Following Zeppelin’s six-date tour of Japan, Page, Plant and Richard Cole set up camp in Bombay’s five-star Taj Mahal hotel – and duly played a gig. Their arrival in the country came at a time when Indian rock music was still in its infancy. There were several such bands in Bombay – chief among them being Atomic Forest, Human Bondage and Velvette Fogg – but they were almost wholly in thrall to Western imports.
The trip also marked the occasion when Robert and Jimmy, the latter armed with a state-of-the-art Stellavox qaudraphonic tape machine, recorded in the studio with a bunch of Indian classical musicians, arranged for them by Ravi Shankar disciple Vijay Raghav Rao. The result, the much-bootlegged The Bombay Sessions, yielded radically different versions of ‘Friends’ and ‘Four Sticks’, featuring sarangi, sitars and tablas. The ensemble was credited as the Bombay Symphony Orchestra, though Page was less than happy with the quality of the sessions themselves. Once back in England, according to Richard Cole, the Bombay tapes went into storage – though they would finally be released in 2015 as part of the deluxe reissue of Coda. 50 years on, nothing can deflect from the monumental cultural impact of Page and Plant’s visit.