It’s August 1968, and in a poky room beneath London’s Gerrard Street, Jimmy Page is rehearsing his new band. A 24-year-old guitar-for-hire who’d made uncredited appearances on epochal hits by The Who, The Rolling Stones and Van Morrison’s band Them, Page quit a lucrative gig at the Muzak Corporation in 1966 to join The Yardbirds. That band promptly imploded, but Page’s instincts were sound. Soon, he’d corralled a new Yardbirds (they’d soon ditch that name in favour of “Led Zeppelin”) with fellow session musician John Paul Jones and two unknowns from the Black Country, Robert Plant and John Bonham.
In that Gerrard Street basement, they launch into Cincinnati bluesman Tiny Bradshaw’s “Train Kept A-Rollin’’ and the world is pretty much never the same again. Within weeks of that first rehearsal, they’re touring Scandinavia; by Boxing Day they’re playing the US; and less than a year later they’re collecting gold discs for their debut album, which eventually sells a staggering 10 million copies. By 1980 – after seven more smash-hit studio albums, globetrotting tours that shatter all records, legendary on-the-road escapades heavy on the sex and the drugs, and the tragic death of drummer Bonham – it’s all over. Led Zeppelin have left the building, ceding the stage to endless imitators who’ll ape their moves but never approach their magic.
