Bernard MacMahon says he knew he was taking a massive risk. The Irish-British film-maker and his Scottish partner Allison McGourty had spent 10 months researching a film about that massively successful but elusive rock band Led Zeppelin. They put together a storyboard, listened to every interview they could find, and started to dig out archive film to tell the story of the band’s early years in the late 60s.
That was when Jimmy Page, a successful session guitarist, joined the Yardbirds, then wanted to create a band of his own. He signed up John Paul Jones, another virtuoso session star, and two little-known West Midlands musicians: the wildly inventive drummer John Bonham, and singer Robert Plant. Overlooked in Britain, Led Zeppelin found fame in America, where they were attacked in the music press but became celebrities through their live shows, without the help of the media.
The film-makers’ research was funded, says MacMahon, on the understanding that “it was incredibly likely that once I put in a phone call, the group might say they were not interested. There was every chance we would not even get a meeting.” After all, Led Zeppelin had always refused most interviews or TV appearances – let alone an authorised film biography in which the three surviving members would appear.
But Page did agree to a meeting, at a hotel in London in November 2017, to which he arrived carrying Waitrose shopping bags. “I wondered if he had brought sandwiches,” says MacMahon, who took out a leather-bound book with the storyboard – “pictures but no words” – and started talking through it. When he got to the part of the story where Page first meets Plant, the guitarist asked which band he was then in. “Hobbstweedle,” was the answer. “Very good,” said Page. “Carry on.”
Later he queried a date with MacMahon, “and opened the shopping bags to show he had brought his old diaries, dating back to the 60s”. After seven hours “with a break for afternoon tea”, Page said: “I’m in – but you have to get the others on board.”
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[Becoming Led Zeppelin, out today in Imax] ends with What Is and What Should Never Be, filmed at Zeppelin’s headlining show at the Royal Albert Hall, London, in 1970. It is a triumphant finale that leaves out what was to follow – the exploration of more acoustic styles, Page’s fascination with Aleister Crowley and the occult, the decade of massive financial success, the stories of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll excess … and even Stairway to Heaven. So why stop there?
“Because I always felt this was a self-contained story,” says MacMahon. “In January 1970 they have become the most popular band in north America and now return to Britain. In that closing song the audience now accept them as returning heroes. All the band’s families are there and this is the coming together of their childhood story.”
