On February 25, 1972, Led Zeppelin played the third show of a six-date Australasian tour, at Western Springs Stadium, a venue in New Zealand's largest city, Auckland.
Standing near the front was 20-year-old photographer Lloyd Godman, armed with an 8mm movie camera, who managed to capture some footage of the band in full flow. He then consigned the film to his shed, where it lay undisturbed for the best part of half a century.
"I knew I had this roll of film in the shed so I sent it off to get digitised," Godman tells the New Zealand Herald. "I knew there was band stuff on it but I didn't know what it was. It came back and there was the Zeppelin film."
The five minutes of film may be quite murky, but a Zeppelin archivist in the US was able to synch the footage to sound recordings from the event, and the results were premiered yesterday on the LedZepFilm YouTube channel.
Among the snippets of tracks played in the film are Bron-Y-Aur Stomp, Dazed And Confused, Rock And Roll and Whole Lotta Love.
"[My reaction was] really one of joy," says Godman, "because, of the still photographs I took, I only ended up with six shots, which were really the rejects because the promoter had picked through the best of them and they just disappeared. So finding this was like finding gold really."
He continues: "It's really timeless music, some of that stuff. It's so powerful and I think the combination of musicians that came together to form the group - it was just like a giant cyclone.
"The way a cyclone's formed is, you know, all the energy was there - it just came together and it just formed into this amazing vortex that not only carried them along but carried everybody else along as well."
