64 3pickup
When tickets for Zeppelin's Earl's Court shows
went on sale on 19 April 1975 they sold out
in two hours. The most expensive tickets
were �2.50, which in current prices that's like
seeing the biggest band in the world for �14!
Audio-Visual: Six songs from Earl's
Court compiled from footage shot on the
24th and 25th are available on the official
Led Zeppelin DVD. All five nights have
circulated on bootleg audio and there is
bootleg video film of the 24th and 25th.
Lights out in London...
At 8.00pm on May 24th the lights were cut and D.J. Nicky Horne stepped up
to the mic (one of five DJs chosen) to introduce the band. Within seconds
the technicolour thunder of `Rock and Roll' pinned everyone to their seats.
Close-ups of the action relayed to the giant video screen hung above the stage
(a very rare feature of rock concerts during the 70s). As the hundreds of photos
testify, when did Led Zep ever look more definitively themselves, with Plant all
blonde mane, blue jeans, bare chest, and Page slithering his way round stage-
right in the black embroidered dragon suit. `Rock and Roll' segued straight into
the low-slung Les Paul sleaze of `Sick Again'. The sound came off the back wall
of the arena like a perpetual storm. `Over The Hills' was blue-lit for the quasi-
acoustic intro before crashing into the hard rock verse. `In My Time of Dying'
was a bottleneck frenzy punctured by cavernous pauses. Page's legendary
cherry red Gibson EDS 1275 doubleneck came out for the high-velocity
excitement of `The Song Remains The Same'. `Kashmir''s slow caravanserai
took on a hypnotic force, its epic drum-beat magnified by the cavernous reverb
of the vast Earl's Court arena.
About half-way through the mood of the show changed. Jones played a
classical-style piano solo in a 20-minute `No Quarter'. Its Gothic melodrama
gave way to the poignant `Tangerine' and the sunny intimacy of a three-song
acoustic set that made Earl's Court feel almost like a folk club. That was the lull
before another storm: the massive contrast from acoustic to the electric
Led-funk of `Trampled Underfoot'. A thirty-minute (!) `Dazed and Confused'
was Page's showcase with violin bow, green lasers and dry ice, and featured a
stunning version of `Woodstock'. John Bonham's showcase `Moby Dick'
mainly consisted of a 20 minute drum solo and even played by the mighty
Bonzo it went on way too long. But the energy picked up again toward the end
of `Stairway', with the band leaving the stage with mirror-balls wheeling stars
across the arena. Encores came but for many rushing to get last trains home
the last they heard of Led Zep was the Theremin wig-out of `Whole Lotta Love.'
At Earl's Court Zeppelin both met and side-stepped people's expectations.
The band offered epic musical journeys, not only headbanging slam-crash
songs. But after Earl's Court things would never be the same for them. On
the last night Plant ad-libbed `welcome to the last concert in England for a
considerable time ... There's always the 1980s'. How ironic that was to be. A
couple of months later, on 4th August in Rhodes, Plant was injured in a severe
car crash. Led Zep were off the road until 1977 and never recovered the vitality
they displayed at Earl's Court. PM

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