AS I WAS PINNED to my seat in the cinema at the weekend, my eyes and ears were flicking left and right to capture as much of the green velvet pants, shocks of hair, freewheeling moustache, and, front and centre, this unfettered, unleashed music of a band that had only recently become known as Led Zeppelin but were still in the process of, as the film title describes, becoming Led Zeppelin. I chuckled. At myself.
You idiot, I said (not for the first time, admittedly), how did you go that long not liking this band? What were you thinking back then?
Here I was thrilling to the sheer visceral impact of live Zeppelin in 1968 (to a perplexed but curious Dutch TV audience who thought they were getting what it said on the tin/poster, the new Yardbirds) and 1969 (firstly to a bamboozled and sometimes pained British TV audience, but then to more thoroughly convinced American concertgoers). And that was me just enjoying the fact that we were getting pretty much full performances of songs, not excerpted bits to illustrate rather than educate, even if there was in the first half at least nowhere near enough about why they were playing this music and how they were writing and making it.
Here too I was being excited by hearing John Paul Jones get more than a passing mention but actual screen time and a decent dive into his background, and even more so by hearing the surprisingly soft-spoken, polite and enthusiastic John Bonham (found on a forgotten 2SM interview from the early ‘70s) coming across as anything but the room destroying thug of legend. And yep, I was a journalist who had interviewed them, caught between amusement, fascination and scepticism as the usually wry and self-distancing Robert Plant seemed to commit to taking history seriously, and the usually serious and self-important Jimmy Page seemed to leave room for a smidgen of doubt.
What was I thinking back then as a righteous teenager and borderline pompous 20-year-old? I was thinking Led Zeppelin were wrong: the antithesis of what was right and good and holy in music.
There were a good number of reasons back then to not just be uninterested in Led Zeppelin but to actively designate them as Very Much Not Our Thing Thank You. And it begins and to a fair extent ends with punk, even though I was too young for punk itself.
By the late ‘70s pop had pulled me in and would never let go, and punk was obscure, quickly gone and basically very English – mate, I had never been to the city, let alone heard of the Funhouse when Radio Birdman were playing there (and they’d argue they weren’t punk anyway) so no I didn’t know about Sydney’s underground pre-‘78 at that time. Instead, the “intellectual” foundations for my music opinions was grounded in the writing about, and the music of the scenes that sprang up after punk but carried many of its prejudices.
Having no older brothers or sisters whose record collections might have bled through the walls into my room and my taste, I completely bought into the idea that ‘70s rock was the nadir of music, that guitar solos were a wank, and songs that went more than three or four minutes – prog! Urgh! – were the epitome of the societal breakdown that comes from warmongering private school neofascists in flares and too much cologne. Comrade.
In retrospect I think there was something else at play here, or something that fed into these pre-existing opinions: the stuff I was reading away from music. And the death last week of that quintessential ‘70s author, Tom Robbins, brought that front of mind.
Robbins made the light touch with the heavy joke a thing to aspire to, and his female characters felt smarter, powerful even, despite, or maybe because, of their many flaws. At least that’s how it looked to a teenage boy who knew girls but had about as much knowledge of them as he had had dates (which is to say, none), was yet to discover female authors not called Rosemary Sutcliffe, Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie, and therefore thought someone like Robbins a font of wisdom in this area.
I was also reading a lot of the university-set comic novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, and Woody Allen short stories, and through them your typical man wasn’t exactly looking super effective or, with a word we weren’t yet thinking, “aspirational”. And loud, boorish, cocksure, dominating men were even less appealing. Bet you they didn’t listen to Dusty Springfield or The Go-Betweens.
So while I eventually bought the first two Zeppelin albums after getting a post-uni job – on the basis that if I wanted to write about music I needed to know all of these people, whether I liked them or not – the strutting power plays, the domination, the bare chest and teenager-back-in-the-dressing-room, the audience (I assumed) of the same guys who scared me at Chisel gigs or Oils gigs, the very lemon squeezing down the legness of them, made Led Zeppelin easy to put aside. And categorise. And demonise.
Bizarrely, illogically, but maybe inevitably, the thing that turned me from resistor to devotee, was a song that appeared to have in it everything that I knew to be wrong.
At a party where many of the people there – including a girl who I impossibly desired but would have struggled to remember my name if she even thought to glance my way – were unbelievably old, like late 20s old, I beheld the tower of excess that is Achilles Last Stand.
It goes for more than 10 minutes, it shifts in tone and tempo regularly, it has multiple guitars over relentlessly thundering, relentlessly moving drums and a bass part that could be a whole song on its own, the vocals are wandering and hippie one moment, probing and proto-metal another, the lyrics meaningfully meaningless (though to be honest I wasn’t really listening to them) and the guitar solo(s) seem not just ever-present but unending. And just when you think that’s it, it goes again. Then again.
I sat there mouth agape, body shaken, mind consumed. This was wrong. And I loved it. It was a total wankfest. And I loved it. I didn’t even know who it was. And I loved it. Then I found out it was Led Zeppelin. Bloody hell. Verities had not just been upturned, they had been trampled underfoot and scattered to the winds.
There is only a brushstroke of this in Becoming Led Zeppelin, which finishes abruptly in early 1970 just as Led Zeppelin II has established them as behemoths-in-waiting. In a couple of live performances songs are given the freedom to ramble on as the band look to explore beyond the recorded versions, beyond plans. But the film does give us enough to understand that the future lay here, and that it was made possible by the depth of their abilities and history (those Page and Jones sessions with Shirley Bassey, queen of bombast weren’t wasted!), the timing/confluence of influences that made the late ‘60s and early ‘70s freedom city for many (for good and sometimes very bad), and the self-confidence that comes from being the courted rather than the courting.
In time – about 15 years after this night of revelation – confessing that this was the song that converted me gave me the key to unlocking a ‘til then indifferent Jimmy Page in an interview – the song was on his favourite, though oft-ignored album, Presence. And for that I remain very grateful. But it had already done its best job in setting the path for a pompous young idiot to find himself – as a hopefully less pompous, if no less idiotic old man – throbbing with teenage excitement on a Sunday afternoon in 2025 to watch a film about a rock band.
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