To be sat here watching this film almost 50 years after catching Led Zeppelin on the fourth of five nights they played at London’s Earls Court arena has a strong personal resonance. That Saturday night in May 1975 in front of 17,000 people they played for over three and a half hours. Having recently released Physical Graffiti, their sixth and in my view their best album, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham were at the peak of their already considerable creative and commercial powers. They were unquestionably then the biggest band on the planet.
The film Becoming Led Zeppelin, though, draws to a close at their Royal Albert Hall show in January 1970 more than five years before that concert at Earls Court. In so doing it avoids any mention of the band’s later excesses. There is to be no ‘Stairway to Heaven’; no Starship One, their very own private Boeing 720 jet; no references to Page’s worrying interest in the occult, especially the work of the author and magician Aleister Crowley who was routinely described as “the wickedest man in the world”; and most certainly no talk of potentially criminal episodes involving teenage girls. That Becoming Led Zeppelin is the first authorised documentary of the band undoubtedly chimes with the complete absence of any reference to scandalous events in their past.
Just as its title suggests, what you get instead is a film that explores the origins of this iconic group and their meteoric rise to musical stardom. And whilst accusations of Becoming Led Zeppelin leaning towards the hagiographic certainly have some merit, the moment the opening bars of ‘Good Times Bad Times’ (the opening track on their eponymous 1969 debut album, Led Zeppelin) thunder out of the cinema speakers any such thoughts are quickly dispelled. You just know there and then that this is going to be special.
Brilliantly researched and written by the film’s director Bernard McMahon with screenwriter and producer Allison McGourty, Becoming Led Zeppelin stitches together present-day interviews with the three surviving members of Led Zeppelin (Page, Plant, and Jones), a 1972 radio interview with John Bonham (who died in 1980 at the age of 32), old family photos, and archive footage of the band. The timeline of the film is underlined by linking itself to significant historical world events from that period, including the Nigerian Civil and Vietnam Wars, the first inauguration of Richard Nixon as President of the United States, the Manson killings, and the 1969 moon landing. Robert Plant remarks drily about the surrealism of Zeppelin “playing in a tent in the States whilst a man was walking on the moon.“
Whilst there is sadly no recording of their very first rehearsal together in August 1968 when the four men ran through the old R&B number ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’’ – an event that Jimmy Page describes as “life changing” – the other vintage material of the band playing is electrifying. Some of it has been readily available on the likes of YouTube for years, but to see and hear it on the big screen and with such a huge enveloping sound moves the experience into another dimension.
The full 12 minutes of ‘How Many More Times’ on Danish TV’s Gladsaxe Teen Club in March 1969 is incredible. The teenage audience just looks on in stunned disbelief. ‘Dazed and Confused’ is also played in its incendiary, violin-bowed entirety here, though the version we are to hear at Earls Court some six years later extends to almost 35 minutes and perhaps reflects the band’s subsequent excesses.
The concert material ends at the Royal Albert Hall with a triumphal reading of ‘What Is and What Should Never Be’’ (from Led Zeppelin II, released in the UK a mere seven months after their debut), with the song appearing to act as a metaphor for just how far Led Zeppelin had travelled towards global domination in such a relatively short space of time. As the credits to Becoming Led Zeppelin roll, the last song we hear is the band’s cover of Eddie Cochran’s ‘Somethin’ Else.’ And that, they most certainly were.
I saw Becoming Led Zeppelin at York City Screen Picturehouse on 17th February 2025.
