Led Zeppelin never wanted an official documentary – until now

Robert Plant was always going to be the hardest to crack. In 1969, Led Zeppelin became the biggest band in the world on their own unprecedented terms. No interviews. No promo films. No nonsense. The death of drummer John Bonham ended their story in 1980. Looking back for their journeyman singer in particular has always been anathema.

Led Zeppelin at Bath Festival, 1969.Credit: Courtesy of Madman Entertainment

“When the decision was going to be made whether to proceed or not, the final question was from Robert,” says Allison McGourty, producer of Becoming Led Zeppelin, the first-ever band-authorised documentary, out worldwide this week. “He looked me in the eye, and he said, ‘How are you gonna tell this story? There’s just no footage from that time’.”

He had a point. From the outset, Zeppelin’s leader, Jimmy Page, was adamant his new band would refuse the commercial demands that had stifled bands he’d known as a session guitarist (the Kinks, the Who, the Stones, Bowie, the Yardbirds and plenty more). Manager Peter Grant was renowned for shunning TV, even smashing fans’ cameras lest they sully the purity of the Zeppelin experience.

McGourty and director Bernard MacMahon didn’t blink. “Well, having just managed to make a six-and-a-half-hour story out of American Epic from 1926, before there was even sound or talking pictures ... if anyone can do it, we can do it,” she told him. Plant was in.

It’s no surprise that he, Page and bassist John Paul Jones loved American Epic, the British filmmakers’ multi-award-winning TV series about the dawn of American music recording. Ten years of research had unearthed an incredible trove of sound and vision documenting the blues and folk roots that would inflame a key handful of young musicians across the Atlantic.

English rock band Led Zeppelin in 1969. Credit: Ron Rafaelli 

The filmmakers’ conviction that Becoming Led Zeppelin would be the next step in the American Epic story turned out to be inspired insight. As Page, Plant and Jones open up for the first time about their gritty post-war lives in London and Birmingham, their passion for all things American building to that spectacular year of US conquest in 1969, their joy is often as electrifying as the live footage – found, after all, in another formidable act of archival excavation.

“Led Zeppelin are the end of the American Epic era,” says MacMahon. “What I love about them is they are as mysterious as the Memphis Jug Band and the Carter Family. There are no interviews with them. Just fragments. And film footage is incredibly rare for a group that sold 300 million records. They didn’t do TV. They didn’t do promo. For the Led Zeppelin II album, I counted seven or eight interviews – and this was the biggest band in the world!

“Just like [the 1920s folk and blues pioneers], there’s no pictures of them on their records. They’re nowhere to be seen. The only connection we have with Led Zeppelin is the disc or, if you can get to see a show. That’s it. So they are absolutely of the American Epic [mould], and they are every bit as mysterious and as difficult to put a film together about.”

Led Zeppelin performing at Royal Albert Hall in 1970.Credit: Courtesy of Madman Entertainment

With the surviving trio’s blessings, diaries and address books, McGourty and MacMahon spent five years unearthing material which, as we see on screen, often delights and amazes the band themselves. It includes that rarest of artefacts: an audio interview with John Bonham, discovered in the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra.

“It was so nice to surprise them with that,” MacMahon says. “What’s wonderful about that interview is they’re coming to Australia for the first time, so the interviewer [UK-based 2SM stringer Graeme Berry] makes them talk about their childhoods. He’s very thorough, and he’s brilliant in that wonderful Australian way: he keeps saying, ‘Robert, shut up, let John talk!’ So it’s an Australian gift.”

The joy that radiates from Becoming Led Zeppelin is partly down to the fact that it ends so near the beginning.

With their first two albums riding high, the band’s triumphant homecoming at Royal Albert Hall in January 1970 seals a glorious first act. Stairway To Heaven and Kashmir, hard drugs and death and dark dramas of ego and excess are way off in the future – no small reason, one suspects, for the three survivors’ warm recollections.

Director Bernard MacMahon and producer Allison McGourty at the premiere of Becoming Led Zeppelin in Hollywood this month.Credit: FilmMagic

MacMahon isn’t ruling out a sequel – “if we have another five years free,” he says dubiously – but in terms of his intention, Becoming Led Zeppelin tells the whole story that’s obsessed him since he was a boy in the 1970s.

“When I was 12 years old, in a box of junk, this book turned up,” he says, holding up a paperback titled Led Zeppelin by Howard Mylett. “I had no idea who these people were, but it was the story of these four guys on their individual quests who, midway through the book, meet in this room, and this magical thing happens.

“I found this story inspiring as a kid. I learned from this book. I read it like The Odyssey or Jason and the Argonauts. I thought this could be useful for kids to see: anyone that wants to do anything that’s out of the ordinary. You’ve got to be very dedicated. You’ve got to work with people that maybe you have little in common with. But the whole can become greater than the sum of the parts. That’s Zeppelin.”

Becoming Led Zeppelin is in cinemas from February 7, including select IMAX sessions.

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