Led Zeppelin
O2 Arena, London
10 December 2007
by Alissa Ordabai
By Alissa Ordabai
(SugarBuzz London)
SugarBuzz Magazine
Pixs courtesy of Getty Images
The magic that has been missing from rock music ever since Led Zeppelin broke up in 1980, was finally revived on December 10 at the O2 arena in London where Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and John Paul Jones have reunited for a one-off show to honour the memory of their mentor Ahmet Ertegün, Atlantic Records founder who signed the band way back in 1968. The most wanted reunion in the history of rock became a grandiose, dignified affair, confirming this band's unyielding reputation of rock's overlords supreme. Once they came on stage, performances of their praiseworthy support acts – Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings and Foreigner – became a blurred memory, such was the grandeur of the vast, larger-than-life presence of the headliners.
If anything, memory wouldn’t have been the key to enjoying tonight’s concert, because the only way to get into it was to stay in the moment and forget about associations and nostalgia. Any comparisons with the band’s past would have been nonsensical, as on the night Led Zeppelin strived toward a purpose beyond legend and remembrance, playing with full consciousness of their true goal, which has always been to transmit the immediate impulse and the immediate sensation. And in that sense the show was a complete success. The spiritual power of their songs and the band’s air of mystery were there on the night, and that was all the audience wanted to witness, not fretboard exercises or vocal acrobatics.
The band's musicianship to this day is remarkable, despite Plant’s diminished vocal powers and the rust that transpires in Page’s technique. Jason Bonham, who that evening replaced his diseased father John Bonham on the drums, has an unerring sense of rhythm, and while his drumming is no match to the ferociousness of the rhythmic designs of his genius father, he still managed to provide a reliable foundation to the band's intricate compositional blueprint.
The opener Good Times, Bad Times was recognised by the 22,000-strong crowd immediately, John Paul Jones and Jason Bonham swinging the bouncy beat with confidence and aplomb, revealing the amount of time that has really gone into rehearsals for the show. It took John Bonham's absence to make me realise for the first time how much of the gravitas of Led Zeppelin rhythm section has always been down to Jones. It takes a less exuberant drummer than John Bonham to make Jones's bass parts really stand out, and tonight he sounded tremendous, providing all the support that the band needed, but at the same time going beyond mere backing function. Jones achieves this not by playing lead on the bass, but by colouring the sound of the band with compelling, august sonority without which Led Zeppelin's claim to full mastery of the dark side of musician's art would never have been so compelling.
Plant’s voice instantly surprised with its power and freshness, showing that it takes a certain song to bring a singer into a realm beyond his current personal dispositions. At times it felt like it wasn't Robert Anthony Plant wailing and whooping, but a universal force of nature manifesting itself through his voice, which despite having taken a considerable battering over the years, has now gained emotional depth and authority that can only be achieved after being on a life journey as tough and protean as Plant's.
The guitar’s lack of fluidity also became noticeable soon, but the main attraction of seeing Page play live has always been his distinct musical eccentricity, not virtuosity, and his personal vision of guitar craft to this day remains untouched, no matter what changes his technique has undergone. The sharp, twisting angle of the way he approaches his solos is still there, as well as the way in which his idiosyncratic phrasing continues to bring out the emotional core of the music.
By the third number, Black Dog, things really took off the ground, the band swaying it hard and tense, the audience singing back, and the atmosphere escalating to the point of elated frenzy. It amazed me how strong they began to sound by that point, Plant hitting a range we haven’t heard him push into in the last 15 years, bringing back dimensions of his personality that haven't been seen for so many years until now.
In My Time of Dying proved that Led Zeppelin have always understood blues better than any other rock band, at the same time managing never to limit themselves by its canons. When Page and Plant feel like playing blues, they are unmatched, but while they excel at the genre, their creative genius begins to really unravel once they depart from it. The fact that Led Zeppelin remain the most eclectic band that has walked the earth, was highlighted by the next number they played, For Your Life. This song has never been performed live before, and it was fascinating to hear the band wield the whopping syncopes of this angular, weighty Janus-faced piece, alternating the emphasis on blues and rock features of this cross-genre colossus.
By contrast, No Quarter turned into a sophisticatedly enigmatic number, showing how careful balance of the rules of juxtaposition always leads this band to natural internal harmony. Page is still fond of the dark, and still amazes by how he can put so much mystery into a simple rock riff. His guitar spoke in a weary, dark voice, contrasted by the subtlety and the light of Jones’s piano solo, the combination of the two giving off a singular, overcast feel which to this day remains unreplicated in rock.
Led Zeppelin are capable of going through an infinite array of moods within just a few hours, and Since I’ve Been Loving You took the audience into another realm altogether - still capable of inducing shudders, still capable of stirring volatile emotions, still as pure and authentic as if it has been written yesterday. If there is one piece of music that proves that the proverbial English understatement has never been a consideration to these musicians, it is this number. And while the heartbreaking blues cry of Page's guitar and the story he told with his solo were soul-wrenchingly brilliant, what really shone about this number was how he managed to sustain his infallible harmonic sensibility throughout this piece, regardless of the volatility of the emotions, confirming once again that he has always been a composer first and a guitar player second.
But you should never underestimate this band's versatility, because the epic slow-burner Dazed and Confused turned things around, spotlighting Page this time as a guitar craftsman, with his trademark violin bow routine just one of the tricks he had up his sleeve for this song. Still, no matter how serious the responsibility is on Page to carry the weight of all guitar parts in each song, his imagination always takes primacy over technique, and this is what this number has shown, Page's impulsive flights of fancy taking him through a range of delineations from veiled menace to raucous head-on assault.
The show had no highlights, because every song they played was a gem - compelling, different from all others, and totally captivating to the audience. Stairway to Heaven, of course, couldn't have been omitted from tonight's set list, and neither could have been Kashmir. During Stairway to Heaven Plant adopted an intimate, reflective tone, with whiffs of forlorn regret transpiring in the creases of his voice. Page abandoned the traditional build-up approach to this solo and instead produced a swirl of notes on his double-neck, with parts of the original solo still recognisable, some parts omitted and some deliberately mangled. Kashmir, a symphony collapsed into 15 minutes, was where Wagnerian grandeur met the hypnotic flow of blues and the trance of eastern harmonies. There was grandeur and dignity to the way the band performed this number, Page and Plant responding to each other's emotional movements with agile precision, their analogy of opposites resonating with depth throughout the vast dimension of the song. Plant gave a poetic, inspired vocal performance, and you took him at his word as he sang, "I'll take you there", because on the night he had, his voice floating majestically over the epic harmony, transporting the audience into a time and a place none of us could have visited without him. And Jason Bonham’s drums at times sounded erringly like his father’s, so seamlessly he cohered with the rest of the band and the spirit of the piece.
The concert finished with two ball-breaking colossuses: Whole Lotta Love and Rock'n'Roll. The booming granite-block riff of Whole Lotta Love reverberated across the huge arena with ground-shaking resonance, giving the audience the chills and igniting the flame all at the same time. Plant sounded unmistakably like himself, his voice soaring above the bedrock of the rhythm section and the relentless guitar. Page's growling leads spat volatile fire, time and again denting the relentless pace of the song with free-form improvisation. Once it was over, the audience went into a deafening applause, completely exhausted and satisfied, with nothing more to ask for, and this is when the band launched into Rock'n'Roll, which turned into the best song of the set. Spontaneous and emerging from several points, it swung with awe-inspiring magnificence, tight, but at the same time wonderfully spontaneous. Page was an awesome sight, chopping out rough, fierce leads with his guitar strapped at knee level, moving freely and impulsively, like true guitar hero should, unaffected by time or any other considerations. The most remarkable part of his performance though was the balance he was striking between his rhythm and lead parts - something you learn though years and years of playing in a one-guitar band. There was a sense of unsettling, restless urgency to the way the crowd sang along, maybe because everyone knew that the end of the show was almost there. The drum-avalanche ending was indeed the end of the concert, leaving the crowd unable to stop applauding and with one single question burning in everyone's mind: Will we ever see them play together again?