Zeppelin Dates (New Musical Express, November 11, 1972)
Longest ever tour
Led Zeppelin begin a major British concert tour at the end of this month - confirming last week's exclusive NME forecast. It will be the band's longest tour ever and include concerts on two successive nights at each of six different venues.
A total of 24 dates is set and the tour opens at NEWCASTLE CITY HALL on November 30. The schedule inclues two days at the MANCHESTER HARDROCK, as reported last week.
Zeppelin have chosen ALEXANDRIA PALACE as their LONDON venue for two days during the weekend immediately before Christmas. After a ten day holiday break the itinerary continues until the end of January.
Ticket prices at all venues, with the exception, are being priced at £4 and they go on sale tomorrow (Friday).
Full details of Zeppelin's dates and the theatres, together with ticket information, is on page 4.
Page Flees U.F.O.s (New Musical Express, August 20, 1977)
Last week’s tragic news of the death of Robert Plant’s five-year old son has cast a fairly grim spotlight on Led Zeppelin’s extended tour of the Americas. Strange it is, though, that the tour itself hasn’t garnered more press coverage over these past few months.
I mean, who can forget the days when a Led Zeppelin U.S. Tour would immediately require the Boswellian talents of Lisa Robinson to report on every bowel movement the metallic quartet performed during a working day. Ms Robinson’s talents have not been employed this time around, it seems - although we’ve still had all the various articles containing the usual “we are the greatest” bluster plus more tense interluding with the difficult Mr Page, whose only message to the media is an adamant statement that his metabolism has rid itself of artificial aids these days.
Three interesting observations, then, concerning the Behemoth’s annual trouncing of the colonies.
Firstly, tower-of-strength manager Peter Grant has been keeping a low profile on this tour even though he has been present as usual at every gig the band have played. The victim of a painful divorce settlement which has given custody of his children to his wife, Grant, reports claim, has become a virtual recluse, spending his time either locked in a hotel room or else in the dressing room, morose, unapproachable and delegating most duties to assistants.
This current strategy (or lack of the same) may or may not have brought about the ‘bit of bovver’ that hit the headlines two weeks back involving Grant, drummer John Bonham and Richard Coles against the omnipotent Bill Graham’s minions at one gig. It was a fourth name, though, that caused certain observers to blanch slightly. One ‘John Bindon’ was reported as being the fourth Zeppelin bully-boy arrested during trouble with the security guards - the same John Bindon who got immortalized in Performance when he was chosen to play Moody, the simpleton-thug, a role he carried off with some relish. Bindon, for the uninitiated, bears a reputation for being the toughest man in London.
Finally, though, to Jimmy Page. Page, in fact, has been acting out the role of all-round Mr Clean on this last jaunt. His mode of self-elevation when off-stage, apparently, is to listen to The Damned’s album (a real Zeppelin fave) and a tape of Rockville recorded in Dallas. Not that dat ole’ black magic still doesn’t impinge on his activities. One Swansong employee claims that Page was watching a video in his hotel room one night when, across a clear blue sky, appeared four straight lines of distortion. Just yer basic interference, the common-or-garden peon watching said screen would think. Not our James. He immediately took these ‘markings’ to be scanning U.F.O.s bearing messages.
The result? Page immediately packed his bags and split, mid-tour, to Cairo for four days. - Nick Kent
"Pink Floyd: Color Them Angry" (from Hit Parader, Nov. 1973)
“Genuinely insane … disturbingly real … space rock … sci-fi craziness … ecstatically mad … free-form psychedelia…”
Those are some of the adjectives invented by critics and reviewers to describe Pink Floyd since their very strange entrance into the music world back in 1964. Part of England’s blooming new “underground” music scene back then, the group didn’t take long to surface to ground level - and despite all predictions to the contrary - they’ve lived on and on and on, long after the “underground” died.
Not that premature announcements of their death doesn’t hit the news pages at least three times a year. And when they refuse to lie down and play musical corpses, the so-called arbiters or rhythm and rhyme begin comparing some bright new group to them, saying how much better the new guys are. Of course, the fact that Pink Floyd is still around long after the new group has had their flash moment in the sun and disappeared does keep the critics quiet for a while. But then it starts again. This time the verdict is that the Pink Floyd is just not too influential anymore - slowly but surely on their way out.
That, in fact, was the last word we’d read on Floyd … just as their “Dark Side of the Moon” album hit the charts, and the top of the charts at that. In the top ten, the word still was that the Floyd was waning. It was like nobody had bothered to listen to the elpee to see just how the group had grown and changed from “ecstatic madness” to the “futuristic fantasy,” nobody, that is, but the folks who still know a good record when they hear one, and put out the bread for it.
And luckily for those people, the Floyd have never taken their critics and prophets of doom too seriously … except in a purely technical and/or constructive way. It’s obvious in their development that they have never stood still for very long - that growth was, and is, the name of their game - and they don’t care where the fertilizer comes from. Their music has always had a large dose of humor in it, but as artists - and they are artists whether you love them or hate them - they are serious.
They have always been willing to listen to genuine experts in the name of growth. What they will not listen to, however, is advice about pure commercial raking it in that begs them to cash in on somebody else’s success by imitating. Nor will they listen to the phonies who kind of cringe at every brand-new sound because they really don’t quite know what to think about it yet.
“You know,” one of the group told us, “there are some people who cannot judge a sound that isn’t already established. They already know what they’re supposed to think about an established sound - it’s been judged for them by public reaction. But give them a new sound, and instead of judging themselves about whether it’s good or not, they begin wondering what they’re supposed to think as professional reviewers. Give me an audience of non-pros with honest gut reactions anytime. I’d rather be hated by them than loved by the pros.
Part of Floyd’s problem with the type of pros they’re talking about, of course, is that their style and sound and ultimate goals keep changing. Which, they insist, is as it should be. And they will take advice if it fulfills two of their most important requirements: that the suggestions come from sources with a talented expertise and an objective interest in the quality of music; that whatever they are asked to do be honest and no put-on for success’ sake. “Insanity” is fine - just so long as it really is “genuine.”
Actually, Pink Floyd tells a kind of sad-funny, comi-tragic story about what has been described as their “early madness.” At that point in their sound and career, their lead guitarist and songwriter was Syd Barrett. He was the creator of their earliest style, as strong and distinctive even back then as anything being turned out by fellow rockers. Starting with a melodic aptitude, Syd first gave birth to some tunes that were as simple, as lovable, as rich as that evocative but elusive British feel as the music of Ray Davies.
But Syd would combine it with equal portions of psychedelic fairy-tale rock, electric free-form rock, and his own unique brand of mad-gleam-in-the-eye humor. The result was a musical product whose point of origin “could have as easily come from the bowels of an insane asylum as a recording studio.” And that’s the way a musical colleague and ardent fan put it! Says this same source, “Barrett - vintage Pink Floyd music was unavoidably insane, swimming in that glorious, ‘ecstatic madness’ that is, undeniably, ‘disturbingly real’.”
“So real, as it turned out,” says another source, “that Mr. Barrett had to be quietly removed from the world of us normal ones sometime in 1968.”
So much for “insanity” that is “genuine.” But off the wall or on, talent is talent, and Mr. Barrett has since returned with some very fine albums of his own. And speaking of talent, Pink Floyd, forced to replace Barrett, found Dave Gilmour, who took them in yet another very genuine direction.
The direction was a natural extension of the free-form psychedelia - a foray into then then-virgin territory of space rock. And sci fi is where they’re at now.
Since then, many groups have taken the space trip, and been compared to Floyd, much to the latter’s annoyance. It’s not so much a matter of having their territory invaded. They’ll no doubt be into something else by the time everyone gets into the sci fi thing anyway. But they have explored new territories, and feel they have contributed to music, so why not everybody else who claims to be serious about their field.
“Perhaps if the group hadn’t been so severely criticized when they first got into the space thing, it wouldn’t seem so upsetting now,” a spokesman for Floyd told us.
“Now suddenly, everybody’s being acclaimed for what they got batted down for. Not only that, critics are insisting that the copies are better than the originals. That’s so rarely true to begin with, small wonder the boys are angry. But then, it’s never been the press who’ve made Pink Floyd what it is. It’s the people - the music-lovers, the concert-goers, the record-buyers. So why be angry with the press?”
That’s precisely the attitude the boys have, though it’s hard not to lose your temper every once in a while, especially when you’re always trying. But so long as they’re the darlings of the public - and it looks like they will be for a long time to come - they really have nothing to worry about. They’ll head off into some new musical direction - and it’s already coming we hear - and no doubt the critics and reviewers will be on them again.
They’ll be put-down and they’re bound to feel put-out by it all - but they’ll still be heading the charts in spite of the negative ruckus. And next thing you know, some new group will be winning the praise of the reviewers with some hopped-up imitation of Floyd - while Floyd is exploring something brand new.
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