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Led Zeppelin at 50, MOJO, December 2018

Half a century on from Led Zeppelin's explosive entrance, 38 since their tragic exit, the spirit of their music-making thrives, their legacy curated by their devoted guitarchitect, while his bandmates make peace with the legend as best they can. As a new book emerges, Jimmy Page talks Phil Alexander through the factors that fed their music and fields the question they can't avoid: will they ever play together again?

Plus Robert Plant on madness in Tampa, and the wisdom of John Bonham's mum.

John Paul Jones bemoans the myth-making, apologises for D'yer Mak'er.

Jason Bonham The highs and lows of the last man to drum with Led Zep.

As dusk fell on those warm summer evenings of 1967, the young guitarist would slip into his motorboat and disappear on to the river, enjoying the simple freedom of not quite knowing where he was heading. On other occasions, he would aim for land once owned by Gilbert Beale, a wealthy local bird enthusiast. Beale loved peacocks and had established a nature reserve on the Thames, some two miles or so above Pangbourne, but his death at the age of 99 put plans to create a wildlife park on hold. Meanwhile, his island summer house remained empty. It was there that the 23-year-old Jimmy Page would head during many of his night-time sorties, soaking up the sounds and the stillness and, once he’d moored up on the island, wandering around “in a paradise of peacocks”. For Page, these bucolic rambles — launched from the boathouse that he’d recently bought — allowed him time to think and to escape from the turmoil that had begun to engulf The Yardbirds, the band for whom he’d abandoned a lucrative career as a session man in June 1966.

It's almost impossible to be exact about how many sessions Page played on, but his run of roughly 150 recordings from January 1963 had provided him the wherewithal to buy his Pangbourne residence, a few doors down from The Swan pub (itself famed for being mentioned in Jerome K Jerome's classic 1889 novel, Three Men In A Boat). His work as a jobbing guitarist had also provided Page with an impressive string of industry contacts, and when The Yardbirds split in 1968, he repaired to his boathouse and informed the band's manager, Peter Grant, of his intention to form a new outfit.

Page understood that the pop boom of the early '60s was at an end. It was time for something new, a step on from the music that had swept around the globe in the wake of The Beatles' success. All he needed now was a bunch of musicians that could bring his ideas to life. The first of those he welcomed to Pangbourne was 19-year-old, Black Country-born singer Robert Plant.

The pair famously bonded over music and tea during the space of a week, and it was Plant who suggested his former bandmate John Bonham as a suitable drummer for the music Page had in mind. The band was completed by Page's fellow session musician John Baldwin, AKA John Paul Jones, the four-piece convening for a brief rehearsal in London's Gerrard Street on August 12, 1968. While their name would come a little later, Led Zeppelin were up and running.

On an August afternoon almost 50 years to the day since that first rehearsal, Jimmy Page sits in the dining room of The Tower House, the London residence he bought from actor Richard Harris in 1972. Latterly, the building has become the focal point of Page's life, largely due to the ongoing battle between him and his new neighbour, singer Robbie Williams, whose proposed excavations threaten the foundations of Page's Grade 1-listed property, built by renowned Victorian architect and designer William Burges. In what are extraordinary steps for a man who values his privacy so intensely, Page has invited both press and TV cameras into his home in order to present his case. Discuss it with him and it becomes obvious that he views himself as The Tower House's custodian rather than merely its owner.

The same could probably be said of Led Zeppelin — the band whose memory Page has done so much to preserve since they split following the death of Bonham at the age of 32 on September 25, 1980. In the 38 years that have elapsed, Page has been the band's enthusiastic curator, single-handedly overseeing a substantial reissue programme, while Plant and Jones felt it less necessary to engage with the idea of legacy.

The band's 50th anniversary, however, sees all three surviving members collaborating on a book: Led Zeppelin By Led Zeppelin, published by Reel Art Press. All three have raided their personal photographic archives to deliver an impressive, weighty tome. The book also comes with annotations from the trio, presented as an appendix that charts the band's development. For Zeppelin fans, this is the closest they will come to the band's autobiography.

Sitting in his dining room, Page looks at the book in front of him with a certain amount of pride. "Everyone put something into it, and applied themselves," he says. The guitarist, now 74, is nursing a cold and a sore throat, but he insists that we soldier on with an interview, the aim of which is to tackle the band's legacy and his role within it. Most recently, he has returned to visit Pangbourne, so it seems fitting that we start back there and a period which, for Jimmy Page, represents "absolute freedom" and where the seeds of Led Zeppelin were sown.

Why did you move out of London to Pangbourne?

I'd done my apprenticeship as a studio musician in London. I worked seven days a week at times and it was pretty intense, so I wanted somewhere that was calm and on the Thames. I thought a houseboat would be a good idea but that turned out not to be too practical. But a boathouse? Well, my goodness gracious! When I saw that, it was almost as if it was there waiting for me to move in. I realised pretty quickly that if ever there was a location where you could experience the seasons and the flow, then this was it. It was just a magical place to be.

In the book, there are shots of you with a telescope standing in your lounge, and another next to a gigantic jardinière.

Yeah, you can see a few records, and the taste that I had at the time in that second shot. A lot of the furniture that I was buying was Arts and Crafts furniture [from the late 1880s] which, at that time, was literally being thrown out because it wasn't fashionable. You could just pick up really lovely things. That jardinière, though, came back from the flea market in Paris on the plane on the seat next to me because you could do that in those days.

You were also buying art and you'd been to art college. How did art school affect the music you made?

When I was in my teens and I was being introduced to records, I developed the ability to really hear things intently. I'd listen to records and work out what every instrument was doing and how it all gelled together. Then, when I worked in studios, I'd ask the engineers how things were done. The thing about going to art college, though, is that you learned how to see things in different ways. That's what it did for me: it provided me with a different perspective. I was sort of seeing music in the way that you were layering paints, or like a collage.

So do you actually 'see' music?

Well, I can definitely visualise it, there's no doubt about that. There are definitely things that we did along the way where I knew what they'd be like before we did them.

Like When The Levee Breaks [from Led Zeppelin IV]; from hearing the drum sound onwards, I knew straight away that I was going to put on this sort of backwards guitar to link into the riff. I said to Robert, "Right, let's do the electric harp now. I've got an idea of how we're going to do it with the reverse with the echo." I wanted the whole thing to be super-duper-dense, and it just is. At the end when it's repeating, on the stereo mix Robert is constant in the middle and everything is spiralling round him. I really had all that in mind.

You also had a definite view of what you wanted to do with the whole band from the beginning.

Yes. When Robert first came down to Pangbourne I played him the Joan Baez live album [Joan Baez In Concert]. Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You was the first track. I said to him, "It may sound a bit weird that we're even listening to a Joan Baez album, but if you can mirror that vocal, I've got a guitar part that will really work." I'd done all the acoustic guitar arrangements as you would hear it on the first album. All the other parts — like the pedal steel, and the acoustic overlays — I knew what I wanted to do with those too. Then again, it's all well and good knowing what you want to do with it, but if you've got somebody who is sympathetic to the idea then it really helps, and Robert was. Of course, once we started doing it with the band, then it just took off as a piece of music.

Alongside your interest in art, you'd read a lot and you'd listened to a lot of music. What influenced your thought process the most?

In the Jeff Beck documentary [Still On The Run], Jeff says that when he first came round to my house my record collection was really eclectic. Everyone else had largely rock'n'roll with some blues records from the Chess catalogue — and we were really young at that time — but I had sitar music, Arabic music and electronic music. I was also into a lot of musique concrète where they cut up music, almost like the musical equivalent of William Burroughs. I was also really into classical music, traditional and modern.

In The Yardbirds, this idea of mixing all sorts of different types of music together, textures and sounds, carried on. It was the same in Led Zeppelin. I was trying to create something that hadn't been heard before or, if it had been done before, then it hadn't been heard in the way in which we played it. That's what I was trying to do from those first chords (beats out the intro to Good Times, Bad Times on his knees) all the way through the band's career.

Recalling Led Zeppelin's first rehearsal, Robert described you and John Paul Jones as "exotic, stylish, mature", adding "and they played like a dream." Do you think Robert and John Bonham were somewhat in awe of you both?

Well, John Paul Jones and I were used to studio disciplines and maybe they hadn't walked into a rehearsal situation like that where we were ready to go and where it exploded from the start. Then again, I'd never walked into a rehearsal like that. None of us had.

The combination of the three instruments and what we were playing was stunning. For John Bonham, this was his opportunity for him to play in the way he felt he wanted to play. It was the same for Robert, for me, and for John Paul Jones. Regardless of what we'd done in the past, as soon as we started playing this whole new thing started moving and in a communal manner. It was an overwhelming experience for all of us. It was life-changing, and we all knew it.

In the book, Robert also mentions the daunting prospect of writing words to fit the band's music. He had to use his voice almost as…

(Interrupting) …an instrument! That was exactly what it was supposed to be. We didn't want a crooner over the top of what we were doing. We wanted someone who sounded uninhibited. Primeval! That's it. It was really clear that he was a vocal gymnast. He could really improvise too. Again, that was super-important to me. I wanted that improvisation and I wanted a singer who could really make a meal out of the songs.

So the words weren't important?

They kind of were. I was writing lyrics at first but I didn't consider myself to be a lyricist in the same way that I considered myself to be a musician or a producer. It came to the second album and I've got Thank You. I hadn't written the lyrics for most of it. When we were running through it, Robert said, "Do you mind if I do all of the words on this?" And I said, "Yeah, go ahead." That was music to my ears because I wanted to concentrate on the sound, the production and the music.

It's clear that by late 1968 you've moved away from the idea of pop music towards the idea of music as art.

Maybe. It gets a bit pretentious when people start talking about art in that sense. People recoil from that. It was just clear to me from my time in The Yardbirds that if you made the right album, then there was an audience willing to listen. I figured even before I even had the group that if an album could be done with enough contrast on it, with enough drama, and what we call the light and shade — which means the acoustic and then the choruses, and super-heavy electric playing — then that would be incredible. That's what we tried to do.

Throughout our career we had a guitar-led approach — not to take anything away from anyone else. And I was always determined to write and present music to the others that would really inspire them. If any piece of music turned up that sounded like what we'd done before, then it would just disappear, because it just wouldn't interest us at all.

Once you'd finished recording the first album, you and Peter Grant took it to Atlantic Records in New York where Jerry Wexler signed you. How did Jerry react when you first played it to him?

Well, he thought it was really good. I mean, he just really listened to it and he heard it the way everyone else heard it, because we didn't change a damn thing! He'd never heard anything like it, but he understood the musicianship involved, which is why he wanted to sign us.

Peter remained the band's manager throughout the band's career. What did he bring to Led Zeppelin?

He'd been in the business for many years and that was his world. It wasn't really mine but he was forensic about contracts. The best part was once he'd negotiated the record contract that gave us freedom to do things, we could continue our steady ascent without any interference. Then he starts to apply certain areas of his experience and business acumen by saying to promoters, “Well, you can have Led Zeppelin but you can have them this way around rather than your way around.” He did that because he had the clout to be able to do it because he was managing us. He was a real ally of mine and he could see what we had from the start. I think he must have thought at some point, “My god! I've backed the right horse!” But he totally backed us, and I got on really well with him.

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The latest release from Zep Inc. — the remastered soundtrack to The Song Remains The Same — brings back perilous memories for Jimmy Page.

The Song Remains The Same — the film and its soundtrack — have often been viewed as missteps in a career which, up until the movie’s release in October 1976, had been nigh-on unstoppable.

In some respects, the film is symbolic of the turmoil that engulfed Led Zeppelin after Robert Plant was seriously injured in a car accident on Rhodes on August 4, 1975. As Plant writes in Led Zeppelin By Led Zeppelin, it would be seven months before he took his first step again, with soundman Benji LeFevre looking on as the singer fell on his face at the first attempt.

With Plant laid up, the idea of a Led Zep movie (which had its roots in 1970, and an initial filmed performance at London’s Royal Albert Hall) was revived. In July 1973, they’d shot portions of their three-night run at New York’s Madison Square Garden, but that footage came with its own problems. “When we saw the original rushes they didn't have any shots of Robert and they hadn't captured the vocals properly,” explains Page.

In the summer of 1974, Zeppelin repaired to Shepperton Studios in Surrey in a bid to capture the sound and images they needed. “But it wasn’t as simple as that,” Page continues, “because I had to try and replicate what I'd played in New York. That was more challenging for me because I was improvising through the original shows. But the most important thing was to get Robert covered.”

In addition to the Shepperton footage, the band had some off-stage material and a series of fantasy sequences, designed to provide a brief glimpse into the lives and thoughts of the band members. Page chose to film his sequence at Boleskine House, the property on the banks of Loch Ness which he had purchased in 1970 and which once belonged to philosopher and occultist Aleister Crowley.

“We all decided to do our own scenes but I don't think we even discussed what each scene would consist of,” Page recalls. “[The film’s original director] Joe Massot filmed my scene at Loch Ness and the idea was that I would climb this escarpment. I said to him, I want to do it when there's a full moon and snow there as well!” laughs Page. “So we went for the full moon and, lo and behold, there was actually snow there too when we started shooting. He thought that was quite magical.

"The idea behind the scene was the adept aspiring towards the beacon of truth, the light, and he’s making the ascent. A perilous ascent, it should be said! Actually, there’s one point where a bloody rock comes away and I'm halfway up! I'm there like an idiot. It was even worse when I got to the top because they said 'You've got to do it again.’ I thought, Oh my good gracious.”

In the film’s best-known sequence, the guitarist transforms into a Gandalf-esque character carrying a lantern, based on The Hermit, a symbol of wisdom found in several spiritual traditions and the inner gatefold of Led Zeppelin IV.

“I wanted to use the Hermit imagery,” says Page. “Then the beacon of light idea goes back to a [William] Holman Hunt pre-Raphaelite painting [The Light Of The World]. The idea was the journey of your life is being able to recognise the truth, the spiritual truth. But people can come up with any interpretation they want.

“It was a spiritual thing that I wanted to reflect but, whatever anybody thought of that, the bed of it, the music, could be heard on its own. Visually, though, the whole thing builds to this crescendo with The Hermit and the bow. It is pretty good.”

While he has never hidden his interests in esoteric spirituality, Page rarely discusses them in depth.

“I don't intend to really,” he says, “but The Song Remains The Same is out again and people will see that again so they may wonder what that scene’s all about, so it's worth explaining it.”

The Song Remains The Same (re-released on September 7) remains a flawed but entertaining experience.

“The momentum of the show itself is really good,” says Page. “The performances are really great. Yes, it's eccentric in parts but within the concert footage you can see how things were really done up close. As a musician, I'm always fascinated to see how other musicians do what they do, and the film really does that. It's a historical testament.”

Phil Alexander

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By late ’69, around the release of the second album, Led Zeppelin seemed to be making heavy music for heavier times, suggesting that music would never be the same again…

I think that's from the first album actually. That first album said things had changed, and that continues to the second album, third album, fourth album, fifth album and Physical Graffiti. It just doesn’t stop until we start recording In Through The Out Door [in 1978] by which point there are machines that can re-create the ambience of rooms as a direct result of sounds we achieved earlier on in our career.

So as a producer, what are the accomplishments you're proudest of?

On Led Zeppelin I the drums are recorded right across the stereo pitch, or the mono pitch if it was in mono. I’m not sure anyone had ever done that before because they seemed to keep the drums sort of left of centre and right of centre. It happened because of the way John played, tuned and set up his kit. I felt it was really important to capture the full frequencies that were coming off his kit so you could feel it breathing as he played it.

But it’s not just the drums that breathe on those Led Zeppelin records…

No. Parts of Dazed And Confused are almost going towards the avant-garde. It's very spooky some of the stuff that’s going on. It’s actually disturbing to listen to. But it was meant to be. It's not meant to be polite. It's meant to cause a disturbance in your mind.

You were deliberately disturbing the listener?

Yes. Certainly the instrumental section in Whole Lotta Love was. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with that. It wasn’t done by chance. It was designed to be what it was. That was a good serious production in every respect.

Led Zeppelin II was a huge record for the band. You followed it up with III in October 1970, which contains some of your most intimate and acoustic music.

Yes. But the acoustic element has been there since the first album. That album is intimate. But then again, we go and play the Bath Festival — which curiously we'd already done the previous year in 1969 on exactly the same day which was June 28 — and the first number we do is Immigrant Song, the first cut from that third album. People literally just looked at us and thought, “Oh my god, what is this?!”

Bath is interesting in terms of image, too, with your beard/neo-farmer look. John Paul Jones says in the book that you never discussed image very much. In contrast, you say, “I was trying to project a certain style.” What was that style?

It was whatever I was living at that point in time. Seeing the footage from the Royal Albert Hall [in January, 1970], I realise that I probably haven't had a haircut since my time in The Yardbirds because things had been so intense! Then, at Bron-Yr-Aur [the cottage in west Wales where much of Led Zeppelin III was written] there’s no hot water and I just think, “Oh, I'm going to grow a beard!" Then, the beard started taking over! Suddenly, there were beards everywhere. So I shaved it off and more or less reverted to the way that I looked in The Yardbirds.

I had an idea of how I wanted to start looking, for sure. You can see it in The Song Remains The Same. I start getting into more flamboyant clothing, like the dragon suit. I wanted to wear things that reflected the image of the music.

Have you still got all your suits?

You're darn right I have! Yeah. The dragon suit looks brand new, too. It doesn’t look like it’s had this whole experience. It's an extraordinary piece, it really is.

After a three-hour show that suit must’ve been dripping with sweat.

Do you think I sweat, then? Let’s just say that I didn't do my own laundry! (Laughs) It's not a very palatable subject is it? Shall we move on?

Between 1968 and ‘73 you toured and recorded at a relentless pace. What impact did that have on you as people?

When I put the band together, John Paul Jones already had a family and John Bonham had a family too. Jason [Bonham] was already born. Robert was soon to have a family but I didn’t have one. So going on tour did have an impact on us and their families.

In America, once we started off, the response to the live show was so phenomenal. We all know the size of that continent, but we wanted to make a mark there so we had to spend as much time as we could there. The door opened, there was a glimmer of light, and we kicked the door down. That meant that we were over there for almost a full six months in 1969.

Then I had my daughter in 1971. Peter [Grant] also had a family and so it sort of came to the point where we weren’t doing tours as we had done and certainly we didn’t tour the way some people do now, where tours go on for two years. I'm not sure how anyone puts up with that length of touring.

By 1973, Led Zeppelin were the biggest band in the world. How did success impact on you as people?

We weathered the storms and we did that through the music. After Pangbourne, I was living in Sussex and it was very, very quiet there. Coming back off of a tour it would take about two days to settle back into a completely different way of life. All the rooms in your house seemed completely different from what you were used to and all of the sounds you heard seemed odd. It was almost as if you needed a debriefing to come off of a tour in order to settle in as the family man or whatever you'd been before you left. To me, that was the other side of the coin to all the extremities of being on the road and really enjoying being on the road. I mean, I didn’t go on the road to be miserable! I went on the road to really enjoy myself, you know.

The enjoyment has been quite well documented. In terms of playing live, the set was constantly evolving too.

Yes, and despite everything, I was always responsible to the show and the performance. I was pushing myself every night we went on stage because I wanted to explore the song and go further than the night before. That was constant: that desire to go further. The sets were going to three, three and a half hour sets. With that level of commitment to it, you would get worn out. There’s no doubt about that, but in another way you'd be extremely fit.

After a fashion.

No, you would be really fit in every respect!

It’s not like you were living the healthiest of lifestyles.

Well, I don’t know. It depends what you mean by healthy. I thought it was healthy!

The mythology of those early tours has at times obscured the music. Do you resent that?

Has it? No, it hasn’t. It has — and with all due respect to you — in journalistic or written form, but in the audible form it hasn't affected anything because of all these tens, hundreds of millions of albums that we're supposed to have sold, I don’t believe a single record got sold on the strength of a mud shark or any other sort of thing that is supposed to have caused outrage. It’s about what that music is and what it actually imparts to the listener and the effect it can have. And that's a great thing to be talking about after all this time, something that started 50 years ago and which young musicians are still coming to because it’s a remarkable textbook. That whole ethos of four musicians making music together in a live capacity is real and authentic, and the music is honest. That's why it lasted.

One thing in the new book really hits home: the press release that you issued when John Bonham passed away. It reads: “We wish it to be known that the loss of our dear friend and the deep respect we have for his family, together with a sense of undivided harmony felt by ourselves and our manager, have led us to decide that we could not continue as we were.” Who drafted that?

It was done at the office. I didn’t draft it. I don't know who drafted that. But obviously Peter circulated it around while we're all still in shock.

When John died, you must have all just felt lost…

Oh God, yeah. Obviously, it was just terrible. It was terrible for John’s family, it was terrible for the members of the band. It was also a great loss to the world of music. We were really affected because he was our musical comrade. He put so much love into the band, as did the others. But it was quite clear that every show was different because of our improvising; I knew that I couldn’t teach someone that aspect of the band. That's why it had to end. It was about the total respect that we felt for each other as musicians. That wasn't to say that the music should just stop at that point. There was a careful curation of what came out afterwards. There is a respect for the music as opposed to just flogging it.

Despite that shock, you were obligated to deliver another album, hence Coda.

That was not an easy thing to do. With all of that tragedy Peter put it to me that we owed Atlantic another album. I said, “You've got to be kidding!?” So, as you do when there’s really dark or negative times, you turn the situation over on top of itself so that there’s light, and I thought, “Yes! We've got Bonzo’s Montreux!” That was just him and I in the studio in Montreux at the casino. That should really have been on the previous album. I knew we had that, and what a celebration of his drumming and his invention that is. That, for me, was the whole rock to build Coda around. And when we reissued the album as a double [in 2015] that felt like a proper celebration.

You have overseen the remastering of the catalogue and every Led Zeppelin reissue. Has the band’s legacy ever been a millstone to you?

Well, Coda was very difficult but other than that, it hasn’t been because I've always really enjoyed listening to Led Zeppelin music. I've always found it stimulating and fascinating to listen to and that’s it. It's just the most extraordinary group on so many different levels.

A month after our meeting at the Tower House, Jimmy Page is on Led Zeppelin duty once again, arriving at London’s National Portrait Gallery on a September evening for the launch of Led Zeppelin By Led Zeppelin. Among the 200 guests are a few of the book’s surviving snappers and a number of Page’s children and grandchildren.

The gallery’s Main Hall is decked in Led Zeppelin livery. Following an introduction by cultural historian Sir Christopher Frayling that ends peppered with Zep puns (“I don’t want to Ramble On or leave you Dazed And Confused…”), Page speaks of his pride in the book. “I hope it travels through to the fans and meets their imaginations and expectations,” he smiles.

It’s 11 years since Led Zeppelin played their triumphant, one-off show at London’s O2 Arena with John Bonham’s son Jason on drums, and it now appears certain it was their last. “I think everyone knows where things are as far as that’s concerned,” says Page. “I don’t really see the point of discussing it any further.”

The book and the anniversary have given Page further time for reflection. It’s always seemed that his time leading Led Zeppelin was spent searching for something elusive. What does he think he was he looking for?

“Personally? Personally, I wanted to challenge myself to reveal music or open up music that was a challenge for me to play. There was this collective spirit coming together and what I wanted to do was to make music that could change the frontiers of what already existed.”

So, five decades on, why does Page think Led Zeppelin’s legacy has endured?

“It’s performance art at the end of the day. It’s art! It’s lines, it’s landscapes, it’s architecture, it’s Jackson Pollock, it’s everything! It’s every movement in art! But it’s in music and, in that respect, it’s a whole school of music unto itself. You could say it fits into this category, or that category, but quite clearly it’s just Led Zeppelin.

“There’s a lot of people who came in the wake of Led Zeppelin, who got the idea, and played in the spirit of it and sang in the spirit of it, but Led Zeppelin music was different from everything else. It was just a phenomenon.”

Robert Plant recalls “the humor and madness” of a time when rock 'n' roll was still feral. “Jesus Christ, where's the fucking troubadour gone?” he asks Andrew Perry.

With How The West Was Won, The Song Remains The Same, and this photographic book, it feels like there’s some momentum towards a collective celebration from you surviving band members.

There's been several books before, and none of them tell the truth, but this is a photographic book, put together by Dave Brolan, who's very capable. My only thing was, “Can you find anything that nobody's seen before, apart from all the other wives?”

When you talk about Zeppelin, it always feels like your energy drains a little. Why is that?

I just think about John Bonham. Because we were spars. The West Indians used to use that term for a friend, but we were spars in every respect. We were edgy, and we had shoulders out here. He was very, very important, all the way through my time, from The Crawling Kingsnakes, through the Band Of Joy — all the humour and madness and stuff.

Did listening back to the performances from the LA Forum and the Long Beach Arena on How The West Was Won bring back any fond memories?

It's not the Bonzo's birthday party one, is it? When Keith Moon was playing with us? [That show at the LA Forum was on June 23, 1977 — the album documents shows from June 1972.] That night, Moonie came and they set up his drums so we couldn’t see what was going on, and suddenly we had two drummers. We'd been there a week before when Jethro Tull was playing, and Bonzo took a fruit selection — a basket of fruit and vegetables to wang at them, some tomatoes and stuff like that — and he turned round and said to me, “Well, I've got a title for their live album…” I said, “What's that, John?" He said, "Bore 'Em At The Forum!” (laughs to the point of tears. So yeah, The New Yardbirds — it's come a long way, really.

Back at that first gig in Gladsaxe, Denmark on September 7, 1968, what you couldn’t have foreseen was that your band would revolutionise rock touring on a mass scale.

Sure, and you can also say, oblivious to cause and effect. I always think of that Doors album, Weird Scenes inside The Gold Mine — what a great title. I mean, nobody had a clue. There were just more people all the time. And then the streets were jammed with people, and there were roadblocks, and there were people climbing up the stage stark naked. And there was Janis Joplin helping me out with my sore throat by giving me neat vodka with a teaspoon of orange — a half pint of it! All that stuff was fantastic.

Going to America, the furore and the insane energies were so overwhelming, you'd be exhausted just by looking at a crowd. Just, “What the fuck — what's that?”

As a touring operation, did it feel streamlined and well-organised?

It wasn't. But to the best of everyone's ability, it was. Because there hadn't been anything like it on that scale before. So where could it stop? It didn’t stop. It kind of went on and on, and we ended up in the Guinness Book Of Records a few times. We played in Florida to 57,000 people at Tampa Bay Stadium [on May 5, 1973], and we didn't even have an opening act. There was another big one in Atlanta [the previous day], but in Tampa, we didn't have an opening act, the stage wasn't covered, and there was a torrential storm, so the US Air Force were up in the sky. And they were using radar to plot how long the storm would be if it came across, and once the crowd started climbing up the stage, and everything went up in the air, I found myself running as fast as I possibly could, with a kid under each arm, to get out of there.

I mean, the furore and chaos — it was just a great excuse for the fascists down there to come in with their see-through shields and truncheons, and they came diagonally across, so as we got into the plane and took off into this storm, popping a Valium on the kids' sandwiches as we went up. We looked back down and could see all the lights flashing, and this pincer action of the authorities.

It sounds like that scene from Apocalypse Now where the female dancers cause a riot and they have to escape by helicopter.

It was like some sort of awful dance competition of organised violence. Nowadays, if it's raining at Glastonbury… everything's covered. They have isolation transformers, nobody gets killed from weather. It's all planned, there’s people with laptops everywhere tap-tapping away. (Laughs) What a fucking mess! Jesus Christ, where's the fucking troubadour gone? Or the griot in the Tuareg world who just comes through and tells a story about his family.

So you remember those crazy mega-gigs in the early '70s fondly, because they were a leap into the unknown?

But isn't it amazing, because we played the Bath Blues Festival with the [Jefferson] Airplane, and then Michael [Eavis] came along and said, “I've got a farm nearby…”, and from those glorious days… That was the great thing about those times, that nobody really had a map — a literal map, or any kind of idea or theory of what the fuck was going on. We came to America in 1969 or '70, maybe three, four, five times, I think — so much so, that Carmen, my daughter, thought somebody else was her dad. And I really hope that isn't true!

The Beatles and the Stones stopped playing in the mid-'60s, because they couldn’t hear themselves. Did you find the actual playing satisfying?

Oh no, it was spectacular. it was magnificent, because we'd just shout out songs as we were going along. Like Jack White does now, to his credit. He's one of the real people on the scene — proper job! But no — it was amazing. Who knew what was gonna happen next? “Wow, look at that, look at that! I am the golden god! “There couldn’t be anything more absurd than that, really, and so I said it. But I was standing in a palm tree at Bonzo's birthday party. I couldn’t see anything more ridiculous, and so funny, at those times. And you know, there were no automatic tuners: we used to tune up with a harmonica and a guitar backstage and hope for the best. It was stone age.

Fast forward to December 10, 2007, and Led Zeppelin’s reunion concert at O2 Arena. In the aftermath, you said you'd felt a discomfort during the longer instrumental passages, that you didn't know what to do with yourself.

I thought the O2 was a triumph. (Pause) Triumph is the wrong word. That's how it would be construed. Rather, it was a lot of concentration and focus, turning out to be great on the night. We've had a few reunions apart from that — Live Aid [in Philadelphia in 1985] and so on, which were a shambles — my voice was fucked, or there were tuning issues — whatever it was. So those were a tragedy.

But what could I do when they were playing? I could enjoy them. Because I was no longer in it, I was a voyeur. So I didn’t have a responsibility to make it work with my hips, or my chest, or my shoulders, or do some kind of strange marionette job. I was just enjoying it, and it was really good.

But you skipped the formal aftershow at the 02, and made your own fun at the Marathon Bar — a kebab shop/after-hours boozer in Chalk Farm. What can we read into that?

Yeah, and the French guy with the bolero jacket was playing rock'n’roll guitar in there. They've since changed it in there — it's fancy. But anyway, for what it was, O2 was great, and you know what was really good? Bonzo's mum, Joan — she was holding court. Jason [John Bonham's son, who stood in for his late father as Zeppelin's drummer at O2] had his dressing room, and in there, he had his grandma, and Deborah Bonham [Bonzo's sister], and Pat, John's wife. And it was just really funny, because Joan always was quite glib, and she'd been more or less a second mum to me when I was 16, 17, because Bonzo and Pat lived in a trailer behind their shop. So, Joan’s sitting in state with her kind of chiffon and silk around her shoulders, and she looks at me and says, “You haven't changed a bit, Robert — still got all those girls screaming!” I said, “It's mostly blokes now, Joan!”

The Zeppelin songs you revisit with your current band are the folkier ones, Led Zeppelin III tracks like Gallows Pole and That's The Way. Is that the stuff you're most proud of, or still feel in tune with?

That one’s such a beautiful beast. All artists talk about the difficult third album. When Jimmy and I went up to Snowdonia, to Bron Yr Aur, That's The Way was one of the triumphs of that time, and what the fuck did we know about anything? We just knew that we were able to write songs together, and share silent company, and really try to go somewhere.

A few years ago, you told me a story about how you met Joe Strummer for the first time in autumn 2002 — a month or so before he passed away. The way you told it, you both pulled up in the car park at Rockfield studio in South Wales at the same moment. You each got out of your respective cars, and at a certain point on the walk to the entrance, you recognised each other, tried to speed up and slow down to avoid talking, but eventually you had to shake hands and say hello, and you ended up spending the whole day chatting and having a whale of a time. As well as two icons of differing rock generations, you were also two staunch reunion refuseniks, turning down the biggest pay-outs in live music. Did you talk about that stuff?

I don't really remember. The thing is, when the deal goes down, Strummer and so many of us can trace a part of our DNA back to Jerry Lee Lewis, and the rockin’ times — Jack Scott coming out of Detroit on Carlton Records singing Leroy, that sort of thing. There was a little bit of that in him. When you're with someone that’s part of the great network of the histories of rock’n’roll, I don’t think, "Oh, the snare drum was shit on London’s Burning,” or anything like that, and he doesn't have to think that some of my machinations back then were a bit absurd, because they were both just what they were, so once you're one-on-one with somebody, everything else disappears, unless either of you have a problem.

You even had that attitude at the height of punk, when you and Jimmy Page turned up to see The Damned play at the Roxy club in January 1977. How did that conversation go, when you chatted afterwards?

Well, they’re troupers, aren’t they? Rat Scabies tried to get a job in my band when he was at Rockfield. I can’t remember who was drumming with us at that time — I think it was Phil Collins! — but whatever it was, it was just great. Because that album that Nick Lowe produced [1977's Damned Damned Damned], with Fan Club, New Rose and all that, it was just exactly what everybody needed. When you ask me what was I thinking about, what would I do with myself during a 10-minute solo, I was probably wishing I was in The Damned! (Sings) “For my fan club!’ For a minute. And then happy to come back in when it's my turn.

John Paul Jones on a musical banquet with side order of exhaustion and disquiet. "It was a cri de coeur," the bassist/keysman tells Mark Blake.

Does it surprise you that Led Zeppelin still mean so much to people 50 years on?

It's very gratifying that people still remember us. But I always presumed I'd still be playing music 50 years on, because it's all I ever wanted to do.

In the new photo book’s epilogue, you write “It was all about the music, all of the time.”

It always was. Everything else was just incidental.

You came from a musical family; were you always going to become a musician?

Six months after leaving school, my dad said he knew a friend who could get me a job in a shipping office, if I wanted it. I said, "No thanks, I'll find a band.” My father was a pianist, my mother was a dancer and a singer —they were both in variety — and my granny used to play piano for silent movies.

You, Jimmy Page and Peter Grant bankrolled those early New Yardbirds/Zeppelin dates. Presumably, you knew you were onto a winner?

Yes. That first rehearsal was just so fantastic. Plus I knew Peter Grant, as he worked with [producer] Mickie Most and I'd been Mickie's arranger. Peter was a force of nature — and with him behind us I knew we could do really well.

From the outside it seemed as if Led Zeppelin were destined to be successful. Was there always a grand plan to conquer the world?

No. Jimmy had sussed out the lie of the land in America with The Yardbirds, but there was no formal plan. Maybe, a plan evolved later, after we realised touring America at the birth of FM radio was a great way to do it.

You and John Bonham seemed like polar opposites, and you were also a more experienced studio musician. Was that ever a problem?

There was never the slightest problem. John knew what he was doing and did it better than anyone I'd ever heard, John and I drifted apart when we weren't on-stage, but that’s how it was in Zeppelin.

You've said the four of you weren't close friends, but it was about coming together to play music.

Completely. Even if you'd been arguing earlier, it didn’t matter. That was left behind when we walked on stage. On-stage we were as one.

Is it true people sometimes thought Zeppelin had a hidden bass player when they saw you playing keyboards on-stage?

Yes. “Who's playing bass?" "I am! Look at my feet!”

Peter Grant once claimed Zeppelin considered hiring a keyboard player in the early days.

No, no, no (emphatically). Unless they were talking behind my back…. I even played keyboards at those early rehearsals at [Jimmy Page’s house in] Pangbourne. Page had a Hohner Pianet, if I recall. I played it when we did the Band song Chest Fever. Their album [Music From Big Pink] had just come out and we were so excited by what we were doing we just wanted to keep playing.

But you did threaten to leave in 1974 as it was taking you away from your family too much?

Yes. That was a bit of a cri de coeur. I just wanted to know what we were doing, say, two months in advance, rather than be told, "This is happening tomorrow.” Then everybody else got children and it all fell into place.

Was family life away of staying grounded amid all the madness of the road?

Very much. But even without my family on the road, I would arrive, check into my room and then go straight out the back door of the hotel and walk around the city. I remember The Beatles saying that on their first American tour they hardly left their hotel. I thought, “That's not going to happen to me."

Did you ever present an idea and have it rejected for not being, say, ‘Led Zeppelin’ enough?

No. If an idea was good it didn't matter what the musical slant was. If it didn't work, we'd all agree and move on, Obviously there area couple of our songs I'm not that crazy about…

Which ones?

D'yer Mak'er (laughs). Down By The Seaside, but I like that country piano I played on it. Generally, we didn’t put out stuff anybody in the band hated.

Songs sometimes took on a life of their own in concert.

I've always improvised. When I was 14 and playing the organ in church, I improvised — because I was never that good at playing Bach. Some songs stayed as ‘songs’ and others, like No Quarter, we took it somewhere else on-stage. I remember doing the Atlantic 40th [birthday concert, New York, in 1988, where Zeppelin performed with Jason Bonham]. We were in an elevator with the guy from Tears For Fears. He said, “God, I wish we could do what you do. Everything we do is to a click track, it sounds exactly the same every night…” We just listened in horror.

You had more writing credits on the last Zeppelin album, In The Out Door, than any before. How do you view that record now?

I like all our albums. But that one was a matter of logistics. Robert and I got to rehearsals and nobody else was there. Eventually we said, "OK, let’s try this.” It was never, “OK, I'm taking over This is my album.”

If John Bonham had lived, what would the next Zeppelin album have sounded like?

No idea. We had no idea from one album to the next. Nobody ever said (adopts slow, monotone voice) "Oh, let's do another Stairway To Heaven, let's do another Whole Lotta Love…”

Did you miss Zeppelin when it finished?

Yes. But I spent a lot of time with my family. I couldn't get arrested in the '80s — a very weird time. It wasn't until the end of the '90s when I made my first solo album [1999's Zooma]. We toured the world, sold out shows, then promoters started insisting (sounds appalled) I get a bloody singer. It was Instrumental music, but I'm not Jeff Beck. I remember a promoter saying, “We can't grow it”, Oh well, fuck you all.

Would you make another solo album?

No, no, no. I can't be arsed (laughing).

You've produced and collaborated with an eclectic mix of artists since Zeppelin, though: Diamanda Galas, Wings, Them Crooked Vultures, R.E.M., Rokia Traoré…

If it sounds interesting, I do it. I'm writing a chamber opera for [mezzo-soprano] Dame Sarah Connolly.

Is it refreshing working with musicians who don’t necessarily like Led Zeppelin?

Yes, but I just discovered Dame Sarah is a huge fan and knows all the stuff.

Do you allow her to ask a couple of questions?

Yes, occasionally (laughing). The same with Them Crooked Vultures. Dave Grohl would go, “Hey, what was Zeppelin's rider like?" Sometimes they're disappointed by the answer because the myth has become so built up.

The myth is also a part of it.

I suppose it is.

What's your proudest musical achievement in Led Zeppelin?

Oh lord… (long pause) No Quarter would be one. I always liked Physical Graffiti because of the scope of it, but | also liked the hardness of the first album.

What about since Zeppelin?

Touring with Gillian Welch, that first Sara Watkins record [2009's self-titled debut], and working with Diamanda Galas — I'm really proud of that. She’s my favourite pianist and singer. She's part of our family now.

Would you have liked to play more Zeppelin shows after the O2?

Absolutely. Jimmy, Jason and I did rehearse and looked for a singer — not to replace Zeppelin, but because it sounded so good, we all thought, “Let's do some more.” But it didn't work out.

It's never going to happen again, is it?

No, and if it’s not going to happen, I always move on. But I'm very happy doing what I'm doing now. All I ever wanted to do was play music. Any excuse — I don't care.

Jason Bonham on the trials and triumphs of living up to his dad. Interview by Danny Eccleston.

When were you first aware of what your dad did and what it meant to people?

When you don’t know anything else, it's just normal. Dad plays drums in a band. It wasn't like he was in The Beatles! And he never played much drums at home, and if he did it was on my kit. But even on my little kit he played like John Bonham.

John Bonham is most rock drummers' favourite drummer — why?

I think there’s this misunderstanding about his style. He was not a bish-bash drummer. He had a real finesse. If you watch things like the Royal Albert Hall show [from 1970] you'll see how far up he holds his sticks. That gave more control, less wallop. You think of him as this thunderous drummer, but he had an amazing left hand. And he had a swagger not matched by anyone.

Did you miss him when he went on tour?

I don't remember him being away that much. They'd do the big tours but then we'd go on these big family holidays in the south of France, for a month at a time, and people would come and join us: Lulu and Maurice Gibb; Ringo. They'd go out and party with Oliver Reed and Peter Sellers. That’s when dad shaved Ringo’s hair off. Which mum said was fine until they took the eyebrows off as well!

Did you always want to follow your dad into drumming?

I got really into racing dirt bikes and that was my distraction when dad was away. But when he was home, he really got into it, got up at six in the morning to make the bacon and egg sandwiches and drive me to Wales. We had a trailer on the back of a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud! I remember a guy from Kawasaki coming up to him and saying, "Your son's fast, we'd like to sponsor him.” And dad goes, “Nah. We can afford our own bikes…”

When you got back into drumming, how was it dealing with your dad’s legacy, on his own turf?

At 15, Robert would pick me up from school and I'd demo tracks for his solo album before Phil Collins came in. Looking back, it gave me a false sense of security. I was going to be the guy! It didn't help me in my choice of lifestyle. If someone would say, “Just like his old man!” even if I was being drunk and smashing something up, I'd take it as a compliment.

You did Jimmy's Outrider album, then the Zep reunion at the Atlantic 40th birthday party in 1988, What do you make of it now?

For me, and I think the people there, it was… it was what it was. It was unrehearsed. We'd had two hours in the afternoon. And looking back on it now, that's what it sounds like.

How did you feel when you were recalled for the O2 show?

It was June 10, 2007, I was on tour with Foreigner, had to get a stand-in. Flew to England on the red eye, went to the studio at 10 in the morning, setup my drums and at 12 the guys arrived, and we did nothing that was on the list of songs I'd been sent. But it went amazingly well. Jimmy and Robert looked at each other and looked at me and said, “This is as good as it’s ever sounded.” Robert had to go and said, "Uncle Jimmy wants to talk to you about something. Maybe your wish is gonna come true.” I remember bawling like a child and it was all, We're gonna do a new album, do this, that, Wow! All of a sudden it was on.

Then the next rehearsal, when we started rehearsing in August, it was a very different vibe. Once the managements got involved, now it was a serious event, it was a little bit less personal.

This must have been a whole new level of being Bonham Junior.

I was so paranoid about getting it wrong! I felt that I still hadn't proven to anybody that I could play drums well. With about a week to go, I met a friend for coffee on the way to rehearsals and they asked me, "Are you having fun?” And I was… " No. It's driving me crazy. I feel like I'm failing every day.” And they gave me the best advice they could've. They said, “Stop trying to be John. Be Jason and John will come naturally.” And it was at that rehearsal that Robert turned around to me after the first song and said, “Where’ve you been? Finally, you're here.”

But for me the show was only one part of it. Being round them for that amount of time, it made me feel… when I left the room it was as if maybe dad would walk back in, or when I came in it was like he'd just left. I feel very close to him when I'm with the three of them.

What do you remember most about the show?

Before we got on stage, Robert got us in a huddle and said, “Remember to have fun. Because whatever happens, they can't take that away from us…” Then I remember the roar and thinking, “I can’t swallow.” Robert said, “You are gonna sing the harmony, aren't you, on Good Times, Bad Times?” And I'm like, “What?!” It was a great decoy to stop me worrying about the bass-drum triplets! But once we got to Black Dog we were more relaxed. We'd started to improvise more than we had during rehearsal.

And after it?

I remember, as we'd got close to the show, my mum had said to me, “Will you be OK when it ends?” Because this is what I'd lived for as a kid. This is what I'd talked about in rehab. This was what was painful to me when Page And Plant was together and people asked me why wasn't I playing with them? This was the torment. This is what I wanted and never got until that moment.

It was crazy, overwhelming. I remember, afterwards, Robert trying to steal the lamps from his dressing room. He said, “I like these lamps, I'm having these!” The Gallagher brothers were in there. Paul McCartney, dancing. The Edge. Oh my God, look who's here! Then it was waiting for the bootlegs so I could checkup on the playing, ‘cos I knew I'd fluffed up on one bit and it was bothering me. But we did it!

Then Jimmy and John wanted to continue it?

That came a few months later. We lost someone who worked for Robert, Big Dave, shortly after the show. I remember being with Robert, with my family, in the Midlands, and Robert had promised to take me and my son to the Wolves game, but I knew Dave had died the night before, so I sald I didn't hold him to it, but he said, “No, come on.” I remember my son falling asleep in the car on the way back and I said to Robert, “I've gotta know, do you think we're gonna do it again?” And he said, "No. But don't ever think it was because you can't do it. There’s a lot more to it than you think, son.”

You rehearsed with different singers…

A guy called Myles Kennedy came in from a band called Alter Bridge. I kept mentioning Chris Cornell, but nobody seemed to reply. Then the strangest thing happened. I got a phone call from Robert. He said, “How's that new singer?” I thought, "Busted!”

In the end, it never came to pass. Where did that leave you?

If anything, it was harder to deal with than the O2. It was the thing that mum had said. I'd got sober in 2001. This was 2008 and it was like someone was trying to make me fall off the wagon. I'd been pressured to leave Foreigner and I was left with nothing. That wasn't the happiest time in my life.

But you'll always have the O2?

It's a tough thing — to have that seat for a short time. But I have a Grammy for it. It's carved in time: the only other person to have played drums on a Led Zeppelin album was also called Bonham. I'm happy to have achieved that. I'll always be compared to my dad, whatever I do or try not to do. But you know what? I'm very proud of him and I love the music.

You're doing this show: Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening…

I started it as a kind of therapy. It was trying to get the Led out of me. But I get to play those songs and feel good about it, as well as doing my other work with the other artists I play with. I hope to bring it to England one day. It's a trip down memory lane with home movies and video and telling stories. Everyone who sees the show tells me afterwards, "I get it. I absolutely get it.”

Have any of the others seen it?

I'm sure they have, somehow. A DJ tried to get Robert to comment on it, but all he got was, “Jason can do whatever he wants. No one plays those songs as good as him other than the man who isn't around. He has my blessing.” Robert always says, “I adore the passion you have for the music we made with your dad and your knowledge of it. But it scares me sometimes.”

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