Led Zeppelin - Live at the Royal Albert Hall 1970 - Part 1
Led Zeppelin - Live at the Royal Albert Hall 1970 - Part 2
Led Zeppelin - Live at the Royal Albert Hall 1970 - Part 3
It isn’t hard to understand the substantial appeal of Led Zeppelin. Their current two-hour plus act is a blitzkrieg of musically-perfected hard rock that combines heavy dramatics with lashings of sex into a formula that can’t fail to move the senses and limbs. At the pace they’ve been setting on their current seven-town British tour there are few groups who could live with them on stage. Friday night, the third stop of the tour brought them back to London’s Albert Hall for a two and a quarter hour solo marathon that completely destroyed the ever-weakening argument about British reserve. At the end of two 15-minute long encores, when the audience had been on its feet dancing, clapping and shouting for 35 minutes, they were still calling them back for more. It was electricity that had been building up throughout the evening. The Albert Hall suits the Zep’s style and they were in good form, working through a selection of their heavier numbers of which Dazed and Confused is still a tour de force.
The slight frame of Jimmy Page, clad like a Woolworth’s sales counter in Alf Garnett shirt and jeans, belies the fearsome aggression of his guitar, which the other side of his nature comes through on the intricate White Summer solo. Midway through the set John Paul Jones switched to Hammond organ for a segment of quieter Led Zeppelin not previously heard on stage, before John Bonham’s Moby Dick drum solo brought him a standing ovation. But the Zeppelin forte, the closing 20 or so minutes were still to come and when it did, such was the rapport that when on How Many More Times, Robert Plant sang I” want you all to put your hands together…” the audience en masse had done so before he’d finished the request.
Strutting about the stage with arrogance, Plant is a most accomplished performer, drawing from the finest blues/soul-shouter traditions with a confidence out of line with his inexperience previous to Led Zeppelin. His control is masterful; so much so that when he dragged out the lyric “I’ve got you in the s-s-s-sights of my gun,” hesitating dramatically over the “s,” the crowd was shouting back and filling in the missing word. I spoke to Jimmy Page after the show and he confessed that the whole band had suffered extreme nerves beforehand, mainly because people like John Lennon, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck had requested tickets.
“But it was just like it was at the Albert Hall in the summer,” said Jimmy, “with everyone dancing around the stage. It was a great feeling. What could be better than having everyone clapping and shouting along? It’s indescribable; but it just makes you feel that everything is worthwhile.”
“We’d actually finished How Many More Times and were going into the Lemon Song, but the audience was still clapping so we just went into another riff and carried on for a further ten minutes.
The group’s intention in doing solo shows of such length, says Jimmy, is so that if the audience wants it, they can continue playing without having to worry about whether earlier support groups have overrun and how much time there is left. They’ve had hassles with hall management on this point in the past and Jimmy points out:
“Our sets have gone longer and longer anyway. They are now always at least two hours long – and that’s without any extra numbers for encores. I really believe in doing as much as it is physically possible to do… if the audience wants it.” From: https://www.ledzeppelin.com/show/royal-albert-hall-january-9-1970
The slight frame of Jimmy Page, clad like a Woolworth’s sales counter in Alf Garnett shirt and jeans, belies the fearsome aggression of his guitar, which the other side of his nature comes through on the intricate White Summer solo. Midway through the set John Paul Jones switched to Hammond organ for a segment of quieter Led Zeppelin not previously heard on stage, before John Bonham’s Moby Dick drum solo brought him a standing ovation. But the Zeppelin forte, the closing 20 or so minutes were still to come and when it did, such was the rapport that when on How Many More Times, Robert Plant sang I” want you all to put your hands together…” the audience en masse had done so before he’d finished the request.
Strutting about the stage with arrogance, Plant is a most accomplished performer, drawing from the finest blues/soul-shouter traditions with a confidence out of line with his inexperience previous to Led Zeppelin. His control is masterful; so much so that when he dragged out the lyric “I’ve got you in the s-s-s-sights of my gun,” hesitating dramatically over the “s,” the crowd was shouting back and filling in the missing word. I spoke to Jimmy Page after the show and he confessed that the whole band had suffered extreme nerves beforehand, mainly because people like John Lennon, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck had requested tickets.
“But it was just like it was at the Albert Hall in the summer,” said Jimmy, “with everyone dancing around the stage. It was a great feeling. What could be better than having everyone clapping and shouting along? It’s indescribable; but it just makes you feel that everything is worthwhile.”
“We’d actually finished How Many More Times and were going into the Lemon Song, but the audience was still clapping so we just went into another riff and carried on for a further ten minutes.
The group’s intention in doing solo shows of such length, says Jimmy, is so that if the audience wants it, they can continue playing without having to worry about whether earlier support groups have overrun and how much time there is left. They’ve had hassles with hall management on this point in the past and Jimmy points out:
“Our sets have gone longer and longer anyway. They are now always at least two hours long – and that’s without any extra numbers for encores. I really believe in doing as much as it is physically possible to do… if the audience wants it.” From: https://www.ledzeppelin.com/show/royal-albert-hall-january-9-1970
