Show Notes
When four symbols replaced a title and Stairway refused the rules
Hosts: Neil & Chris
Duration: ~88 minutes
Release: 12 January 2025
Episode Description
Welcome to another episode of Riffology - the podcast where two mates dissect the albums that shaped music history. This week, Neil and Chris tackle Led Zeppelin's untitled fourth album "Led Zeppelin IV", a record that turned mysterious runes, stairwell drum sounds and an eight-minute epic into the template for what a rock album could be.
What You'll Hear:
- Late Conversion Confessions: Neil owning up to years of dismissing Zeppelin as "old man pub jukebox" music while he chased Slayer and Swedish death metal, and how he finally fell in love with the golden-era 60s/70s records.
- Album-as-Event Culture: How news of a new Zeppelin album was literal front-page material in Melody Maker, the 70s equivalent of a Beyonce drop or royal scandal, and what that says about how seriously albums were treated then.
- Cover Art & Runes: The story behind the nameless sleeve, the crumbling house painting, the four symbols and the label’s horror at releasing a record with no band name or title anywhere on it.
- Headley Grange & Mobile Studios: Life in the house with the Rolling Stones mobile truck outside, writing and recording in hallways and stairwells instead of sterile hotel–studio loops.
- Production Vision: Jimmy Page as producer and orchestrator, balancing Bonham’s explosive drums, Jones’s arrangements, Plant’s vocals and his own guitars so nothing dominates yet everything feels huge.
Featured Tracks & Analysis:
The hosts dig into "Black Dog" and its brain-bending timing, the folk–to–hard rock build of "Stairway To Heaven", and the cavernous groove of "When The Levee Breaks" with its legendary stairwell drum sound. Along the way they unpick John Bonham’s feel, John Paul Jones’s recorder parts that many assumed were Mellotron, and how Page’s production keeps a relatively thin, era-appropriate mix feeling massive and dynamic.
Tangential Gold:
True to Riffology form, expect delightful detours into:
- HMV restraint, three records in hand (including "Motley Crue: Dr. Feelgood" and a repress of "Appetite for Destruction") and the internal monologue of a vinyl addict trying not to get roasted on the podcast.
- Wayne's World, "No Stairway? Denied!" and the whole question of whether a song being overplayed (from "Stairway" to "Enter Sandman") actually makes it any less great.
- Alice Cooper and Joe Elliott as DJ archetypes: rock stars who are still pure music nerds first and evangelists for records outside your teenage era.
- Teenage tribalism, Brutal Truth t-shirts, and the long road from "I will never listen to your old man Dire Straits and Led Zeppelin" to quietly obsessing over Zep IV’s drum sounds.
Why This Matters:
"Led Zeppelin IV" is more than just the album with "Stairway To Heaven" on it. The hosts argue that it captures a band at a rare crossroads: studio-schooled yet rule-free, commercially enormous yet still willing to release a record without their name on the cover. Its blend of hard rock, folk and blues, plus Page's production experiments at Headley Grange, helped rewrite what rock albums could sound like and how seriously they could be treated as art.
Perfect for: Listeners who know the big hits but have never really sat with the whole album, younger rock fans curious why their heroes worship Zep, and anyone ready to drop the "overplayed" baggage and hear "Stairway" like it’s 1971 again.
Transcript
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Hey, hey, mama, is it the way you move, gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove? I die, will you shake that thing, gonna make you burn, gonna make you stay? Hey, baby, when you walk that way, watch honey drip, can't keep away I can't, my brain won't do it, mate. I can't do it. I can't, I can't, that bit there that's just come in. The timey bit. Can't do it. My brain will not make sense of that. Bonham doing the drums. I wonder when they did it, if they did it, they did a lot of it live, didn't they? Yes, but I wondered if they did it, like, like, whether he sang without the drums underneath it. Do you know what I mean? Because you were talking before we started about how, like, obnoxious the timing is on this record and how, like, how, like, weird and crazy the structure. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts my brain. It's, it's, um... It's like, it's like algebra. There's nothing wrong with algebra. You'd like, you'd get that beat there. Welcome to the Monster Shop, I'm Chris. I'm Neil. We're doing Led Zeppelin! Led Zeppelin! We've been talking about doing this for ages. Yeah, yeah. We actually said we were going to do Fat of the Land at some point as well. We're probably, this is, this is probably when we should be doing Fat of the Land, isn't it? By Zebrodigy. And how different record, just, it suddenly just hit me, like, how many podcasts out there? How many people do Led Zeppelin and probably do Prodigy next week? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, they're both massive, aren't they? Yeah, of course they are. Which brings me onto a thing, I guess a confession about this album. That I, like, as a teenager, I like big, nasty, like, Slayer and Exodus and Testament and Anthrax. And then, and then just as I was rolling out of that, I went into Swedish death metal. And all through that, I was listening to Bolt Thrower and Napalm Death. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Brutal Truth. This would have been very cool. I would have, I remember countless times sitting in the pub in Ashby de la Zouche. Yeah. And there would have been an old man with a beard. Yeah. Telling me, I would have had my Brutal Truth t-shirt on. He would have been saying, can't even read what that says. Yeah. Can't hear what they're singing. Yeah. Stupid. Yeah. And then he'd wander over to the jukebox and he'd put like Black Dog on. Yeah. Right. I was like, get lost. Get lost with your old man music. I will never listen to your old man Dire Straits and your Led Zeppelin. I will never, ever listen to that. Yeah. And it really, it's weird. It's kind of really, I guess, like put me off it. And it probably like a decade later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you know? And it would have been for me, the Rolling Stones. Yeah. And absolutely. I still remember it to this day. Absolutely falling in love with the Rolling Stones and just spending the entire day just going through the Rolling Stones back out of the 60s and like a beggar's banquet and all. I just absolutely fell in love with it. And then building this, I don't know, this kind of love of that time, that the music that came out of that time and how, I don't know, I guess how it came from a different era when like it felt like albums and music was treated differently. You know, it wasn't free, like today's albums and today's music is kind of very much a, it's not even a commodity, but it's, it's a thing, it's a thing that you do to do to sell something else, right? Yeah. It feels like the general public are kind of less bothered about the, you know, the obsession that musicians go through. And back in the 60s and 70s was this kind of golden era for me where, you know, an album was a big deal. Like, like this- It was art. Well, this particular album was in the front page press. It was in Melody Maker and it was in the music news, but the fact that Led Zeppelin were going to do a new album, that was like- Huge. Front page news and where they were going to record it was- That's the Kardashians, that's the- Yeah. It's Beyonce, it's that. It is. The way that the general public lap all of that up or something to do with the royal family or whatever, the way they lap that up, you know, that's what this was. This was- These guys were rock stars. They were celebrities. Actual rock stars, yeah. They were, you know, really important to culture. It's incredible. And I was reading, I've been in, I've been at a children's party today, Chris, in Birmingham. You survived the children's party. I did, I dropped off the child. Yeah. And then I went, you'll be really proud of me. I went, I ran around the corner and there was a HMV. Yeah. And I didn't buy any records. Really? I picked three records up. That surprises me. And then I remember, I thought, if I buy these, Chris is going to take the piss. So I put them back. And then I went and sat in a coffee shop. What were they, just out of interest? I found Motley Crue, Dr. Feelgood. Yeah. This one, Led Zeppelin 4. Oh yeah. Or Untitled, as it's officially called. And what was the other one? Oh, I was, it was the repress of Appetite for Destruction. Because I've got the original of that, but I've not got the repress. Oh, so you want two. You obviously want two. Yeah. One isn't good enough. No. You want one more. No. I've got one to look at. But I didn't. I'll put them back. But I went and sat in, in the coffee shop, right? So I'm sitting in the coffee shop and I thought I'll- In HMV? No, around the corner from there. Oh, sorry. They do coffee shops in HMV. They do waterstones sometimes, don't they? I don't know. I don't know. It was a Starbucks-y coffee store. I didn't even look at it. I just walked to the thing and said, Earl Grey. Yeah. And then I sat in the corner. Lady Grey. Yeah, Lady Grey, please. And I sat in the corner and I was reading about the album art. You know, I'm starting to look at doing this, this blog about album art. Yeah, yeah. And I thought, I wonder who did it. And I wonder who got involved in it. So I'm reading about it. And the first article that I found started to talk about how the record label had told the band they couldn't do it. So that essentially they said that releasing an album with no, uh, distinguishable, like marked it. So we didn't say Led Zeppelin anywhere on it. Yeah, yeah. Um, the album itself didn't have a title and the band, um, just came up with these like runes, these symbols. Yeah. They represented each memory. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, and, and literally all they did, like the, the record label, you know, wanted to do big thing. They wanted to do, you know, posters and all this stuff. Um, and in some of the music, I think it was a melody maker. Um, they put the, the symbols on there, but didn't, it didn't say anything else. It's literally imagine like a quarter page. Imagine like a full page and a quarter of that is just a, like a blank white square with the symbol in the middle. Yeah. It doesn't say anything else. So no one knew what they were. Oh, that's cool. It's just really cool. It's just really cool. And, and I read that the band were like, like railing against the music press that were still giving them. Um, cause the band really struggled with the press. They weren't taken seriously. No. What? Sorry. This is my thing. Going through the interviews. Cause we obviously put in these, we ripped these interviews from YouTube and put them in the, in the show. Listen, the, the, the people doing the interviews, they don't, they don't take them seriously. They don't. You hear the record and you go, these are the best musicians around. Yeah. But you, and you don't see, you don't see that. You just see, you just see kind of like, like, like misbehaving naughty boy rockstar. They were misbehaving. They were really bad behaving. They definitely were. But, but yeah, it was, it's incredible. And they, they, they were reacting to the press saying bad things about them and they've got, and we've not got any in here, but there's some lovely clips on YouTube about about the literally arguing with interviewers. Yeah. Yeah. Where the interviewer will say something like, you know, you're not very good. Are you, you know, or, uh, you know, why did you choose to do this? Or why did you not do that? You know, the, you know, and, and, and the, the band reacting, you know, like really defensively, which I don't know. I don't know if it sort of fueled it maybe. Yeah. But we talked about this last week where, you know, there's this, the, the rock stars, you kind of assume that they're just, you know, they're, they're not questioning themselves. Yeah. But when you see that, you know, yeah, it's just phenomenal. And yeah, to see them, uh, like reply back with just this, well, you know, so we're just going to release the music and we're not going to say who, who it was. We're not going to say who it came from and we're going to see, see if it sells. So let's, let's, let's remove us from the equation and let's see how the music does. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's, I just, I don't know. Yeah. Like today you think, oh yeah, yeah. Genius move. Yeah. But at the time, imagine at the time, I don't know. I just think it's phenomenal. And that's the thing you forget is the world at the time. Yeah. You know, Led Zeppelin, kids wear Led Zeppelin shirts. They might not have even heard of Led Zeppelin. heard a song, but they wear their shirts cause it's cool. And they weren't for a while, were they? There were, there was a thing where I think, I think maybe all, all of these kind of legendary artists go through this, but there's a point in time where, you know, they're not the zeitgeist and there's a generation of musicians that have sort of railed against whatever that thing was. Yeah. Which is, you know, the big kind of metal stuff in this case that you were talking about earlier. But what you have got is when you let go of that and discard that and you listen to this record as a piece of art. Yeah. Because that's why, as soon as I listen to it, I'm like, this, this isn't just music to me. This, this record is, is art. And if you'd have, you know, I mean, Dan, Dan Baker, who I talk about probably every week. He's not real. Led Zeppelin are one of his favorite bands and Jimmy Page is one of his favorite all time guitarists from when he was a kid. Wow. I never knew that. No. And, and, and, and, you know, he'd talk about Jimmy Page with reverence. Yeah. Of course. As a guitar player. And I'd be like, I don't really know what the fuss is made to be honest. I heard him play live once. It's all right. Yeah. It's all right. Yeah. And, and then you listen back to this and you go, remember that it was, it was at the time. Remember it was a long, it wasn't. Yeah. Of course. Like what Nuno Betancourt does. No. Or, you know, like Steve Vai or whatever. It's not that kind of thing. And, and then you, but you go back and you listen to, to the stuff and you, and you think, no, no, no, this guy has a road, this guy. Cause I think Jimmy Page was almost a bit of an orchestrator of the group. Yeah. Yeah. And you're right. It's almost like he's got the roadmap of how this whole piece of art works. He's got the kind of full canvas, if you like, and he's, and he's putting the paint where he wants it. And he's, you know, and all the bands of country, all the members of the band of contributing their bit and fulfilling their role. But it's almost like, it feels to me like Jimmy Page is almost like just, just kind of eking it out of everybody a little bit. And he kind of knows the map, knows the way, the way it's going to go. And there's a little bit we're going to do later, which, which is him talking through stairway. And it's exactly that, you know, he, he knows right from the start, how this thing's got to come together. What it's got to do was kind of a whole piece of art and everyone's going to contribute to it in particular ways. The vision. I think he was, he was kind of the main, would you say producer? He was the, yeah, he was. I think there were people around that maybe engineered, but he had this vision of what this thing needed to be. He, he's, he's credited as the producer for, I think all the Zeppelin albums. Right. Okay. Okay. I didn't know that. Yeah. I mean, he had engineer, there were engineers. Um, in fact, there's some lovely, um, there's some lovely bits from his engineers where, where you have that clash of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. His vision against what, what the engineers were doing at the time. Yeah. Because there was some, there's a lot of unconventional things. Um, particularly, um, the, where, you know, the levee breaks. Yeah. And the drum recording. Yeah. So the drum recording was, and it's quite famous now, but it was, it was this thing in a stairwell. Yeah. And mics round it. And I don't know how much extra stuff they put on afterwards, but you could almost hear a delay. Yeah. You know, like it's got a delay on it, but it's got revert, you know, you can hear the room. If you think about it, you, you, you get the delay. Yeah. Just because of how long it takes the sound. Yeah. In a big space. Yeah. You kind of get that automatically. The thing that I think is, is difficult right now is that that's, that was so, uh, impactful. Everyone copied it. Yeah. So, so now when you talk about it, it's like, oh yeah, yeah, I know that. Yeah. Yeah. The time to do something like that was phenomenal and to focus on drum sound. Yeah. You know, the drums were just the drums, you know what I mean? I mean, I say this, but if you, if you listen to, uh, the Beatles albums. Yeah. Uh, you know, the, without getting strung up by all the Beatles fans, but, um, you know, the drums don't have that same focus. So to give up that, um, the, the focus on the production and the sound of the drums to, make them do that. Yeah. The same is to be said across the whole album. I think in the, the tone and the production, I mean, it's thin of, but, but of its time, right? So it's not, you know, super thick and, you know, 20 layers of guitars. Um, and the drums, like John Bonham's drumming is so, there's so many like flourishes and details into it, but at no point do you feel any one instruments overpowering another. No, it's perfectly balanced, isn't it? Yeah. And it's, it's phenomenal to me because you don't like you, some records, when you listen to them, you can hear, you know, when you've, especially when I think you've read a lot about it and you've, you know, you spent time, I guess, analyzing albums, you, you, you can see when the producers ducking stuff and you think, Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, this album for me, you don't. No, everything's got its own space. Yeah, you don't, but it's, it feels really organic. You don't feel like somebody has been in there with a fader and gone, Oh, I'll move that down and I'll move, you know what I mean? It kind of feels like it was just meant to be. It was, you know, that nobody's mucking around with faders and stuff, but everything's, um, got its, got its time in the limelight, if you, if you like. That's a really, there's another really interesting thing about this. Um, and the first is, is, is Headley Grange is called, isn't it? Yeah, Headley Grange was the, that was the house. They lived in this. Yeah. Like, like albums we've covered before, which I, you know, I love, I'm going to have to do this at some point is hire a house and record it, I think. But that was, that was, isn't that? Cause you, you've spent time at Rockfield, haven't you? Yeah. Rockfield's a residential. Yeah. But it's, but it, but that's a, you've got, you know, a place where you, where you live, if you like for a bit and then a place where you live, then a studio where you record. Right. There's a couple of complexes there. Okay. Yeah. And there's a few residential studios that are like that. Yeah. And a studio on the same side. Yeah. But it feels very much like this was, they're in the house and then they're finding the right spaces in the house to do. Well, this was another one where they use the Rolling Stones mobile recording studio, this kind of van full of gear, if you like on, on coasters or casters that they just kind of rolled around. Yeah. And yeah, they, it's interesting in the interviews, hearing them talk about previous albums where they'd, it was in hotels. Yeah. And they said it felt like a conveyor belt. So you would, you would get there into the studio hotel. Yeah. You know, studio, hotel, studio. Yeah. And it just, it's this kind of repetition and it was quite structured and, and to have them in the house together where you said you're all, it feels really organic where, you know, stuff is happening. Yeah. But it's not planned. It's not, it's just like, Oh, I mean, you would go into the rehearsal space and somebody would be working on something. working on something. So it would just be really haphazard that, you know, somebody was working on something and, and, and somebody else would come and sit next to them and develop that. Do you know what I mean? And I, I think it really shows through to me, this does in, in, in, in, for this record, particularly. And the other thing that got me just before we dive into a couple of interviews is, I had so much I wanted to say about this record. It's really, really strange, isn't it? It is the, is the, the idea that, um, I had it in my head. Yeah. That's particularly when you think about stairway and the ones that are really lush sounding. Yeah. That there's loads of like other musicians and session players and like someone comes in and does orchestration and all that. Yeah. It isn't. It isn't. It's John Paul Jones with some recorders. Yeah. I love, I love the fact that you, they chose a recorder. One of the biggest rock and roll bands to ever walk the planet to try and stick a recorder on it. Yeah. But I, cause I thought it was a Mellotron. I've always thought that was a Mellotron. And it's not, it's real live recorded recorders. Actual recorders. Yeah. There you go. Slipknot are going to get recorders out next. But it's them. It's, it's, it's just, it's just the band. There's no, I don't think there are any external players on it. I don't think. Is there a vocalist maybe? There is somebody just backing. Yeah. I was going to say there might be a, there might be an extra vocalist, but I think in general, it's all kind of done by the band. And this is the thing is that Jimmy Page was a kind of studio stalwart, wasn't he? He was someone who understood the process, who, you know, he kind of knew the full, the full works really. And I think that that shows when, when this band, I suppose, you know, he's almost kind of got the control of it, hasn't he? He's almost running the thing through. I think so. Yeah. One of the things I was looking for was Sandy Denny. Sandy Denny. She does backing vocals on it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I, I think she's the only. Yeah. I don't think, I don't think they, they were very, um, tight as a band. I don't think they brought other people in. I always had it in my head that it was like, you know, the Stones thing where they go to Abbey Road and then they've got all the Abbey Road string guys that come in to do the stringy bits and all the, and there's none of that. I don't, yeah. There's none of that. I don't think so. I, I, I'm just looking for, uh, I can't find anything that they've done. I think that was on a, on a, on a, on a studio album. I, I think that's it. I think it was just them. Capturing them. Just her. So I think, um, I think it's probably the first person to sort of listen to is Robert Plant. Yeah. And there's, there's one interview that we've cut. I've carved into three and we'll, and I think it's just worth listening to each bit because one is talking about the sort of, you know, development lead up to the band. And then the other part about kind of being in, in the band and what the band's about and that sort of thing. And I just think he's, he's, he speaks about it in a really interesting way. Let's listen. I was drawn to the lights because I came like so many kids out of my generation in Britain became from a kind of very gray post-war, you know, the kind of the residue of a lot of pain and strife. So I suppose kids in the mid fifties in Britain were just starting to wake up after the, you know, parents coming back from the war or, you know, being attracted to the footlights of the footlights and the entertainment and the smell of a venue and the kind of, the anticipation in a crowd. I love that. I thought that was amazing thing, you know, because I've, I've been a music fan and a fan of all things that are interesting and occasionally unique all my life. So I'm, I'm always a member of the audience and an entertainer. And there's people like him all around. There's like Robert Plant, Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper. Yeah. Yeah. People that love it. Like, love it. You know, whether, whether they were doing it or not, there'd still be huge lovers of music, regardless. You know, I, I, I, when I, when I was shooting gigs a lot, I would be in, with the camera, with the camera. I'd be in Rock City a lot. And then you kind of come out of that. And I would be, cause you're doing it a lot. Um, you, the, the car park would get really busy and I don't want to spend 45 minutes sitting in the car. So I would, I would kind of hang around right at the end and almost run to the car. Yeah. Just as I would get in the car because of the curfew at Rock City was when Alice Cooper's show came on Planet Rock. Okay. I was always, uh, head back to Alice Cooper and he was a, it reminds me hugely actually, um, of, uh, Joe from Def Leppard. Right. They both got this, this absolute, uh, passion for, for music and their knowledge is phenomenal. So not only would they have these incredible stories about people, um, you know, they would also, you know, uh, uh, I guess expose you to music that you would prior to your generation. Right. So, you know, we, we talked about, um, music that influence does, and we talk about that, that teenage effect. Right. So the music that's big and popular when you're a teenager, that's the stuff that's your stuff. Yeah. Um, but what I think is incredible is discovering the stuff that's out of your general. Does that make sense? Yeah. It makes whole sense. It's not, it's never there, is it? It's later on. Yeah. It's later on. You get to it. You come back to it. I certainly have them with, with, with Led Zeppelin, you know. Um. I want to ask you a question as well. Yeah. Do you know Wayne's world? Yes. No stairway denied. What year was it? Oh, 1993? Two. Two. Oh. But it just hit me that 1992 for me was right in the middle of. The big hair metal thing. The, the, the, well, that was kind of for me, that was in my teenage peak. I see. Right. That's the music that came out probably between like 86 and 90, 95 probably, but probably like 93, 94. Like that was the stuff that was really influential. Yeah. I see. Yeah. Wayne's world came out. Yeah. So that was a big, a big thing. I really remember it clearly. Yeah. And I remember, um, uh, them like making fun of stairway. Yeah. And it, you know what I mean? It was, it was that. It's strange, isn't it? Because, because that's, it's one of those ones where. It's the overplayed. It was, I read about it this morning and it, and it was the, the, the, the, the reason it was in there was this kind of over, it was overplayed. It was, you know, it was played over and over. Um, and it made me think I was, uh, I, and I've posted a few, uh, but they, but they, but they revere. Queen. Being in Rhapsody. Yeah. Which is strange, which, which is almost like a, it defeats itself. It's just comedic, wasn't it? But I, um, yeah, you know, I, I posted a few times this week about this and it's, you know, does, does something being overplayed, uh, diminish shit, shit somehow? Right. Does it, does it have that effect? Because like for me, discovering Led Zeppelin late. Yeah. I feel actually quite a, I mean, I, I didn't hear this being overplayed. No, no. None of this stuff for me was, was, was stuff that was played when I was a, as a teenager. My, my mum would have played this and queen. But what you do is you, you inherit the perception that it was. Yes. And then, and then that almost tarnishes your experience of it. So we're going to play stairway in a bit. It's lovely, isn't it? And what you want to do is just do a quick, like two or three minute meditation before. Yeah. So pause the podcast and then do that. Get that idea out of your brain. Yeah. Do that. Stop, stop, stop the judgment. Stop the worry. And all preconceptions of stairways of heaven, let go of, and just listen to how incredible it is. Made me think what is the most overplayed. I mean, like from, from, for me, it would probably be like, uh, would be something from Guns N' Roses probably. Yeah. Sweet child of mine. Yeah. Knocking on heaven's door. It'd be something like that. I think that was, that was just everywhere. Linus Morissette probably. They were, but, but that, that stuff that would have been played in the early, like late eighties and early nineties for me. And then like for you probably a bit later, you know, it would have been, been, been a bit later. Um, but it's, it's funny, isn't it? Yeah. It's funny. And then like, tell you where the black album for me, that's probably like, uh, you know, enter Sandman and stuff. Yeah. That there for me is like super, when I hear enter Sandman, I kind of cringe a bit. I'm like, Oh, just make it stop. And it's a great song. Yeah. Yeah. But it was just, it's just, yeah, exactly. Yeah. This. And so, so stay away from me. It's not overplayed. No. I know people say it is, and it was probably. Yeah. But it's not for me. I really, I, yeah, I, for me, like discovering some of this stuff. Yeah. It's, I dunno, I feel we're a bit privileged. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. So the next part of the, the, it was the same interview thing. Yep. Robert Plant talking about, um, the experience of, of being in Led Zeppelin. And that's really cool. Cause. Yeah. You get the, you know, you get the idea that it's rock stars and it's mucking about and it's all that, but actually they really care about their craft as well. Yeah. And I think that, you know, the, that what we're saying earlier, the media didn't get that bit and they didn't communicate that. They were really serious about their music. Yeah. The best of it is that our time initially when the whole thing was opening up was there were no charts, there were no maps, there was no structure, there was no conditioning. We were flying by the seat of our pants into this thing. There were many people around us, especially from the Bay Area, San Francisco. There were fantastic bands, musical units, but we had no, there was no etiquette developed yet. There was no, the last thing we were, was a good bet to have on a talk show or anything like that, you know, it was a, a time to be proud of our music. And also, now that I know now the way that everything's gone, look where we are, you know, in Warner Brothers, you know, the home of once upon a time Atlantic Records and all the great stuff. There were no rules. Things were being developed and, and the journey, there was no, nobody could plot it. It was just, what do we do now? Oh, maybe we'll play somewhere bigger. You know, I mean, it was just like kids going from playing in the youth club behind the church to playing small clubs. The acceleration into another place was crazy. Interesting. Interesting about the experience of being a part of that world. is because it's such a, it's a different age. There's a different era. It is. It's a long time ago. And I don't know. I wonder if he, if he sits now and thinks back, you know, cause he's obviously been out of the Led Zeppelin thing doing these other things longer than he was probably in Led Zeppelin doing the Led Zeppelin thing. Yeah. I always think about that to do with like Paul McCartney and people like that as well, where it's like, well really, that Beatles thing was a very, very short period of time. Short period of time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he's done a lot of other stuff since then. Do you know, I'd not thought about it like that, but you're right. But the stones is the other way around. Stones is like that. That's what they've done. That's it. Yeah. He's gone off and done a few things. Keith Richards has been some pirate films, but the, but, but they've always, they've always done the Rolling Stones thing. And that's been their life. Whereas. Yeah. You know, I think maybe it was the death of John Bonham. Yeah. That was the kind of thing. Yeah. That was, was it? Was it 1980? I don't know. But yeah, I think, I think, yeah, that that's, that's what, that's what I've read about over the past week or so. Yeah. That's kind of what put the thing. Yeah. That kind of ended them as a, as a band. Yeah. But it's, it's, it's the influence and the impact of, of the band. Yeah. Yeah. So the, the albums that came out and, but it's of the band themselves and the things that they did and, you know, the impact that they had on the bands that, that kind of came after and were doing, doing stuff. Yeah. You know, you, you've got to say that, that you've almost got like the bad boy rock and roll stuff. And that, that surely influenced like the, you know, the, the twisted sisters and the motley crews. And then, you know, you, you know, that they grew up on Led Zeppelin. And so, you know, idolizing that, the, the band and the, that focus that they had on an album and what they were doing and probably black Sabbath too. I would have thought, you know, what was the, what was the, the podcast we did a couple of weeks ago where it was about, you know, the band coming from America to go to the home of Led Zeppelin and the home of these bands that they, that they was looked up to so much. through so much yeah yeah yeah yeah oh i can't remember who it was but it was it was one of the big ham yeah it was wasn't it like love hate yeah i think it was it was sort of faster pussycat it was one of those two one of the two yeah yeah but yeah no you're right where it was that they wanted to come and see the world of britain the world like where whereas the others are going let's go to you know california let's go to the strip yeah go to the pussy what was it called pussycat club is that what it's called no it was called the cat house cat house that's the cat house got that from the um that's somewhere else i've been everyone's googling the pussycat club now raising their eyebrows but the um yeah the thing the thing about that is the um they they were they were that as you've said though those bands from that era absolutely like worshipped led zeppelin and yeah the beatles and the who and you know bands like that it's hard i think it's it's it's um it's kind of hard to imagine a universe without it you know it's it's it's one of those um can i do some facts yes i've got i've not i've got i've not got that i've got some facts i'll do some i've not got that many facts so it was released on 8th of november 1971 untitled which we've discussed the record company we're not approving of um the genre what genre is it this is the problem you see because what i hear yeah is blues folk yeah rock prog that's they're the four genres i hear yeah but led zeppelin is constantly called metal heavy metal it's not it's not even close to heavy black sabbath heavy metal this was not even close i don't think even close to heavy metal it was i i would describe it's kind of hard it's hard rock and blues yeah there's focus stuff in there it is that's the bit for me you listen to this led zeppelin 4 and you go well that's a folk song that's a folk song with with a couple of heavy bits it's they were criticized weren't they for led zeppelin 3 for too much acoustic stuff and people said they were copying other yeah other bands that were popular at the time um but yeah so genre wise um there's not many people better than him jimmy page to do that though that you know that kind of really picks yeah like 12 stringy stuff and the mandolin stuff and all that twangly jangly yeah it's got a beautiful sound awesome um i guess the point is that the genre for led zeppelin is just they're just not no just not no no no just not not genre for for uh they're almost like early queen without the pop stuff yeah a little bit with a with a kind of searing american vocalist another band where you can't genre them they're not you don't know it's like a box it's like it's like you can't draw a box around no no yeah but what what i do here with led zeppelin is a british group of british lads very british playing american music yeah that's what it feels like to me oh that's a really i was like their tone's very british yeah you can tell it you can tell it's been produced in in a country house in england yeah yeah that the production of it is but but yeah it's really interesting they've got that america he sings with the american accent there's the americana kind of sort of rock and roll blues kind of thing yeah there's a lot of that i hadn't thought of it like that yeah the um sorry you'll go on i was going to say in fax mode i'm going off somewhere else i was yeah it's short 42 minutes which we've discovered uh is the best type of albums eight songs 42 minutes the best albums are short yeah you don't want you don't want to i'm not a big fan of the long definitely double album mate you're gonna do like melancholy aren't we're gonna still be listening in a week later um i don't think i've ever listened to melancholy from start to finish no ever not even one side not even one oh yeah yeah i would have listened to half but not the whole thing no not the whole thing from end to end it's too long i've fallen asleep i've had to eat or something in between um it was released on atlantic records but they didn't pay for it oh really the band paid for it because they didn't want the pressure of the record label um that's crazy record well that's why they were able to do it with oh label says oh can't do that oh we're paying for it yeah basically do what yeah screw you we do what we want i didn't know that that's wow that's amazing recorded at hedley grange yeah it was also recorded at island studios where is hedley grange then oh i don't know that's a good question it's a good question cotswoldsy type sort of place i don't know i feel i feel like i should know that and i don't well when we do the next interview we should google it and find out we'll forget by that far it'd be nice to go there wouldn't it one of us will need to go to the toilet as well someone's someone's doing a hedley grange tour aren't they that's got that's got to be a thing surely yeah this is where john bonham did i know they do gavin and stacey they do gavin and stacey tours of of thinking about the island the barry island for our american i've never seen for our american uh listeners of which there were many according to us yeah yeah um gavin just look up gavin and stacey on the youtube um it's got james corn's in it you know it's got james corden he we're still a bit disappointed that you've sent back has he come back yeah yeah i don't like i don't like i preferred it when he was in america um produced by jimmy page yeah so he's sole producer i think so yeah wow so i had some so i had probably had people about doing the buttons yeah he had lackeys do you would shout at people go and do tapes um sold 37 million copies huge 37 million of anything is a lot 37 million like smarties yeah that's a lot isn't it yeah there is a million albums yeah 37 million people yeah went to a record store and decided they were gonna buy it yeah which is utterly insane yeah absolutely insane and they had no advance to pay back no they had no advance to pay back for that for the making of that record i don't think so so from what i read the one was it that they uh the record company put it out yeah but very much uh uh reluctantly yeah they were like this isn't gonna sell not gonna go anywhere he's got stupid record cover yeah you've got stupid runes well i mean you're all stupid you can just imagine like a cigar sitting back in his chair stupid boys stupid long hair with his stupid jangly guitars um do you know what i mean and and they but they wanted hits they wanted a whole lot of rosy yeah you know what i mean and and they um so i read they were not impressed at the time and the band just told them to get lost yeah uh which i i really like well after that we're not going to finance this one we'll do it then yeah that's amazing i also hadn't realized and probably people are going to scream at me for this one because um uh i'm not this is not on my fact sheet but it's something that i read earlier but the band came from the yardbirds yeah yeah yeah yeah and then yeah and then just kind of got oh i'll bring my mates in and kind of carry on when the yardbirds ended i i i mean it is it is before like my time i'm 50 this year so um for those of you a bit older this is probably common knowledge but i didn't know that i wasn't something i yeah and i know i keep talking about jimmy page quite a lot but he was he was always around the studios of that era so even if he wasn't in the band chances are we played on loads of stuff that you yeah we wouldn't realize you know this i used to i love that of the other um this is common with the stones where they were just random people in the studio playing stuff and and there's no there's like there's no credit anywhere but there'll be an interview of mick jagger saying something saying oh yeah yeah we had you know yeah he was just he was next door sting was down the road yeah so he just came in and did did singing or playing or whatever and it's just i love that kind of the same thing happens in a lot of scenes you know when you've got like um like the bay the thrash stuff for the bay area there's tons of just looking yeah where there were just people in the studio playing and they'll have played like the drummer on an entire song will be not the album not the album not the band drummer and it won't be in the credits won't be anywhere it'll just be on while he was there so you put that down i absolutely love all that um mixing desk is credited as a helios console which is a new one on me i'm not familiar with helios that they've got they've got a really uh vibey and then man it's a manual it must have been manual yeah yeah it's a vibey um yeah i've yeah on the on the stuff that i've got the uad stuff that's what your helios preamps and stuff um compressors is down on my fact sheet as a universal audio 1176 um i thought that came a bit later i'm not sure it's a bit i i wouldn't have assumed much compression was on this it doesn't feel it doesn't feel very compressory um uh yeah the track when the levy brakes had the bonhams kit in the mansion stairwell and the uh uh mics dangled all over the place which is uh yeah stuff of legend isn't it it is it's so so i guess copied yeah now yeah but it wasn't then was it that's the thing is that that was a totally like mad thing to do um uh album sales uh led zeppelin one yeah 15.8 million led zeppelin 2 21.9 million led zeppelin 3 13.7 and this is when the press were giving them a hard time yeah you've copied and blah blah blah um 13.7 million still a lot do you mean if i if if if any if you if anybody listened to this is in a band and you suddenly said do you know what i'll buy 13.7 million albums off you you'd be you'd snatch their arm off but the press at the time were giving them a hard time for that led zeppelin 4 36.8 million copies um houses of the holy 17.7 physical graffiti 13.4 here a lot of people have a bad perception of physical graffiti i all the way around i quite like it yeah people i think people who who are musicians yeah love it it's their favorite right that's really interesting all of them that's really interesting but yeah i quite like it i i saw some negative comments online when um we posted about it a couple of months ago um and then the album sales record i don't know no i don't know i don't know um this album so led zeppelin 4 23 times platinum certification from the riaa yeah which is bonkers induction to the grammy hall of fame um but you can see why with those numbers why that why stair stairway would have got that um radio play the radio play but also that that reputation of like it's too big it's too it's too commercial it's too popular it's too overplayed it's too yeah yeah when you talk about those numbers can i talk about other albums that were released in 1971 go for it aqualung by jethro tull great album sticky fingers by the rolling stones great album who's next by the who and imagine by john lennon oh my gosh and that's a big year isn't it that yeah masters of reality by black sabbath yeah it's just nuts isn't it that time you know there are magical i mean every year there are there's great records being released and i think just some years have got just something in the water that yeah yeah 71 yeah just crazy um bits that i think are fantastic um uh some of the stuff is legend really but black dog was inspired by a black dog wandering around the studio like a black labrador really you just think what what yeah yeah because you assume it's it's the depression thing or something yeah yeah yeah but yeah so i read it was inspired um so robert plant's lyrics were in inspired um from an actual black labrador uh which is which is pretty pretty cool um they shunned standard media afterwards so there was a whole bunch of standard promotion that the record label would typically like them to do and the band didn't do any of it um they were known for so that's why they've got the mythos possibly the kind of mythical status because they didn't go out and do it they they had a really fractious relationship with the press and the media so they just chose not to do it so there were all these things where you know that you got no album out you had to go on talk shows and you had to go and do all these things and they just hated it so they didn't do it and they were just like we're just going to go on tour yeah and that's what they did they did they toured more and bigger and better and that's what they did they were just like well people want to see us then we'll show it to them yeah they can come and see us uh we're not going to go and listen you know not going to go and have some interviewer you know ask us stupid questions um which i i and she shows some confidence i said confidence i think it it's almost an integrity it's kind of like we you know that's not what we do you know we're not going to do that and so they chose not to um uh what did i get to down here as well um uh oh yeah the media and television um so that was another one isn't it though you don't hear well hardly anything but famously there was an immigrant was an immigrant song that was there was used on um school of rock yeah which was like a wildlife tiny clip yeah yeah yeah he's on there so so uh historically it was really carefully licensed yeah it was on wayne's world right in 92 yeah um but the next one is that rock and roll uh stairway to heaven it was there oh of course because it's because it's yeah it's in the storyline to the film isn't it um now uh since like 2010 ish uh well it was so rock and roll was used on a cadillac commercial apparently in 2003 which was really it's a real outlier yeah but then from 2010 ish you've seen a few so so black dog was used in argo yeah when the levy breaks is used right at the end of the big short oh right um and then like you say immigrant song um as well so you know let it go a bit yeah i think so yeah but i think kind of similar to the uh pink floyd boys it's just i've had enough yeah do you know what i mean i'm fed up of people ask just do what you want and i kind of get the feeling like they've just gone you know pay somebody you deal with it you deal with it make sure we get paid i don't want to have the conversation anymore um you know it's that you know when you stop wanting to have the fight isn't it really so um the reviews were interesting i think um looking back now the reviews are all like five out of five ten out of ten best album in the world ever at the time it wasn't at the time there was still uh critique it was still mostly positive but um if you go back and have a look in the way back machine so if you look if you search now for like what these the music press said about it um super positive and lots of i guess modern magazines have written about it yeah yeah but at the time it wasn't quite as popular um well not uh you know um yeah there was critique yeah and i think it wasn't accepted as much i think it was partly to do with the fact that they just shunned the media yeah and they were just like we're just not going to do it yeah so the media are like you know we talked about this with def leopard as well where when um there was that one journalist yeah who was angry because he felt they were best mates and then they went to the us and got really popular when they came back he'd been writing all of these hit pieces saying they've sold out and they're terrible yeah um i think that was there was definitely an element of that here where yeah you know where the band just had this really bad relationship with the media in general um remasters and reissues it was um quite a few of these bits and balls in there for these yeah yeah the big ones in 2014 where it um it kind of got re redone um where there's some alternate mixes on their unreleased tracks um like a deluxe edition thing yeah and super deluxe box sets and all of that stuff but um and it's not terrible yeah i think is but i think for some of these like 1971 obviously done to analog tape yeah uh you know the masters and stuff that were taken from that would have been of the time yeah right and so the chance to go back and pull that media yeah off the tape probably for one last time right to pull it off those studio masters and um get them into um to pro tools or whatever uh yeah i like that and i don't think they ruined it i'm sure people are screaming at their um uh wireless sets about that but um i'm not i i don't like remasters really i don't i'm not a big fan of it but i've not said that before i think i think i think they did an all right job yeah you know they they have do you know who else does you know just a brilliant job of this stuff and that is steven wilson steven bloody wilson who stole our idea for a podcast um but yeah steven wilson does he does a lot of this stuff doesn't he who does he do uh famously he's worked with um he definitely did a lot of the jethro tull stuff jethro tull that's yeah he's but he's i think he's really um he's got that that feel for this of you know just how far you push a remaster and without it sounding like uh greta van fleet yeah yeah do you know do you know where i'm going with that we should talk about greta van fleet as well um and that's it really that is everything i've got on my fact sheet um i do want to talk about greta van fleet yeah do we do that now or do that a bit what do you think because i wanted to talk about robert platter's voice a little bit oh yes i'd like to talk about that as well because he talks about that in the interview yeah shall we listen to listen to listen to him talking about it then we can talk about it then we can talk about the greta van fleet well you know the thing is a voice it's not gonna it's a it's a muscle it's a funny shape thing anyway and um yeah i had a lot of trouble with my voice along the line i was in australia once in melbourne i remember waking up and we'd sold out a kind of some huge stadium um the stage was on wheels so they got it so that if we had 10 000 people that was fine but if it was 12 they could wheel the stage back with a tractor pulling it and then back and then back and then back and as the day went on more and more people arrived and i couldn't speak and i went to a doctor and he hit me with some adrenaline and stuff like that and i i mean i turned several shades of different colors and slid down the wall covered in perspiration and sang the gig now that's the last thing a singer needs to do the damage that you can do one time i went to see a voice specialist in london in harley street he was pretty high brow he had a he had a desk with a little button underneath so that as you walked in he hit the button and the curtains all closed around you and he had a kind of dish on his head and put a camera down my throat and he said he said in six months time your voice won't even be able to show signs of surprise he said it's over and that was 28 years ago so i mean the number of times you think you've had it you think it's gone or and then and there's quite a lot of singers who who were so hard on themselves that they did lose it forever yeah it's the thing is you hear about people like over time you've got um those big powerful rock vocalists like bono john bon jovi um elton john even yeah you know it's really if they've had like medical issues with their voice and struggled with it in some way and you just think he's he's you know robert plant still i don't know if he's still wailing quite so much because he was back then he's probably not quite got the range but he's still he's i think he's still doing it it's such a unique voice i think um you know and he yeah you're right he there there are these uh uh vocalists that they feel inimitable yeah yeah yeah which is where greta van fleet come in i don't know but they they do they feel you know i mean if you were to go back to the 70s and 80s i you know there were probably a lot of people trying to imitate yeah uh his voice yeah but i don't think anyone managed he can't not that not that range it's phenomenal the guy the guy can get right up there i mean even rock and roll there's a few times where i've tried to play and sing that and it's right at the top of my register i'm really squawking squeak squeaking it out but yeah you're you're right and and i think you know age age kind of comes to us all right you know and and it has has that impact on your body and your body changes but um i you know we talked about john bon jovi didn't we yeah in previous shows um i someone said the other day about um i think it was a response to one of our posts oh it's the first time i've heard someone say it and they said these days it's the best bon jovi album yes yes you're one of your favorites isn't it yeah yeah and i've never heard anyone say that before song righty album it isn't very much i bet they had a house for that one john bon jovi owns many house houses i i he i really love the way the authentic and genuine way he dealt with his voice yeah just kind of said actually i've you know this is this is what's happening yeah you know and so until you know until we can solve it yeah they're trying to tour and trying to do things and until we can figure this out you know i don't know i just think he's he he nailed it i think there's a point where you i guess you can't keep doing the same things you know and you've got to deal with that haven't you and but you know it's easy to say it but when you're john bon jovi or when you're robert plant yeah yeah that's you that's your your identity is wrapped up in that wailing that you do yeah so when you can't do that anymore yeah you become useless right what what are you if you're not that persona of that person so i get it i totally get why it where people um or yeah why why vocalists um struggle to come to terms with it it's it's phenomenal yeah it's a part of that thing isn't it yeah you're right yeah which which does bring me on to greta van fleet yeah um i i find it fascinating i find it absolutely fascinating on one hand that enough time has gone by that a band can sound like just like led they sound really i mean so similar to led zeppelin um but enough time has gone by that it's okay yeah i mean there's a whole audience that are picking that up as if and they've never heard led zeppelin they don't know that there is a led zeppelin they don't know that that they sound similar and and it struck me as i was thinking about how to talk about this today as yeah obviously preparing for the show um because there's also um yeah they're not unique in in that right so you know the various bands that sound like acdc yeah um and they've taken they've clearly been influenced by and clearly care about their music and have replicated in such a way yeah but with a certain level of you know individuality and originality to make it unique to them yeah i it's i guess the question i'd got was is it intentional yeah you know was it the thing with greta van fleet is there's so many like unique elements to led zeppelin yeah right from the musicianship to vocals uh drumming and greta van fleet imitates almost all of them to me right there there there is a you know the probability of a band just forming and sounding like led zeppelin out of happenstance is just oh really you know yeah um and you know it just made me kind of think well yeah is it now malicious is the wrong word right but but what's the driver behind it yeah you know um because when you listen to interviews i remember it's being put to greta van fleet directly they were kind of going no there's no imitation we're not you know we're not even fans we're not that's that's yeah we don't think we sound like led zeppelin yeah um and then go back to the house and see the shrine yeah well yeah and who's who is it that sounds i'm trying to think who's it sounds like acdc um oh god who's it uh i mean but there have been bands that have imitated the style of that era and also the kind of hair metal era so is it airborne and steel panther yeah airborne the acdc that sort of thing even the darkness to a certain extent yeah i it's really interesting because like like i was gonna i know that that's the kind of 80s more 80s sort of era but airborne are really they're really interesting because they sound like acdc yeah they make no bones about it they're like we love it we absolutely love acdc and we wanted to be acdc so that's what we did and we wrote our own songs and they sounded like acdc and we you know that's just that's who we are yeah you know that's our background we idolized them and that's who we are we you know we love that music and that's what we wanted to do yeah yeah so that's where we are yeah um and i think i'm okay with that yeah i'm totally okay what you're what it feels like you're getting at is there is there some level of stylistic intellectual property here where there's been a line crossed that's the sense that i'm getting in that in that if you acknowledge it it's all right but you know if you copied a song yeah you copied some notes that's really frowned upon yeah you get you get very told off for that and you go to court and all that you do but you don't get it if you start if it's stylistic you don't get it if it's you know you sing you sing like that person you have a similar vocal style i think it's just it's just for me it's it's too close yeah you know and that you know and i'm sure yeah that people will have their own opinions either way but for me it was just this i kind of thought they're a great band if you listen to greta van fleet they're fantastic they're brilliant live yeah and you just think what do something else you know what i mean just do you must have your own style in there somewhere um but but the other thing that the other thing that hit me actually as i was as i was thinking about this was there's clearly still a demand for le deppelin if if a band can sound like them and have a massive following and you know sell new albums and you know pack out um events police car oh yeah it is a police car no we've not had a police car for ages i don't know if that'll come through the mics but i don't it doesn't seem to get through anymore no but i do you know i think it just shows you the pent-up demand for them you know but i guess i don't know i don't want to i i don't want to believe that they did it maliciously yeah you know oh i know let's copy you know we've got a singer who sounds a bit like robert plant let's totally copy the sound i don't i don't want to be that guy but um um it's a bit close is too close for comfort what's next right but there's two interviews left yeah and obviously the first ones were with robert plant yeah and the second ones are with uh jimmy page oh and i like to and i don't know what order to do them in because one of them the idea was that we play the interview and it's all about stairway and then we play stairway so you can hear it afterwards okay yeah should we do that should we do that now i like that okay let's do that now i wanted to try to put something together which started with uh quite a fragile exposed acoustic guitar playing in sort of style of uh a poor man's buray by park that sort of aspect as far as the instrumentation goes there are going to be a uh there's recorders to the early part which gives it sort of slightly medieval feel that was an idea of john paul jones is to put the recorders on um and he played the recorders when i actually had the idea for stairway it wasn't that wasn't necessary i wasn't thinking recorders i was thinking more the texture of actually the electric piano the idea of stairway was to have uh a a piece of music a composition whereby it would just keep unfolding into more more layers and more moods and more moods and actually the whole intensity of the or subtlety of the intensity the cut the the of the overlay of the composition would actually uh accelerate as it went through on every level every emotional level every musical level and so it just keeps opening up as it's as it as it continues through its sort of passage this was during the period that we were at hedley grange that uh that the the thing was put together it was slightly complicated to be doing this whole thing without a vocal because at the time there weren't any lyrics and this is the this was the backbone of what the song was going was intended to be and the the whole of the running order from the beginning to the end was sort of mapped out it was tricky it was a tricky thing to do because there there's a lot of music and changes in it i remember during that period robert was he was sort of sitting down leaning against the wall and he was just sort of writing i'm i won't never forget that image of him doing that we do a run through of it from beginning to end with the uh guitar opening as we all know and then robert comes up and starts to he starts to pitch in and sing and i tell you he had said must have been 90 of the lyrics were already done one of the cardinal rules when i was a studio musician was that you didn't speed up and i was keen to do something which had an acceleration to it not only from the musical point of view but from the lyricist so that the whole thing would start to gain a momentum as it went through so it wasn't just a monotone piece and by that i actually mean that it would that it would subtly speed up so you're breaking the number one card in the world to the solo was to have something like a sort of fanfare so it's a definite transition it comes in with a with a fanfare to introduce this solo the solo is just going to soar right through it was a very inspired time for all of us at the time that we were living in the hedley grange uh as a residence eating sleeping making music that's what we were doing day after day after day and it sort of tells when you hear the fourth album but you know stairway is a sort of byproduct of it of all of that but you know it's obviously been quite substantial in uh as a milestone for ledsa it's really an inspired period of time it sort of shows so i think the lasting quality of this music over all these years is the fact that everyone's playing so honestly and uh with such conviction that it sort of shows so so so so so so so there's there's a lady who's short all that's all that's all that glitters is gold and she's buying the stairway to heaven when she gets there she knows if the stores are all closed with a word she can't get what she came for and she's buying the stairway to heaven when she's buying the stairway to heaven and she's buying the stairway to heaven and she's buying the stairway to heaven and she's buying the stairway to heaven and she's buying the stairway to heaven and she's buying the stairway to heaven and she's buying the stairway to heaven and she's buying the stairway to heaven and she's buying the stairway to heaven and she's buying the stairway to heaven and she's buying the stairway to heaven and she's buying the stairway to heaven and she's buying the stairway to heaven and she's buying the stairway to heaven and she's buying the stairway to heaven and she's buying the stairway to heaven and there's a sign on the wall and she's buying the stairway to heaven and she's buying the stairway to heaven and there's a sign on the wall and she wants to be sure there's a sign on the wall and she wants to be sure cause you know sometimes words have to mean meaning in the tree by the brook there's a songbird who sings sometimes all of our thoughts are mistreated and it makes me wonder makes me wonder there's a feeling i get when i look to the west and my spirit is crying for leaving in my thoughts i have seen in my thoughts i have seen rings of smoke through the trees and the voices of those who stand looking oh it makes me wonder oh it makes me wonder oh it really makes me wonder and it's whisper that soon if we all call the tune then the piper will lead us to reason and the new day will dawn for those who stand long and the forest will echo with laughter and the new day will dawn for those who stand long and the forest will echo with laughter echo with laughter if there's a bustle in your hedgehog don't be alone there it's just a sprinkly for the make queen yes there are two fires you can go by but in the long run there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on and it makes me wonder there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on there's still time to change the road you're on and she's buying a stairway to heaven listen to that beautiful tapis it's gorgeous isn't it i didn't know about the tempo oh you're telling me we were discussing this before the show that the song speeds up yeah but you don't really notice until the last bit the last bit you kind of do i just say it feels more energetic it's got this kind of the energy rises and gets more complicated and you think oh yeah that makes sense you know um but then when you said that it's a different tempo at the end to the beginning yeah i'm like it blows your mind a little bit like miles off yeah miles different yeah yeah yeah so a good a good exercise for those who wish to the first is listen to the headphones on yeah because the stereo the use of stereo is incredible um the recorders in your right ear not a melotron not a melotron no actual recorders so if you're if you're a teacher and you're teaching year six students get them on this get the get the recorders out and get them on um and the other bit is play play it from start to finish and then restart it immediately yeah so you can hear that mark difference it wasn't until you said have you ever done it and i thought no i've never i don't think i've ever just straight have gone gone gone back again and it's and it's stuck it's absolutely like totally different yeah different song really i but you don't notice it because it because it goes on such a journey yeah i love that about jimmy page saying that that was totally purposeful yeah the whole thing was planned yeah you know yeah you're not not just like played by feel yeah but actually mapped out in his head and then then executed like that is yeah i think that's kind of what makes him a bit of a genius you know yeah the whole song's architecture yeah song is it's good to have been architected that don't make sense so that you know lots of songs like this um and i think pink floyd did this a lot it was almost done by feel initially and then oh that's that's where it's going and then and then architected it if you like so you know this to have been architected and and designed and and written if you like in his head and then played yeah i don't know i they're just mind-boggling yeah someone can have that vision in their brain and then be able to execute it i just think it's absolutely phenomenal yeah um production's really interesting on it as well there are bits in there that are quite if you listen to it with with headphones um there are bits in there that are quite boomy on the acoustic which modern producer would have yeah you know i mean totally swamped that yeah you wouldn't you just wouldn't get it you wouldn't get that kind of um but i think that i i think there's a bit of that that's a bit purposeful because they're very overpowering actually bloomy almost it's kind of this this bit where it kind of almost drones on the kind of the deeper notes of the acoustic which i think is i think partly the room possibly i'm not sure but um yeah you a modern producer wouldn't wouldn't get it but it reminds me massively of some of the early uh stones recordings where you can hear not only can you hear the studio you can hear people moving like you put your headphones on and there are people like putting picking things up and putting things down and moving and you can hear stuff happening in the studio now modern producer would have just you know like bob rock could have yeah mutlang would have got you call that out but it gives you this connection yeah it kind of feels like that's why i love it i love little bits like that it's like authentic isn't it gives you this it puts you in that space which you know i think modern music is missing really is it's just so perfect everything is triggered and perfect and and and eq'd and flat and and and clicked and it's just i don't know there is just something super something super special about that's not music is it that's not music that's that's products yeah yeah i mean you say it's not me yeah but you say it's not music i mean it clearly is it's a different type isn't it from a different era and a different uh you know i guess appeals to different people but you know to me this is there's just something incredibly special about this era of music and you know like for me it's albums like this it's like you know beggars banquet and let it bleed and there's that stuff that was happening around that time yeah it's just incredibly authentic and and you'd probably never as much as i was talking about greta van fleet uh you're having a similar style there's that authenticity is just it's not the same um because it's different point in time you know it's it's it's different point in time and we didn't talk about um the recording of the album of this album and the way a large part of it was done live yeah yeah it wasn't like done uh layer after layer you know they would just all get together in the big room yeah and record and i think you can hear that yeah there's a and there's a bit i mean and i can't remember if it was in the last one i think it's in the next one the the jimmy page interview which we'll play in a second where he talks about um robert plants you know all of these songs were mapped out and recorded yeah without any vocals not even a guide so so the music was down yeah and then and then robert would be kind of writing the words as it was happening and yeah so what you what the way i would ordinarily write a song is you'd write the song yeah you pop the lyrics on and then you'd track it and then join the tracking process you put the basics down you have a kind of vocal guide so everyone in the band knows where they are roughly yeah and but that bit wasn't done there wasn't vocal lines there wasn't really vocal melodies it was purely instrumentation but then have the vocals layered on once this thing and that's you've got to be good it reminds me of we talked about mike pattern last week yeah about coming in and the album being done yeah and you're having to write the um you know the lyrics and the melody for these songs and that bit where they're sort of like okay you just made that bit longer no yeah no that's it it's done dude just you know sort it out we'll be in the pub tell us when you're ready um but yeah you're right the the the genius of being able to do that i just think is incredible it really is and the band to be able to go and do that without the vocal track yeah yeah that rough vocal track to work to yeah absolutely incredible i mean it's uh yeah what's the fear the fear in the band where you say oh no there's no there's no we're not gonna do a guide vocal you just got need to need to know where you are it's the drummer hard the drummer's no idea what's going on most of the time what city are we in what songs what are we doing what's happening shall we play that interview then yeah yeah this is the last interview if you want and then and then we'll talk about next week sleepy bedtime and we're definitely gonna do prodigy are we i don't know let's go on with it it had been said that at this house which is in hampshire the um that the fleetwood mac had uh rehearsed there not recorded but they'd rehearse there so that ticked box number one for me that that uh that you weren't going to get neighbor problems you know you can make sort of noise and not have that sort of restriction to mess it all up so you could sort of get a flow of music going the second thing was that um that you could actually stay there i don't know what other groups would stay there i don't think too many but it did have accommodation within the main house uh so that sort of ticked another box that we could actually sort of stay there so basically in effect it seemed to it seemed to become like a candidate to be able to do this to to do this idea or fulfill this idea whereby the group would all stay in the same premises eat there sleep there make music there and then you you could just bring in like a an auxiliary truck with a mobile recording studio which actually at the time happened to be the rolling stones one and then sort of just get on it get on with the job i think it is a fusion of all manner of ideas and and but the fact of having everybody living in the same uh place um and uh sleeping there etc and and and and just being able to to evolve all of these musical sort of concepts and and and deliveries and you get something which is so extreme from um uh say levy breaks which is so it's the intensity of it the menace of it the threat of it it is um and the density and the darkness of it uh is uh to to sort of turn the coin and then have something which is really caressing like the uh going to california you know and it's a really really intimate close-up picture so these these whole things were able to be accomplished within this working atmosphere rock and roll came out more or less came out of thin air and so did uh the battle of evermore i mean from my side of it anyway the mandolin because it was written on the mandolin um that there were various things that happened like that the fact that we were routining stairway to heaven there and uh it was tricky going through it without having any sort of sung verses to it um and and and while we were going through it and everyone was learning it the uh uh robert was writing the lyrics in the same room he was sitting down there and writing and then he eventually came to the microphone started singing and it was like wow this is really we're really onto something here because his lyrics were superb on it but it was it was a place really inspired you know uh and that whole that whole approach of having gone there to live the music to work the music to create the music was the right thing to do for led zeppelin at that point of time well it was complex and yeah this idea of having the you know fragile acoustic guitar opening it up and then as it comes in you've got the electric plat pianos and and and the electric 12 strings in stereo and the whole thing it starts to unravel and the layers start to to unravel uh as it goes on and there's a momentum to stairway as well and it's it's all really intentional to have this uh and actually from the first point of the geek at the opening guitar to what's going on at the at the end of it in the last verse over says you you have robert um uh um you know singing and at the end after the solo all that section well there's that there's an increase of tempo you know it's got fast and the whole object of the exercise to have this thing that would almost be like an orgasm really each and every one of us in the band instinctively knew you couldn't fail to know that the work that we've done because we were so such fine musicians all of us in the blend and it was substantial work and i think that's the bit that got my go earlier about the um the idea of the press not appreciating the graft yeah the ability and the skill of these musicians yeah they just saw the rock star and the telly being thrown out the window and the i think i think what they saw was um a a bunch of lads that didn't they were not giving the press the respect that they felt that they yeah yeah yeah yeah deserved and it wasn't from anything other than i just don't think that they uh jimmy i just don't think they were that kind of people they were not the kind of people that were great with the press you know some you know some people are some people are just so work it good your paddy is a brilliant example that you can just plunk paddy in front of anybody on the planet yeah and he'll have yeah whether they were like you know the lowest of the of the low cleaning the floors to the kings and queens of the planet paddy you could have a brilliant conversation with him right and he would he would be phenomenal some people are just my boss is like that you could put them anywhere on you put them on mars and they'd spark up a conversation and be able to interact with them and be like but there are some people that are not you know there are for for people that are like that and have those skills there are people that just don't and i think that led zeppelin with that they do you mean they were not those kind of people that were great with the press yeah and rather than the press kind of going do you know what yeah okay these guys are great artists and great musicians but um you know quite clearly are not you know like media trained i suppose it would be today yeah yeah yeah you know um they just you know it was almost this fight you know between they felt that it was like the the band or the you know the press are nothing and we don't care about them when actually i think it was just more they were not at ease yeah having those kind of conversations you know enough it would it would feel you're listening to to to to page particularly talking about the the albums and the art and the the vision having someone asking you questions about you know yeah have you just copied another band yeah do you know i can i totally can empathize with how that would be yeah yeah it felt like a personal attack yeah on you so i get it i really do um uh i was gonna say i think it's changed but i'm not sure it has particularly um but no is what it is yeah but i i it's interesting i do think they're a band that the media seems to remember better now like the press today has a far fonder relationship with led zeppelin than they ever did back in the 70s which is bonkers isn't it yeah absolutely bonkers yeah yeah for sure right that's all i think i said that's us are we done so we we need to uh uh start the land we did say for the land didn't we i mean how jarring is that coming from the back of the the 70s yeah to the the 90s dance yeah are they that's there another band that are not particularly genre friendly the prodigy no no they're kind of crossover aren't they yeah yeah yeah yeah now they're crossover they are a bit they certainly at that area they were because the jilted generation wasn't so much was it jilted was definitely proper dance bangers that was it was it was the aftermath of the of the rave the acid house they seen uh this was trip hop this was you know that kind of thing everybody loved fat of the land yeah like metalheads loved it exactly we we we all absolutely fell in love with this i mean i would listen to to slayer metallica mega death prodigy yeah you know and i remember going to red i was at reading and um i'm trying to think who it uh yeah so so uh guns and roses played their first gig in the uk for like 20 years yeah and prodigy were on the same bill but it was like um uh puddle of mud and there's a bunch of kind of old rock bands were playing yeah and then prodigy yeah and then do you know i mean and then slipknot played yeah yeah but it's still fit yeah it's just crazy isn't it there are so few bands i think that that managed to i think because you tend to find with the dance lot yeah it's one or two people yeah and then prodigy was a band yeah that was a load of them was the tone i think the tone of their music was guitary wasn't it they had that guitar is the wrong description of it but it had that edge that kind of distorted edge to it a die ant war do you remember when they did um download and all the metalheads lost their mind yeah oh yeah um i think it's bonkers how because that's the reaction you get right they're like oh they're not metal so the metal crew don't you know they're famously not you know territorial if you're very territorial about you know yeah they're not metal i'm not listening to them kind of thing the prodigy we just accepted yeah yeah yeah yeah and and i looking back at it i kind of i can't i don't understand how or why no maybe it was the image it's a lot to do with the show yeah a lot to do with that kind of bad boy yeah yeah that kind of you know yeah i don't i it's it's a weird one i'm looking forward to digging i don't know much i know the album really well i know liam howell i've actually watched a few documentaries about liam very clever man uh yeah he's awesome i watched one i watched a documentary on him learning how to race bikes i'm eager to find that if it's on youtube still because that was awesome um but i don't know much about the production i don't know where it was made i don't know who was involved um i get the impression it was very homegrown you'd have thought so yeah and it was very because they were essex boys when they're brain yeah yeah so so you yeah i'd expect it was very much liam's the mastermind if you like yeah the other guys have got their kind of roles to play the character thing so it's almost like who dances somebody somebody somebody's credited on the album dancer as a dancer key it's not keith flint is it i don't know i have to go i know he he was vote he was vocals later but i think in the early days i'm sure yeah i i don't know and then um but they influenced a whole bunch of bands after right um oh god who did uh propane nightmare and right uh oh i'm i'm looking forward to this one this is going to be this is gonna be really cool i listened to it this i listened to the album through this week yeah on the seat i've still got the original cd yeah yeah and it kicks it's a great record it's got um it's got a real slam to the production it's it's really cool i do you know i i remember playing quake three yes online on a modem on a dial-up modem yeah um with this yeah in my headphones yeah and that you know back in the days of mp3s yeah yeah probably i bet the mp3s i listened to came off the same cd that i listened to this week oh so cool so cool anyway i think right are we done rambling we're done rambling um yeah i was going to say something but i don't know what i was going to say now shall we just let's just go we should come up with i listened to a few more i listened to more podcasts this week sign off people have got a sign off and they do they do like a closing you know thanks for yeah uh yeah thank you listeners for enjoying another podcast with us um thank you for spending your time we've got monster shop or we've got all that that that's the beginning you've mastered that haven't you yeah we need like a like a jackanory kind of voiceover you know what i mean just like uh yeah we said here's what we learned yeah what did we learn i don't know jimmy page and robert planet dead sound dead good aren't they yeah dead good yeah i wonder how i wonder how many other people produce their own albums in was that a common thing i very much doubt i feel the need to go and check that out yeah yeah um but it's been good i've enjoyed this yeah about led zeppelin um again a band i discovered way after really enjoyed it and it's been really cool to dig into how the album was made and all that stuff and i'm excited for the prodigy next see you later see you