren’t anything like the cunt in the bowler hat that used to roar like a bear on stage, not really. That was all just for show. They knew you only used to drink like that cos you hated being away from them all, hated all the bullshit that went with it. They knew that wasn’t really you in those pictures in the magazines; that you never went near groupies or took drugs or any of that other shit they accused you of. They knew you’d never do anything to hurt them, that you loved your wife, loved your kids, loved who you were and what you’d become, what you’d achieved, how you’d done it all for them and no one else, never …
*
The first person Peter Grant had contacted to give the terrible news to was Phil Carson. Despite knowing the state the band had been in on tour during the last few years, seeing firsthand what the drugs and the alcohol and the madness and fame had done to them, Carson still insists he was shocked by the news, that he really hadn’t seen it coming. ‘I never perceived it to be that bad,’ he says, simply. ‘I didn’t think anyone was going to die from this. Everybody in those days was like, oh, cocaine’s all right, it’s non-addictive. And there was a joke about heroin not leading on to anything. Naïve as I may sound, considering the position I was in, I didn’t know anyone that took heroin. Not then. I knew there was a lot of cocaine about but I didn’t know it had gone to that. So, yes, I got the call [about Bonham’s death] from Peter’s house in Horselunges, from one of the people working there, one of the minders who used to live out there. “Peter wants you to come down. Drop everything and come down now! He’s sending a helicopter.” I said, “I’ll drop everything and come down but I’m not getting the helicopter.” It was about one o’clock in the afternoon I got the call. But I decided to drive down because I didn’t want to be stuck there without transport, because I’d played that game before. So I just drove down. When I arrived that’s when I learned what had happened. Peter and I together wrote that somewhat enigmatic note about “we can no longer continue as we are”. That’s how that happened.’
An inquest was held on 8 October 1980 at East Berkshire Coroner’s Court, which recorded a ‘death by misadventure’ verdict, concluding that John Bonham had died from choking on his own vomit while asleep, ‘due to consumption of alcohol’ – in the region, they calculated, of forty measures of vodka. As a result, he had suffered a pulmonary oedema – a swelling of the blood vessels – due to an excess of fluid and begun vomiting. It was death by ‘accidental suicide’, they said. John Bonham was thirty-two.
Inevitably, stories of the ‘Zeppelin jinx’ began to rear their head again, the NME scooping the prize for most tasteless speculation when under the heading: ‘Bonzo’s Last Bash’, it openly suggested that Bonham’s demise was somehow connected to Page’s interest in the occult. The London Evening News also got in on the act, splashing with the headline: ZEPPELIN ‘BLACK MAGIC’ MYSTERY and quoting an unnamed source as saying: ‘Robert Plant and everyone around the band is convinced that Jimmy’s dabbling in black magic is responsible in some way for Bonzo’s death and all those tragedies.’ Others whispered it was surely more a case of ‘bad karma’; an accusation Jimmy was still bridling at when I broached the subject years later. ‘To blame something like that on bad karma makes me angry,’ he said. ‘It’s ridiculous and disrespectful to the families involved.’ Or as he told Nick Kent in 2003: ‘I do believe in karma, very much so. But in life’s journey whatever comes at you, you’ve got to deal with. It doesn’t mean to say that you’ve generated the karma yourself.’
The funeral took place two days later at Rushock Parish Church in Worcestershire; his body buried in the same churchyard he is seen speeding past in his car in The Song Remains The Same. Over three hundred mourners attended, including Grant and the rest of the band. Tributes were also received from Paul McCartney, Cozy Powell, Carl Palmer and Phil Collins. The band shunned reporters but by then they were hardly speaking to each other. Robert seemed to take it the hardest. First his own tragedies, now this, his friend from home, from teenage years, from that time before Zeppelin; a place he knew he would never now be able to return to. Bev Bevan told me he heard about Bonzo’s death on the radio. ‘I tried to phone Robert and I tried to phone Pat but we just couldn’t get through to anybody. It was just very difficult to come to terms with. The thing I do remember very well is the funeral. That was horrible. Unfortunately, I’ve been to a lot of funerals now. But that, I think, was the most horrible funeral I’ve been to. The church was absolutely packed with people – all his friends and family. I went with Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood. We got into the church but we were right at the back and we just about squeezed in somewhere. But it was just one of the saddest occasions. Unusually for a lot of the funerals I’ve been to, there was a lot of absolute weeping and wailing going on. People really were just hysterical. Just out of control, sobbing and weeping – screaming almost. It was just not a nice place to be. It was very moving – extremely moving. And what it did prove, even though it was unpleasant at the time to witness it, was just how much he was gonna be missed. It was just incredibly intense. You get upset yourself, obviously. I’m quite an emotional person so it doesn’t take much to get me crying but I just burst into tears. It was horrible.’
Sitting in the basement kitchen of the Tower House in 2005, Jimmy Page absolutely refused to discuss that day. Instead, he ran his fingers through his hair, puffed out his cheeks, and pointed out merely that it was ‘a desperate time, for me and for his family. It was also a great loss in the musical world, this chap who was so inspirational in his drumming. He was a young man, yeah. But then again what a body of work he left behind.’ What about the night he died: was there anything at all that could or should have been done to save him? Jimmy eyed me uncomfortably. ‘The thing is it wasn’t new to us to see Bonzo drink and pass out. I knew a lot of people who used to do that. Maybe in this day and age it might ring alarm bells. But in those days it was the norm within the sort of people that you knew. So one day – and this is all I’m gonna say about it – he goes to sleep and he’s had a lot to drink that day, and he’s collapsed and he goes to bed – and then he doesn’t wake up. I mean, that’s something that, you know, you just couldn’t believe would ever happen.’
A few weeks after the funeral, the band met up with Grant at the Savoy Hotel in London, where Plant, speaking for them all, said simply: ‘We can’t go on without Bonham.’ There had been some suggestion that they might continue, as The Who had done after Moon’s death. Carmine Appice, Cozy Powell and Bev Bevan – all old friends of Bonzo’s – were all said to be in the frame. But it was never really an option. As Robert put it to me in 2003, ‘There’s always been this deal about, “Oh well, everybody else does it.” I mean, Jesus Christ, how you ever gonna weave that magic that was there? If you look at the DVD now and you watch things like “Achilles Last Stand”, from Knebworth, it’s frightening! That is Bernard Purdy meets Buddy Rich meets a brave new world that nobody’s ever heard of! Even if certain chemicals got the better of us here and there at that later stage, I still don’t think I’ve ever heard a rhythm section in a rock group do that. Who you gonna bring in to make that happen again?’ Or as Bevan said, ‘God, if I had of been offered the job, I think I’d have been terrified because I couldn’t have replaced Bonzo. I can’t think of anyone who actually could.’
As Jimmy later admitted to me: ‘It could have been any one of us that [was] lost, at that point. And I know if it had been any of the others we wouldn’t want to have continued. We couldn’t just replace somebody; it wasn’t that sort of band. You can’t teach somebody, especially in a live situation. You’ve either got it or you haven’t, and nobody else has got what John had.’
Peter Grant had reached the same conclusion before the band had even said a word. He told Dave Lewis that at the Savoy meeting, ‘They all looked at me and asked me what I thought. I said it just couldn’t go on because it had always been the four of them, and they were all relieved.’ Getting a replacement ‘would have been totally out of character’. Zeppelin had always needed all four members to make the magic happen. ‘Now one of them was gone.’
On 4 December 1980, Peter Grant’s office released an official statement confirming the break-up of Led Zeppelin. It read: ‘We wish it to be known that the loss of our dear friend and the deep respect we have for his family together with the sense of undivided harmony felt by ourselves and our manager, have led us to decide we could not continue as we were.’
That Bonham’s early death would add lustre to the Zeppelin legend could not have been foreseen, said John Paul Jones. ‘There is always that James Dean quality to it,’ he told me. ‘The real tragedy was that John was doing fine at the time he died. He’d been through a bit of a dark period, but he’d come through it and was full of enthusiasm again. Working together, we had new energy again and so when he died … I remember it with a lot of sadness but a lot of anger too. Kind of, what did he have to go and do that for? Not just because of the band but because it was just such a waste of life. In bereavement counselling they teach you that anger is often the emotion in close friends of someone who dies relatively young. But I was angry with the situation too. It was an accident that so easily could have been avoided.’
‘It was such a different time, Mick, that’s all,’ said Robert. ‘Because after John passed away, there was no more Led Zeppelin. No matter what anybody would think about replacing John. I mean, he and I played together from when we were fifteen. I couldn’t walk away, feel bad, and then turn around and look for somebody else. It was not the issue. There was no need. What did anybody need to do that for?’
And yet … if Bonzo had died after the second album or even the fourth, there seems little doubt that Led Zeppelin would have kept going. If John Paul Jones hadn’t changed his mind about leaving in 1974 they surely wouldn’t have broken up. No, John Bonham’s death – tragic though it was – didn’t on its own also mean the death of Led Zeppelin. The band had been slowly dying long before that. Bonzo’s drastic, shoddy demise simply made the whole thing more terrifyingly – irredeemably – real. The song might have remained the same but nothing else ever did. No matter how much Jimmy Page, with his occult knowledge, all useless in the end, might have willed it.
Speaking now, in 2018, Phil Carson agrees that the death of Bonham was not the sole reason behind their decision to call it a day, that the band had effectively fallen apart before that and this was merely the final proof. ‘I think a lot of it was that they’d lost their rudder, which was Peter Grant, to drugs. If Peter had said, “Okay, guys, we’ve got to give this some respectful time and then we’re gonna pick up the pieces, John would have liked it that way”, it would have carried on. I’m very sure of that. But they’d lost their rudder and that was it, really. It never really recovered from that.’