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about him, as though he kept a part of himself locked away at all times.

      This, then, was the band. Two diffident southern Englanders with experience beyond their years, two garrulous lads from the Midlands as green as they were driven. To begin with, Page called them the New Yardbirds, since it afforded them both instant recognition and the opportunity to take on some bookings left over from his old group.

      The reaction in Britain to them was lukewarm at best. The weekly music paper NME named their singer ‘Bob Plante’, and in Plant’s own neck of the woods John Ogden at the Express & Star newspaper was even less engaged.

      ‘I don’t think I even wrote about it,’ he says. ‘I thought the Yardbirds were old hat. It seemed to me like another bloody lost cause for him.’

      The four of them knew differently. This much had been clear from that initial rehearsal. They had thrown themselves into ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’’, a staple of the Yardbirds’ live sets, and the force of their collective sound had shocked them. It became more apparent still during the first gigs they did together that September. These were club dates in Denmark and Sweden, 40-minute sets a night, the songs hand-picked by Page: blues covers, tracks he had done with the Yardbirds, and an ominous-sounding dirge called ‘Dazed and Confused’ he had begun messing around with during the end days of that band.

      Each of them understood, no words needing to be spoken, that this was a band apart. It was as if they had captured lightning in a bottle.

      ‘Straight away, we could see the power of it,’ Page told me, years later. ‘It was a very intense thing. Was it extreme for the time? Good God, yes. The use and employment of electric and acoustic guitars – that hadn’t been done by anyone – or the shaping of the songs. There was something alchemical between the four of us that was totally unique.’

      Plant nodded, adding his own rejoinder: ‘We were really good and we didn’t fuck about.’

      Still buzzing from their short Scandinavian excursion and having been together for just a few weeks, the band trooped into London’s Olympic Studios on 27 September to record their début album. Based in Barnes, on the south-west edge of the capital, Olympic was a small, eight-track studio housed in an old music hall. The Rolling Stones had used it that same summer to record Beggars Banquet.

      As he would do on all their albums Page was producing the sessions, assisted by the in-house engineer Glyn Johns. Plant’s studio experience, like Bonham’s, was limited, so much so that he had to be told to use headphones. Despite this he gave off his usual aura of self-confidence.

      Phill Brown was then a teenage apprentice at Olympic. ‘Glyn Johns was using down-time at the studio for them,’ he recalls. ‘He’d bring them in at weekends, when no one else was using the place, and that’s how they made the record. I met Robert and Jimmy. Robert was very striking. He seemed sort of god-like. As a band they definitely had a vibe to them. They were very focused and full-on. Arrogant isn’t the word but they were self-contained and sure of themselves.’

      Page, however, was the band’s undisputed leader. Since there was no record deal at this point he was funding the sessions out of his own pocket and kept a forensic eye on costs. Plant moaned to Kevyn Gammond, his friend back home, about Page charging him for a plate of beans on toast he had ordered for lunch one day.

      Page did not ease up on this control in the studio, where he took the major role in creating and moulding the songs, although he often tapped into Jones’s arranging skills (Plant, still under contract to CBS, was not permitted writing credits). In his soft-spoken manner Page directed the others, Plant and Bonham in particular. The pair were both then on wages, no more than hired hands. The singer seemed carefree but he feared being replaced at any moment and so was compliant. Bonham was more bullish. It was left to Grant to step in and set the drummer right. ‘Do what this man says,’ he instructed him, ‘or fuck off,’ as Charles Cross reports in Led Zeppelin: Shadows Taller than Our Souls.

      ‘I wanted artistic control in a vice-like grip,’ Page told the writer Brad Tolinski, ‘because I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the band. That first record sounded so good because I had gotten so much experience in the recording studio. I knew precisely what I was after and how to get it.’

      Such was Page’s attention to detail and the work ethic he instilled, recording was completed in just thirty hours’ studio time. The sessions had cost a mere £1,782, the shrewdest investment Page would make. Long before the album came out the band that made it had become Led Zeppelin. This dated back to when Page first proposed forming a group to the Who’s rhythm section, Keith Moon telling him it would go down like a ‘lead balloon’.

      For the record’s cover Page chose a screenprint of a burning airship. The stark, explosive nature of the image was fitting. Led Zeppelin was a trailblazing album. Perfect it was not – the material was too much of a mess for it to be that, and not all of it flew. Yet when it took to the air its power seemed almost elemental, Page’s guitar strafing the grunge of ‘Dazed and Confused’, Bonham filling pockets of space on ‘Good Times, Bad Times’ with dazzling flourishes, the revved-up rush of ‘Communication Breakdown’ and the rousing ‘Your Time Is Gonna Come’. In moments such as these, Zeppelin soared.

      Plant shone on ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’, the song that first bonded him to Page. Here it embodied the sense of light and shade that Page intended to be at the band’s core – winsome acoustic passages giving way to full-bore rock, Plant riding the currents of both. Less convincing were two Willie Dixon covers, ‘You Shook Me’ and ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’, Plant as overwrought in his reading of the old bluesman as the band were leaden. He was otherwise somewhat constrained, suggesting little of the wild abandon he had shown with Alexis Korner just months earlier.

      Grant began shopping the album to record labels in the UK. The offices of Island Records were on a floor below his own on London’s Oxford Street, and he pressed a copy upon the label’s founder, Chris Blackwell. Birmingham-born drummer Mike Kellie was then a member of blues-rockers Spooky Tooth and signed to Island.

      ‘We went in to see Chris one day and he handed me this record, telling me there were a couple of guys on it that I knew,’ Kellie recalls. ‘I had no idea who they might be but I took it with me. Those were the days of getting it together in the country and we were living on a farm out in Berkshire. We went back there and put the record straight on.

      ‘Our singer, Mike Harrison, and I had the same reaction to it. We wanted to be in that band. It was the best of everything we’d heard and all we aspired to be. It was only later that I found out it was Robert and Bonzo. To me, Robert sounded just like Steve Marriott on that first record, when Marriott was at his very best.’

      The general reaction to the band continued to be more muted. Grant could not negotiate a deal for them in the UK, and they often met with unresponsive audiences during their first gigs around the country that October and November. If this put Page’s nose out of joint, it was nothing Plant was unused to.

      ‘When I opened up shows for Gene Vincent and the Walker Brothers in the town halls, I was playing to thirty-five people,’ he told me. ‘And that was the zenith of all opportunity. Bonzo and I couldn’t even get in to some of the first gigs we did because we didn’t have a tie on. The fact that we kicked up a gear and got bigger audiences, that was just an act of God.’

      More specifically, it was the act of Grant turning his attentions towards the US that did it for Zeppelin. The Yardbirds still had enough currency there to open doors for him, and when he flew out to New York he was also blessed with good fortune and opportune timing.

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