Led Zeppelin – Earls Court, London - 24th May 1975
On 24th May 1975 I first saw Led Zeppelin at Earls Court, London with my brother and his friends. The band were originally booked for three consecutive nights but due to the high demand they extended the run to five shows with 80,000 tickets sold making it the biggest concert run at the time, we went on the fourth night and our tickets were £1.50 each.
The seats we got were up in the Gods and were really steep, due to an incident I had when I was very young at the top of a Tower I suffer from really bad vertigo and I wasn’t the only one in our group that felt the same, so after some discussions with the stewards we were moved to the balcony over looking the stage. Each of the five shows had a different DJ and it was Nicky Horne who introduced the night we went to.
What stands Led Zeppelin out as one of the greatest bands in music history is that each member of the band was an integral part of their sound, from the solid drumming of John Bonham, bass, keyboards and mandolin from John Paul Jones, the guitar histrionics of Jimmy Page and the distinctive vocals of Robert Plant. Everything they did as a band was big including the set list which was over three hours long, so no need of a support band. They could play for this long as they all had a role to play, the John Bonham marathon drum solo during Moby Dick meant the other band members could have a break and the acoustic set which Robert Plant described as the Leonard Cohen part of the show and when Jimmy Page played the guitar with a violin bow during Dazed and Confused with bright green laser beam going across the length of the venue was an iconic moment that still sits with me.
The album they were promoting at the time was Physical Graffiti and their set featured a number of tracks from that album including hearing Kashmir for the first time which still sounds as fresh today as it did then, they started and ended the evening with Rock’Roll and Stairway to Heaven from the fourth album. It is no under estimation that seeing Led Zeppelin perform live when they were all at the top of their game changed my life and had a profound affect.
I had to wait four years to see Led Zeppelin perform live again which was at Knebworth, Hertfordshire on 4th August alongside 200,000 people with Todd Rundgren’s Utopia, Southside Johnny, Marshall Tucker, Commander Cody, Chas & Dave and Fairport Convention, the shows overran and received complaints about the noise from over seven miles away, tickets were £7.50 each. In 1984 I got to see The Firm featuring Jimmy Page and Paul Rogers at Hammersmith Odeon, tickets were £5.50.
It was around that time that I got to meet Jimmy Page was in a Pub in Windsor when I was working at Windsor Arts Centre where he told me he had just recorded an album with Roy Harper called Whatever Happened to Jugula?. Based on this knowledge I contacted Roy’s agent and booked him to perform around the time of the album release, a lot of people put two and two together knowing that Jimmy Page lived in Windsor at the time and presumed he would be there also (which he wasn’t). The album charted in the top 50 and we sold out weeks in advance and had hundreds of people turn up on the night trying to get in.
I got to meet Jimmy Page several times after that as he was a regular visitor to Windsor Arts Centre, attending events, record fairs and bringing his children to shows and classes, he was always a joy to talk to and very humble.
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