The Led Zeppelin gig Robert Plant thought was “horrendous”
Music has always been an art form that is best experienced in a live setting. Ever since the dawn of rock and roll back in the 1950s, performance has been an intrinsic part of the movement, with each new generation of rock musicians attempting to one-up the previous generation by crafting awe-inspiring live experiences. The hard rock and heavy metal scene of the 1970s was particularly good at innovative live shows, with Led Zeppelin leading the charge in that regard.
Formed in the post-hippie age of the late 1960s, from the ashes of blues rock disciples The Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin were out to completely reinvent the sights and sounds of British rock. Pioneering an abrasive new hard rock sound, drawing heavily from the world of blues, Jimmy Page and the gang quickly set about crafting some of the most enduring rock songs of the 20th century. Their 1969 debut instantly set Zeppelin apart from the competition, but it was the band’s live shows which really cemented their legendary reputation.
The first-ever Led Zeppelin gig was a modest affair, taking place at the Gladsaxe Teen Club in Denmark in September 1968, during a period when the group were still operating under the name The New Yardbirds. Despite their relative infancy as a band, though, the proto-Led Zeppelin managed to put on a storming show. Not long after, the band were playing to audiences that dwarfed the attendance of the Danish Teen Club, playing to hundreds of thousands of people all across the globe.
Led Zeppelin’s most infamous concerts occurred at Knebworth Festival in Hertfordshire. These two performances in August 1979 saw Led Zeppelin perform to a total number of attendees exceeding 200,000, reflecting both their intense popularity and their propensity for putting on groundbreaking live shows. Those Knebworth shows confirmed Zeppelin’s position as one of the world’s premier live rock bands, but not all of their performances went entirely to plan.
Playing to colossal stadium audiences certainly has its benefits, predominantly in terms of ticket sales and revenue, but it also brings with it a number of challenges. As you can imagine, four people attempting to create an atmosphere which will fill a room big enough to hold 20,000 people does not always go to plan.
Speaking to Geoff Barton in 1982, Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant expressed his hatred of arena shows. “I can’t play places like Birmingham NEC,” he said. “The only group I’ve seen come over reasonably well there was Dire Straits, and I’ve seen quite a few people, including Dylan, David Bowie and Foreigner. That size of a gig is a little out of order now, in Britain at least.
Nevertheless, Led Zeppelin were among the first groups to make arena tours commonplace. In 1975, for instance, the band performed five nights at Earl’s Court in London, a venue that boasted a capacity of 20,000 attendees. Although these shows marked an important moment in the history of the pioneering hard rock outfit, Plant recognised that the gigs probably weren’t Led Zeppelin’s best. “I mean, when Zeppelin played Earls Court in 1975, the sound was horrendous,” he shared.
Luckily for the band, the atmosphere created by the audience was enough to negate the poor sound quality of Earl’s Court. “There was a kind of furious momentum about that whole gig that pulled us through,” the frontman confirmed. In the decades that followed the break-up of Led Zeppelin, Plant has appeared more often in arena-sized venues than any other size of venue. In truth, arena tours have become somewhat standardised within the music industry, thanks in part to gigs like Led Zeppelin at Earl’s Court.
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