re-experienced

Led Zeppelin Experience

Have you ever been re-experienced? The original bands are no longer going concerns, but the music of Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and other classic-rock heroes is evergreen, with younger generations discovering music known well by parents and grandparents. And so, serving nostalgia and new crowds alike, touring road shows Experience Hendrix, Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Experience and Classic Albums Live do big business.

BRAD WHEELER

The Show: Basically a whole lotta Zeppelin, with hard-rock blues (Dazed and Confused, Babe I’m Gonna Leave You, and an encore of Stairway to Heaven included) accompanied by dazzling lighting and effects.

MUSIC

The History: Bonham, who drummed for the one-off Zeppelin reunion in 2007, leads a North American tour on the 30th anniversary of his father’s death.

Led Zeppelin: Release Photographic Autobiography

Guitarist Jimmy Page Led Zeppelin band to release a photographic autobiography. The our self titled book will be released on September 27 and includes 650 photographs by page personally selected.

Genesis Publications report it as a “optical history of his vocation as one of the world’s most iconic to the guitar players”. The book will cost £445 and now is available to pre order from genesis publications.com.

Meanwhile, Page discovered in June that he was recently working on a new album.

Led Zeppelin: Reunion ‘heavy’

At London's 02 reunion Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant has admitted the band’s 2007 reunion was “too heavy” for him, and he avoided partying with Liam and Noel Gallagher afterwards in favour of going for a few drinks on his own.

Robert Plant rejected to party with Liam and Noel Gallagher after the Led Zeppelin reunion concert in 2007. The two former Oasis stars went to the singer’s dressing room after the sell out concert at London’s 02 Arena to have a drink with him but he decided to snub their offer. The 61 year old vocalist who performed alongside fellow surviving members Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, as well as the late John Bonham’s son Jason at the gig told Mojo magazine: "Twenty minutes after we finished, the Gallagher brothers were leaning on the door of my dressing room and one of them said, 'You're the actual feeling thing, you are.' I said, 'I've known that all down the line but I think you required to go a little further round the corridor, next door on the left.' And I went. “I ended up in the Marathon pub, drank four bottles of lager and half a bottle of vodka then went to bed. Because I had to get away from it. I'd done it. Had to go. It was too incredible.”In the past, the rocker has voiced his fears about the surviving members of Led Zeppelin reuniting for a full tour as he doesn’t want to tarnish the group’s legacy. He said: "To visit old ground, it's a very heavy delicate thing to do, and the disappointment that could be there onec you commit to that and the comparisons to something that was basically fired by youth and a different kind of exuberance to now, its very hard to go back and meet that head on and do it justice."

At Mojo Awards Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page celebrated

Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page has been inducted into the Mojo Hall Of Fame at the magazine's award ceremony.
The best album prize won the Singer Richard Hawley, while Kasabian's single Fire was named song of the year.
But Florence and the Machine, who led the field with four nominations before the London event, was overlooked.
Page, who last won a Mojo award for the 2007 Led Zeppelin reunion, revealed he was working on new material with a number of different projects.
He has been taken on by Robbie Williams' management company IE.
He said,"I'm just looking forward to making some music and surprising people with it".
"It won't be just teaming up with lots of people who are (big) names. I've got an idea of something which I've had for a long time and now's the time to do it." But he declined to give further details about his collaborators or his new direction.
Mojo is now the best selling music magazine in the UK, selling more than twice as many copies as NME.
Five winners were voted for by Mojo readers, including best album, best single and best live act. That category saw US act Midlake beat Kasabian, Arctic Monkeys and Florence and the Machine.
A further 16 honorary prizes were handed out. They included the classic album award, which went to The Stone Roses for their 1989 self titled debut LP.
Bassist Mani, who picked up the trophy, said it was "gratefully received".
Asked why there were few new guitar bands making a splash in the way The Stone Roses did, Mani replied: "Bands of my era had a whacked out agenda. They walked it, they lived it, they breathed it.
"(They were) not necessarily the best musicians in the world. I think what's wrong with British music at the moment is people are too career orientated. They're afraid, or record companies will not allow them to take risks, and that just makes everything so uniform." A number of other acts from the 1980s were also honoured, including Marc Almond, Jean Michelle Jarre and Teardrop Explodes.
Teardrop Explodes were due to reunite for the first time in 28 years to accept the Mojo inspiration award, but singer Julian Cope did not turn up.
Keyboard player David Balfe said: "At seven o'clock I was told, 'He's going to be there - he likes to make an entrance.' At eight o'clock, 'He's going to be here.' Then we got a text - and he's not here."
Balfe went on to establish record label Food, which signed Blur.
Mojo editor Phil Alexander said: "The 80s are almost the new 60s. You can hear the influence of that decade everywhere.
"The aspects of the 80s we chose to celebrate at the Mojo Honours List reflect the genuine innovation of that period and I think you sense that the best music made at that time has had a massive impact on the musicians of today, in the same way that the 60s and 70s did previously.
"Somehow, there is a freedom in parts of 80s music that resonates among a new generation of musicians and fans."

Best band ever of Led Zeppelin really

The best band ever of the Led Zeppelin. ‘I’m In A Rock And Roll Band!’ crowned the Seventies rock gods, after boiling it down to a short list of three: Zep, Queen and The Beatles.
All good choices, of course, coming from a longlist of The Clash, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Joy Division, Nirvana, Radiohead, The Rolling Stones & The Smiths. Presumably a lot of names got weeded out along the way but it’s hard to argue with Led Zeppelin, an incredible coming together of nice musicians who pushed and pulled rock music in a host of new directions while fundamentally defining what it meant to be a hard, heavy, sexy rock band.
But personally, I would put them third on the list. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones are the bands who set almost the entire parameters for rock music in the Sixties. They remain the quintessential rock bands, and everything that followed is a kind of offshoot, either by reacting against them, or following through on their inspiration. Led Zeppelin certainly took up the baton and charged into the Seventies, but by that time the core of what it meant to be a rock band had already been defined.
I was talking this morning to the great English folk and rock guitarist Richard Thompson (he’s curating the Meltdown festival which starts this week). I made an observation about how rarely you hear the electric guitar in modern pop records, to which he retorted, “Good, its about time”. His argument was that the truly original and creative use of the guitar dominated rock template was essentially over by 1971, but its visceral and commercial entreaty is so great it has lingered on long past its sell by date.

Robert Plant’s New Band Has an Old Name.

Robert Plant still isn’t reuniting Led Zeppelin, but he is digging deep into his past for the name of his next project. Coming off a successful collaboration with the bluegrass singer and fiddler Alison Krauss, Mr. Plant, left, will next hit the road with a group called the Band of Joy, a name cribbed from the 1960s group from Birmingham, England, in which he performed with the future Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham.

In a news release Mr. Plant said the lineup for the new Band of Joy would include the singer Patty Griffin, the instrumentalist and vocalist Darrell Scott, the bassist Byron House, the drummer Marco Giovino and the guitarist Buddy Miller. The band will begin a 12-city tour on July 13 in Memphis and conclude on July 31 in Miami; it is also preparing an album.

UNRELEASED LED ZEPPELIN RECORDING DISCOVERED AT CAR BOOT SALE

A previously undiscovered bootleg of a 1971 Led Zeppelin gig has been unearthed at a car boot sale.

The gig, from the band's 1971 show at St Matthew's Baths Hall in Ipswich features tracks including 'Immigrant Song', 'Whole Lotta Love', 'Stairway To Heaven', 'Rock & Roll', and 'Black Dog'.

Bargain hunter Vic Kemp bought the CD bootleg at a car boot sale in Portman Road, Suffolk, and told the Evening Star that he picked it up for just "two or three pounds".

He explained: "I was going through a stand of CDs at the car boot at Portman Road and the guy who was selling them said, "you might be interested in this"."

Kemp continued by saying that the gig "must have been recorded by someone standing at the front with a microphone. You can hear Robert Plant talking to the audience quite clearly."

It's currently unclear whether any duplicate recordings of the tape have been made.