by Mick Wall
Opening with ‘The Song Remains The Same’, and finishing more than three hours later with ‘Stairway To Heaven’, which Plant mucked up the lyrics to – deliberately, some speculated – no-one in the crowd could have guessed at the tensions whirling about the stage like the giant pyramid of green lasers surrounding Page during his violin bow showcase – now used as the prelude to ‘In The Evening’. Jonesy’s bass wasn’t even switched on for the first three numbers (due to a technical fault that took time to repair). And when Plant launched into a garbled speech halfway through the first show, concluding, ‘We’re never going to Texas anymore…but we will go to Manchester,’ he did so while eyeing Grant at the side of the stage. ‘He was in a difficult frame of mind,’ said G.
For Jimmy Page, though, this was a great occasion. ‘The first one was very special,’ he told me in 1999, ‘I remember the audience singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” [as the band re-emerged for the encores]. And I mean, that was a very…an extreme emotional moment, you know? It really was incredible, a wonderful feeling and very emotional. There was tears in the eyes, believe me…’ Another fond memory, he said, was of John Bonham’s then thirteen-year-old son, Jason, sitting at his father’s kit bashing away on the drums during the soundcheck. ‘We were doing “Trampled Underfoot” and I was playing along, concentrating on the guitar, and I looked round and there was Jason on the drums! It was so John could go out front and listen to his sound balance. I remember Jason playing and John just standing there laughing.’
Mingling backstage in the VIP area were members of the same punk groups that had spent the past three years slagging bands like Zeppelin off: Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols, Mick Jones of The Clash, Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders…Not that Jimmy said he noticed. ‘To be honest with you, I didn’t mix with anybody. I spent most of my time being on my own, vibing up for the show. Even the other bands that were on, like Keith and all of that…I mean, I love Keith, but I remember I didn’t even get to see him.’ Also in the crowd was a teenage band from Sheffield named Def Leppard, who saw the first show and decided, as guitarist Steve Clark later told me, ‘That we’d just witnessed the Second Coming,’ then drove back to Sheffield and signed their first record contract with Phonogram Records the very next day. Years later, Robert Plant would look back on Knebworth and sigh. ‘Although we were supposed to be the arch criminals and the real philanderers of debauchery and Sodomy and Gommorah-y, our feet were much more firmly on the ground than a lot of other people around. But you wouldn’t have believed that to see us swaggering about at Knebworth because Knebworth was an enormous, incredible thing. I patrolled the grounds the night of the first gig – I went out with some people in a jeep – and people pushed the stone pillars down, with the metal gates attached, because they wanted to get in early. Those gates had been there since 1732 and they just pushed them over. It was a phenomenally powerful thing.’
More, however, was expected from the second show a week later. But it was not to be. Reneging on his promise to see Bannister ‘all right’ over the lack of ticket sales, Grant now demanded the band be paid in full – on the basis that, as Grant’s accountant Joan Hudson, told the promoter, ‘you did have 250,000 last Saturday at the first show, so of course there will be plenty over to pay the band in full for the second show.’ What’s more, G wanted the money now, in advance of the second show. Aghast, Freddy and his wife and business partner Wendy demanded a meeting with Peter in person, which was duly arranged for the following day at Horselunges. But with Grant behaving ‘rather like a character in a Tarantino film’, the meeting quickly degenerated into threats of violence – and worse. Convinced the Bannisters were lying about the number of fans at the first show – Freddy insisting there were no more than 104,000 tickets sold, G sticking to his claim of ‘a quarter million’ – and Wendy ‘close to tears’, Grant suddenly ‘jumped up and began waving his fist in her face. “Don’t get smart with me,” he yelled.’
The Bannisters, now frightened for their lives, got up and left immediately. But worse was to follow. The next day an American purporting to represent Grant and Zeppelin, turned up at their home. Clad in a ‘black suit, black shirt and dark sunglasses’, he looked like ‘a typical Mafia bully boy,’ says Freddy. ‘Although I think he was probably just a private detective, there was all this talk of “people from Miami”. Then afterwards he just sat outside the house in this big black car with tinted windows. It was very upsetting.’ Accompanied by ‘a rather seedy-looking Englishman introduced to me as a former Metropolitan Police superintendent,’ the pair claimed to have aerial photographs of the first show that had been analysed by NASA scientists, ‘proving there were a quarter of a million people there’. Seated now over lunch at a smart Chalk Farm restaurant, Freddy laughs at the memory. ‘I mean, really! What rot! Even if it were true, how on earth would we have fit a quarter of a million people into thirty-odd acres? They would have to have been standing on top of each other.’
Again, the matter didn’t rest there, and the following day – forty-eight hours before the second show – Grant turned up at the Bannisters’ home in person, accompanied by the American and ‘a great bull of a man’ introduced as their driver but clearly there, in Freddy’s view, ‘to add an air of intimidation’. However, Grant was more amenable than before, and while insisting that he still didn’t believe there were less than a quarter of a million people at the first Knebworth show, he told them he was prepared to reduce Zeppelin’s fee for the second show, in order to allow the rest of the bands on the bill to be paid off. There was, however, one proviso: he would be taking over the running of the show from the Bannisters and putting his own ‘people’ on the gates. Freddy was ‘furious’ but agreed. ‘I didn’t see that we had much choice,’ he says now, ‘and frankly I’d had enough by then anyway. I just wanted the whole thing to be over.’
Even though the crowd, by Freddy’s estimation, was ‘roughly a third’ what it had been a week before, Zeppelin’s second show should have been better, technically, the band having overcome some of their nerves. However, the performance was desultory by comparison, the mood far less buoyant than it had been at the first show. As Jimmy put it to me years later: ‘It wasn’t horrendous, the second show. It was a very fine show, but the first one had the edge on the second, definitely.’ There were also strange vibes front and back. It rained heavily and the New Barbarians reputedly refused to go on until they had been paid, causing a long delay. When, late in the afternoon of the second show, Joan Hudson confirmed that the total number of tickets sold for the event came to no more than the 40,000 Freddy had predicted, ‘rather than lightening the atmosphere [it] seemed to make it worse’, Grant furious no doubt to be so starkly confronted by the awful truth. The years that had elapsed between those five sold-out Earl’s Court shows and these two undersubscribed Knebworth events had taken their toll, not just in terms of personal cost, but in the sheer weight of history. The world had not hung on for Robert Plant’s leg to heal or his heart to mend; nor had the world shown patience while Page, Grant and Bonham got deeper and deeper into their own personal drug hells. Most of all, rock music had shown that it was quite prepared to move on with or without Led Zeppelin. Far from being the glorious comeback Jimmy and G had envisaged, Knebworth sounded the first sombre toll of the death knell for the band. From here on in it would be downhill all the way…
‘It was all such a shame,’ says Freddy Bannister now, ‘and all so unnecessary. When I first knew Peter, as well as his natural astuteness and innate charm, he had judgment and taste that belied his humble origins. I am sure that he would have been successful in almost anything he undertook, not just in the music business, but also as an international art or antique dealer. But he changed over the years. Drugs changed him, success changed him. If I’d have known this I wouldn’t have done the last Knebworth shows…’ He breaks off into a sigh.
It’s a remarkably philosophical attitude from someone whose dealings with Grant and Zeppelin, he says now, ‘b
asically put us out of business’. The Zeppelin Knebworth shows were his and Wendy’s last as promoters. A month later, the American had demanded another meeting, this time at the Dorchester Hotel in London, where he asked Freddy to sign a pre-typed letter – later reproduced in a page advert in Melody Maker – absolving Grant and the band from responsibility for any ill-effects of the Knebworth shows. News of some of the bad feeling backstage had begun filtering out and, as Bannister later wrote, after the suspended jail sentences Grant, Bonham and Cole had received for their part in the Oakland debacle, ‘it wouldn’t be that easy for them to obtain American work permits and if I made too much fuss about the way I had been so unjustly treated, it would probably aggravate an already delicate situation.’ In fear of his life – ‘By this time Peter Grant was in such a terrible state, both mentally and physically, we thought he was on the way out and would be delighted to take us with him’ – he reluctantly signed the statement.
The final twelve months of their existence were far from good ones for Led Zeppelin. Just two months after Knebworth, a nineteen-year-old photographer name Philip Hale died of a heroin overdose at Page’s Plumpton mansion. The matter made the British papers briefly; had it happened five years before, when the group was at the zenith of its popularity, this would not have been the case. Now, at the fag end of the decade they had once ruled, they were so far off the media radar it barely rated a mention outside the provincial press. An inquest was held in Brighton, at which Page was required to give evidence: the outcome a verdict of ‘misadventure’. The hearings happened to coincide with the Melody Maker Readers’ Poll Awards, which the band had been invited to attend, having swept the board. The band may not have been popular enough to sell out two nights at Knebworth but there were still more than enough fans to vote for them. The MM’s trendy young staff were not best pleased, but the MM’s readers – the kind that could be counted on to vote in such polls – were not like those of the much more punk-radical NME and still liked their rock gods to be long-haired and exceptionally good on their instruments. As if to rub it in, all of the band bar Page attended the ceremony; the first time they had done so since 1971. Plant driving himself in his Land Rover; Bonzo and Jonesy turning up in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce; the latter in a witty Rock Against Journalism badge (ha, yeah…). Dave Lewis, who was also there, recalls ‘they told everyone that Jimmy was on holiday in Barbados, but the truth was he was at the inquest for Philip Hale. Jimmy definitely got away with that one…’ At the party afterwards, a drunken Bonham staggered around yelling that The Police should have won the Best Band Award and began singing ‘Message In A Bottle’ at the top of his voice. As ever, Bonzo saw to it that nobody would forget him in a hurry. On 29 December that year, all but Page appeared at the UNICEF charity show, Rock For Kampuchea, at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, Jimmy’s absence again explained as being on ‘holiday’. And again, nobody from the press batted an eye, nor cared overmuch either way…
There was to be one last hurrah when, six months later, the band, seemingly out of the blue, embarked on a three-week tour of Europe, beginning with the modestly-sized Westfallen Halle in Dortmund, Germany, on 17 June. Informally dubbed by the band as the ‘Cut The Waffle’ tour, gone were the lasers, big screens, smoke bombs and lights, in their place a stark black backdrop, a greatly reduced PA and the decision to drop lengthy show-stoppers like ‘Dazed and Confused’, ‘No Quarter’, ‘Moby Dick’, even Page’s violin showcase: anything that might be construed in the post-punk world as ‘waffle’. Even the venues were scaled down; the smallest theatres they had performed in since 1973. The clothes the band now wore on stage also reflected their painful attempts to contemporise their image; out went the flared jeans and open-necked jackets and shirts; in came straight-legged trousers and regular shirts, even the occasional ‘skinny’ tie. And they had all had a haircut. All of which had the converse effect. Instead of making them look young and trendy, suddenly, Led Zeppelin looked very, very old.
The problems that still surrounded them were also not new. Despite reports now claiming he was in fine form musically, three numbers into the show in Nuremberg on 27 June, Bonham collapsed behind his kit and the rest of the show had to be cancelled. He only just about made it through the rest of the tour. According to Cole – whose own heroin habit was now so out of control Grant had omitted him from the tour – Bonzo was taking smack right up to the start of the tour. Could it be he was still withdrawing when he collapsed in Nuremberg? The band have never confirmed nor denied the stories. Plant later told me, in fact, that Bonzo played beautifully on that tour.
He wasn’t well, though, was he, I asked Plant in 2005? ‘No. He collapsed…I don’t know what happened. I know he had to eat fifty bananas immediately. He had no potassium in him. You see, the only reason that we ever had a doctor around [on tour] in Led Zeppelin was to get some Quaaludes. So we never had anybody checking us up saying, “Oh man, the blood test says you’re really low in minerals.” I mean, every day now I have omega 3 oil for my joints so that I can play tennis and [perform well]. But we had no thought about that then. It was a very, very large Jack Daniel’s and Coke – and on and on and on.’
Bonzo was joined on stage for the penultimate show of the tour at the Olympiahalle in Munich by Simon Kirke of Bad Company, who jammed with him on ‘Whole Lotta Love’. Kirke recalled: ‘The last time I saw [Bonzo] he was packing up little dolls he had collected from different countries for his daughter Zoë, wrapping up these little dolls, one from Austria, one from Switzerland…’ The final show of the tour was at the Eissporthalle in Berlin on 7 July, the band responding to punk’s accusations of obsolescence by cutting down on the more ‘improvisational’ aspect of what till then was regarded as the quintessential, over-the-top Zeppelin live experience, in favour of a more down-to-earth approach that saw Page bantering with the audience and – unheard of till then – actually introducing songs personally from the stage.
‘The state of mind was this,’ Jones told Dave Lewis, who followed the tour in person, ‘let’s sharpen up, cut the waffle out, take a note of what’s going on and reinvent ourselves…it did that seem Robert and I were holding it together, while the others were dealing with other matters. The thing was it seemed to be such a shame to let it go down the toilet.’ For Robert, it was all about showing they’d ‘learned a hell of a lot from XTC and people like that. I was really keen to stop the self-importance and the guitar solos that lasted an hour. We cut everything down and we didn’t play any song for more than four-and-a-half minutes.’ Or as he told me years later, ‘By the late Seventies, everything had become so overindulged, not just with the drugs, which it was, but the music itself. It had gone from this tremendously exciting burst of energy at the end of the Sixties, to this overindulgent monster looking for a place to die.’ Something he still wanted to save Zeppelin from doing.
The other thing he was still trying to avoid on that 1980 tour was the decision to return to America that he knew the others were desperate for him to agree to. On the way home from the European dates, he finally relented and within days Grant had already formulated the next US campaign, giving it the working title: ‘Led Zeppelin: The 1980s Part One’. Plant did, however, lay down some strict deal-breaker conditions: no tour should take him away from his family for longer than a month; the band would play a maximum of two shows back-to-back followed by a day off; and, as with the European tour, Super-domes were out, more modest venues in; the aim to re-establish ‘contact’ with the audience (and, by definition, themselves). Grant and the others wearily complied. ‘I reckoned once Robert got over there and got in the swing of things he’d be okay,’ said Grant.
Scheduled to open in Montreal on 17 October, there would be a further twenty shows climaxing with four nights in Chicago in November. ‘Europe was “Let’s please Robert cos he won’t go to America,”’ says Dave Lewis. ‘Once he agreed to do America, though, everything kicked up a gear again.’ He recalls talking on the phone to a delighted Bonham and b
eing in the Swan Song office while Jimmy was there looking at a model of what was to be the new American stage show. ‘After all the incoherence of the past few years, it was like all systems go again.’
Well, almost. Behind the scenes, Bonham was the one now panicking at the thought of returning to America. Whether it was the prospect of leaving home again which depressed him is unclear, but according to insiders, he had now kicked his heroin habit and was taking a pill called Motival, a mood-altering drug designed to reduce anxiety. He was, however, still drinking heavily. It was in this state of mind that he told Plant on the eve of rehearsals for the US tour: ‘I’ve had it with playing drums. Everybody plays better than me. I’ll tell you what, when we get to the rehearsal, you play the drums and I’ll sing.’