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Led Zeppelin reunion??


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Or as it is spelled on the spine of the cassette of Presence I have - Led Zepplin.

 

i like the bit on the 2003 dvd during the earls court footage where some girl holds up a sign saying "led zepplin"... uh, it was already 1975. thats so 68/69 era naming

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i followed the nme blog and damn if it wasn't exciting. i mean, legends!!! led zep!!! i have been so excited the last week looking forward to this. it really has got me back into listening to them regularly. i just really feel like rock history was made tonight. not just some publicity show or money gig. these dudes played because they wanted to and it's just amazing. rock on!

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from all the videos & audio clips i've listened to, the band sounded amazing... Plant sounds... rather aged, no surprise there. at least he didn't try and extend past his limited range these days.

 

i'd still drop a few bills if they came stateside though

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A review of the gig from the Guardian today:

 

In his musical memoir 31 Songs, the author Nick Hornby recalls seeing Led Zeppelin live in 1975, during their legendary five-night residency at Earls Court.

At the time, Led Zeppelin were unequivocally the biggest band in the world: two years previously, they had smashed attendance records set by the Beatles across America - but according to Hornby at least, the experience was so unedifying, so preposterously self-indulgent that he felt compelled to "nip out" of the show during one extended instrumental interlude, went to a nearby pub, enjoyed a pint and a game of pool and returned to find Led Zeppelin still soloing away.

 

Hornby's tale offers a salutary reminder that the band's return to live performance after 27 years might not necessarily be a source of unalloyed delight, the phrase he uses to describe their performance is "a bit boring" - but it would be brave soul indeed who dared offer such an opinion tonight.

Depending on whose estimate you believe, somewhere between 20 million and 200 million people attempted to avail themselves of tickets for this show: the 18,000 who succeeded are understandably not in the mood for anything more complicated than worship.

 

The three remaining members and Jason Bonham, deputising on drums for his late father, take the stage to a reception so ecstatic that a cynical voice might suggest they may as well immediately turn round and go home, their performance having clearly been taken as read.

 

That cynical voice might belong to singer Robert Plant, whose own career is positively blooming: his recent album with country singer Alison Krauss is the most acclaimed of his post-Zeppelin works and who has given every impression of taking part in the reunion solely because it commemorates the band's former label boss and mentor, the late Ahmet Ertegun, and much against his better judgment.

 

Resolutely downbeat amid the frenzy, he has described the show as a chance "to go out there and say look, we're not immortal, this is how it could be. This is it, do you really want this?"

 

If nothing else, you could never accuse him of adding to the mountain of hype surrounding the band's re-formation. He certainly doesn't perform like a man entertaining serious doubts about anything - for all the pre-emptive discussion in the media about his inability to hit the notes he once could, Plant sounds fantastic, and retains an utterly magnetic and startlingly lithe presence on stage, kicking his microphone stand to the ground, dancing with a rather cheering abandon, even setting aside his celebrated distaste for the band's most famous and overblown song and having a stab at Stairway to Heaven.

 

But watching Led Zeppelin, it's hard not to wonder if the frontman's reticence isn't fuelling the other members of the band. Their previous reunions have been brief and shambolic: a rotten set at Live Aid, an under-rehearsed appearance at a record label birthday party.

 

Tonight, however, after a tentative, feedback-scarred opener of Good Times Bad Times, it's difficult to believe this is a band who have barely played together for the best part of three decades. They sound awesomely tight.

 

The riff that powers In My Time Of Dying is authentically churning and queasy, Ramble On sounds not like a song that's been brought out of mothballs for a benefit concert but wrigglingly, obscenely alive; Trampled Underfoot's conjunction of jittering funk and squealing, metallic guitar seems more bizarre and beguiling than ever.

 

Page in particular has been open about his desire to make the reunion more than a one-off arrangement and you rather get the feeling they're attempting to bring Plant round to the idea by the sheer force of their playing: even Dazed And Confused's lengthy passages of feedback seem less like the po-faced indulgence of a self-important guitar god than something rather thrilling and experimental.

 

Whether Plant is won round in the long term remains to be seen, but for last night at least, it seems to do the trick. His between song-patter remains self-deprecating: "this is a song we first heard in about 1932", but at particularly intense moments, the three of them huddle together before Jason Bonham's drum riser. There's even an argument to suggest that the reformed Led Zeppelin might be slightly leaner. The kind of excesses that once sent Hornby scuttling off in search of a nearby solo-free hostelry have been trimmed out of necessity: as Page has pointed out, it's almost physically impossible for men in their 60s to play three and a half hour sets. Depending on your perspective, that's a pity or an unexpected bonus of old age. Either way, anyone nipping out last night would have missed something faintly remarkable.

 

And the link for a video: http://music.guardian.co.uk/rock/liverevie...rss&feed=39

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I can't see that video at work, but my understanding was that you needed to present ID and a receipt to prove you were the original purchaser of the tickets -- if you couldn't, you were shit out of luck.

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That's what the promoter says in the video. I am curious - as there has not been any recent articles about it. I wonder what kind of scene went down when someone was told they could not get in - plus I would think the people who sold those things on Ebay are not going to be giving anyone their money back.

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plus I would think the people who sold those things on Ebay are not going to be giving anyone their money back.

Yeah, that would be the bad thing about this. I seem to remember something being mentioned back around the time of the ticket lottery about the tickets being non-transferable, but that may not have been sufficiently emphasized by the concert organizers ... if you're going to have such a strict policy, people need to know about it.

 

On the other hand, maybe they did their best to get the word out ... it's not like I was paying attention.

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