Credit: Alamy

What did Led Zeppelin play at their first concert?

Thu 7 September 2023 6:00, UK

On September 7th, 1968, a modest crowd of young Danish music fans piled into the Gladsaxe Teen Club to see The Yardbirds perform. Tickets cost seven Danish Kroner, and the capacity of the club was roughly 1,200. Any true Yardbird devotees were probably disappointed to see that the band who played that night were only “The Yardbirds” in name. In fact, they weren’t even that – they were technically billed as “The New Yardbirds”. No one knew it at the time, but this would be the first live performance for the band that would eventually become Led Zeppelin.

Two months prior, the final lineup of The Yardbirds played their last gig together at the Luton College of Technology in Bedfordshire. Drummer Jim McCarty and vocalist Keith Relf wanted to go in a more acoustic direction, while bassist Chris Dreja wished to pursue a career as a photographer. That left just guitarist Jimmy Page to put together a new lineup in order to fulfil the contractually obligated concerts that The Yardbirds still had scheduled for Scandinavia.

Page sought out Terry Reid for the vocalist position, but Reid declined, instead suggesting a 19-year-old singer by the name of Robert Plant. In turn, Plant recommended his old bandmate John Bonham for the drum stool. Page had been friendly with fellow session musician John Paul Jones for a number of years, and when Dreja dropped out of the project, Jones inquired about the vacancy. With that, the first and only lineup of Led Zeppelin was complete.

On August 12th, less than a month before their first scheduled gig, the four members gathered in a small practice space on the West End to play together for the first time. “We first played together in a small room on Gerrard Street, a basement room, which is now Chinatown,” Jones remembered in 1990. “There was just wall-to-wall amplifiers and a space for the door – and that was it. Literally, it was everyone looking at each other – ‘what shall we play?’ Me doing more sessions, didn’t know anything at all. There was an old Yardbirds’ number called ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’… The whole room just exploded.”

“We had a good play that day and it went quite well,” Bonham recalled in 1972. “Even the first time we’d played together, there’s a feeling when you’re playing whether it’s going to be any good, and it was good – very good indeed. But at that time I had no idea it would achieve what it has.”

With that, the band set about putting together a setlist from which they could pick songs from. Old Yardbirds tracks were largely discarded in favour of new material and old blues standards. The exact setlist from the first concert isn’t fully known, but the band’s standard repertoire included most of the material that would make up the band’s debut album Led Zeppelin, released in January of 1969.

Some of the only holdovers from the previous Yardbirds incarnation were ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ and ‘For Your Love’, although the latter song might have only been rehearsed instead of fully played. Page had his guitar solo feature, ‘White Summer/Black Mountain Side’, and Bonham had a drum solo, then known as ‘Pat’s Delight’ named after his wife. The band had already known blues songs like ‘I Can’t Quit You Babe’ and ‘You Shook Me’. They were also messing with new takes on folk tracks like ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ and ‘Dazed and Confused’.

“They don’t cheer too madly there, you know?” Page explained in December of 1968. “We were really scared, because we only had about fifteen hours to practice together. It was sort of an experimental concert to see if we were any good, I guess.”

There seems to be solid evidence that songs like ‘How Many More Times’ and ‘Communication Breakdown’ were in place by this time. Page also suggested that a song titled ‘Flames’ was played, but this couldn’t have been a one-and-done considering how the song disappeared when the band returned to England. The Garnet Mimms song ‘As Long As I Have You’ also seems to have been included, but this isn’t known for certain.

By the time the band staged their first tour of the UK in the last three months of the year, the band had streamlined their setlists to favour the material that would eventually appear on their debut album. Around this time, fans started to create bootleg recordings of the band’s concerts, a practice that would pick up in earnest once the band arrived in America at the end of 1968.

Since now written setlists are known to have survived, and no audio of the concert is known to exist, the exact setlist of Led Zeppelin’s first concert seems to have been lost to history. But the bits and pieces that can be put together suggest a young blues band playing extremely loudly and passionately, soon to discard the material and name of Page’s previous outfit in favour of finding their own identity.