Few bands seem as unreal as Led Zeppelin. Part of this is down to 50 years of accumulated mythology: long-haired Viking gods arrived from Valhalla to storm the stairway to heaven. But their status as an untouchable, elevated musical entity is also down to the cloak of enigma they wrapped themselves in: no official singles, few interviews, just four figures onstage, bathed in blue light. Even now, 45 years after they split and with the surviving members in their late 70s and early 80s, there’s something otherworldly about Led Zeppelin.
The first official Zeppelin documentary (sorry, The Song Remains The Same isn’t a documentary), Becoming Led Zeppelin strips away some, if not all, of that mystique. By focusing on the band’s first two years, it pulls Zeppelin down from rock’n’roll’s Mount Rushmore and presents them as they really were: an astoundingly powerful and legitimately groundbreaking band. Zeppelin fans will know this story by heart via countless books and magazine articles, but watching and hearing it brought to life is a different matter
The big draw here is the presence of Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones, filmed in the same wood-panelled location, if not necessarily at the same time. Egos and politics have meant the trio haven’t always been in alignment when it comes to Zeppelin (presumably something that explains the documentary’s seven-year gestation), but here they’re perfectly lined up in their view of Zeppelin’s importance, and the importance of each other.
Even more striking is the presence of John Bonham courtesy of an archive audio interview. The late drummer didn’t give many interviews, so hearing his voice here, as crystal clear as if it were recorded yesterday, is startling and moving. He sounds less like the bullish, explosive figure of legend and more like a bloke from down the pub: modest and softly-spoken, aware of the band’s greatness but not self-aggrandising about it. Watching Page and Plant react to Bonham’s voice as it’s played to them in the room is a moment of pure joy.
We get their individual backstories. Page the precocious teenage guitar hotshot, Plant the charismatic chartered accountant student with dreams of Golden God stardom, Jones a former church organist with a droll sense of humour and wry perspective on it all, the disembodied Bonham a man torn between duties to his wife and family and his ambitions to play with roguish Plant.
But things kick in with the formation of Zeppelin shortly after the sudden split of Page’s band The Yardbirds in June 1968 in the middle of a US tour. It’s astounding how quickly things happened: by the end of that year, Page had built an entirely new band, toured Europe and America and written and recorded a landmark debut album (released at the very start of 1969). Another 10 months later, and they’d toured America a bunch more times, grabbed a gold record and made an equally venerated, even more influential second record.
This is where Becoming Led Zeppelin comes into its own, aided by the participation of the band. There’s fascinating if all-too-brief bird’s eye footage of Zeppelin recording in London’s Olympic Studios, and of the band performing on an unspecified TV show, where uncomprehending audience members stick their fingers in their ears to block out the noise. Best of all is a snippet of footage of their appearance at the Bath festival, which even Page hasn’t seen before – the joy on his face as he watches it for the first time is childlike. Presumably, Zep-heads who think they’ve seen it all will feel the same.
The film isn’t perfect. The relative scarcity of archive footage means what the filmmakers did have to play with is sometimes looped a little too much, and the musical audio occasionally doesn’t match what’s on-screen (though studio recordings over live film is still better than silence). There are some honking documentary clichés (newspaper front pages piling up to show what was happening in the world), and yes, it deliberately stops before the decadence, debauchery and darkness properly kick in, though the documentary would never have been made at all if it hadn’t.
But Becoming Led Zeppelin is still a fascinating portrait of a band whose legend is tied up with their careful custody of their own legend. It doesn’t wholly demystify this most mystical of rock bands, but it does reveal the human brilliance at their heart.
