Hey-hey Mama: 50 years of proper Rock and Roll

I don’t know what your memory of 1971 is, but mine’s pretty hazy, mostly because I was 4. But, as David Hepworth’s terrific tome 1971: Never A Dull Moment argued, it was a pivotal year in music - even more so than my own birth year, 1967 (for music, you understand) due to its profound confluence of significant album releases. 

1971 was the year that saw the long playing record, in old money, find its place as one of the major artistic mediums, alongside books and cinema. There had been albums before, of course, and ground-breaking ones, too, like Pet Sounds or Sgt. Pepper, that had made ‘album artist’ a thing in its own right. But 1971 generated an  unprecedented slew of milestone releases, including David Bowie’s Hunky Dory, The Who’s Who’s Next, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, Carole King’s Tapestry, Elton John’s Madman Across The Water and at least 20 more that played their part in defining not just the year but the decade itself (for a more comprehensive list and examination of Hepworth’s book, here’s my post from when it was published).

50 years on, one of those albums stands out, arguably more than any of the others: Led Zeppelin’s fourth album. Colloquially known as ‘Led Zeppelin IV’, the officially untitled record could - should, even - be described as a touchpoint for classic rock as a genre. A bold claim, I know, but within its eight distinct tracks, over a run time of 42 minutes and 34 seconds, it remains a remarkable piece of work by a band that, with it, truly hit their stride. Yes, it contains Stairway To Heaven, a song worthy of discussion all on its own, but within its octet of tracks lies a breadth of hard rock (Black Dog, Rock And Roll), ballsy stompers (Misty Mountain Hop) and those rooted in traditional blues (When The Levee Breaks), mystic, 12-string folk (The Battle Of Evermore, Going To California) and pastoral country references. It’s legacy extends well into its 50-year history, too, with John Bonham’s distinct drums - captured by virtue of the cold, damp stairwell of the Hampshire country house they recorded it in (latterly sampled and used by seemingly everyone, including the Beastie Boys and Beyoncé. 

“It’s like there was a magical current running through that place [Headley Grange] and that record,” guitarist Jimmy Page recently told Mojo’s Mark Blake. Like it was meant to be. Perhaps this comes somewhat from Page’s singular vision. The former teenage guitar prodigy from Epsom, the third of that remarkable trio of Surrey sons to join The Yardbirds (after Eric Clapton had handed the six string reins to Jeff Beck, who in turn handed them to his friend Page) had largely been the architect of Led Zeppelin, the band renamed from The New Yardbirds in 1968. 

Their first three albums had built their profile and credibility on both sides of the Atlantic, riding the post-Beatles wave for British bands with a harder rock tendency in parallel to the early progressive bands that were coming through at the turn of the decade. Notably, Zeppelin built their reputation through, largely, word of mouth and electrifying live performances at events like the Bath Festival Of Blues And Progressive Music and relentless touing in America, playing legendary venues like Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in New York and its counterpart Fillmore West in San Francisco. 

Notably, too, they had deliberately shied away from releasing singles, the primary promotional vehicle of the pop era. This defiance of convention would remain with Led Zeppelin to the band’s abrupt end in 1980, brought about by Bonham’s untimely death. But in Zeppelin’s fourth album, this belligerence found a particular outlet, led by Page’s own wariness of the way the music industry dictated things, leading to the record being as intentionally enigmatic as the band’s reputational rise had been unconventional. 

For a start, the album would go untitled, a notion obliquely referred to in This Is Spinal Tap by the band’s insistence on releasing Smell The Glove with an all-black sleeve and no lettering. While that was a gimmick, Page had another intention: “I didn’t want anyone, including Rolling Stone, making a judgement before they heard the music,” he told Mojo. “I wanted to prove our music wasn’t just selling because of our name.” 37 million album sales may have proven his instincts to be correct, but that wasn’t how Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary boss of Atlantic Records saw it, telling the band it would be “professional suicide” to not even have the band’s name on the cover. “We weren’t backing down,” Page recalls.

So, for a band that had been feted on both sides of the Atlantic as the Second Coming, Led Zeppelin IV arrived with anonymity, not just lacking cover text, but also photographs of the band anywhere in the album artwork. Instead, the front cover featured a 19th-century agricultural oil painting singer Robert Plant came across in a Reading antiques shop, while the rear featured a drab Birmingham tower block, an attempt to highlight themes of urban and rural living. In place of band pictures, Plant, Page, Bonham or bassist/multi-instrumentalist John Paul Jones. Instead, Page came up with the idea of the quartet being represented by four rune-like symbols. “That whole cover was a Jimmy and Robert production,” Jones has said, somewhat sniffily. “I didn’t quite get it myself.”

Page’s own self-designed symbol, ‘ZoSo’, has itself been a source of much debate, with some pointing to the guitarist’s apparent interest in the work of occultist Aleister Crowley as being its inspiration. Collectively, however, the entire approach of IV’s graphic design is probably just one of those rock band gimmicks which, in 1971, meant that anything went and record company marketeers couldn’t say no. Conventions of album design weren’t broken as few had yet been established. “It’s not something to be questioned or dissected,” Page said of the artwork in his interview with Mojo. “Like the album, it was something that was just meant to be. You listened and made up the pictures in your own mind.”

Which brings me back to Stairway To Heaven, a song commanding a cultural mythology all of its own. As Bohemian Rhapsody is for Queen, Led Zeppelin were so much more than this one song, but Stairway will always be their opus, regarded for it’s sheer expanse and complete defiance of pop tradition. Stairway will also never be regarded as a pop song, but that’s what makes it’s lasting endurance even more extraordinary. It was also, famously, never released anywhere as a single, and yet it has received close to three million plays on American rock radio, according to official figures (it was the most requested song on FM radio stations in the US in the 1970s. By a more contemporary measure, it has been streamed more than 600 million times on Spotify. 

To some extent, too, Stairway is the quintessential early ’70s rock album track, and one that - whisper it - comes closer to prog rock than blues-rooted heavy rock. Broken into three sections over its eight minutes, Stairway commences  with the pastoral, arpeggiated A-minor chord so beloved of guitar shop wannabes everywhere (remember the “No Stairway To Heaven” sign from Wayne’s World?), rolling into a folkier groove before rocking out in the final third, Page committing an excoriating solo to it with his vintage Telecaster (a Yardbirds gift from Beck). While this structure clearly creates the attention, its lyrics - penned by Plant while, apparently in a bad mood - have been the subject of intense debate. “Depending on what day it is,” Plant once said, “I still interpret the song a different way - and I wrote the lyrics.” The general consensus is that the “lady who's sure all that glitters is gold” is about a woman who accumulates money, only to find out - badly - that life is meaningless and she wouldn’t get into heaven. Beyond that, Stairway is no more profound than the product of a band at the peak of their chutzpah indulging in the early ’70s penchant for album tracks that got a tad widdly-widdly. 

Jimmy Page has suggested that when Zeppelin started working on the song in October 1970 it was envisaged as being as long as 15 minutes (still quite brief compared with some examples of the prog genre, such as the 23-minute Supper’s Ready by Genesis), with a construct built on a mystical story that leads to a romping climax. Rumours about hidden satanic messages, contained in reverse-recorded passages, have led to some with too much time on their hands to suggest that Stairway was the Devil’s work. Page’s flirtations with the work of Crowley haven’t helped, either (he did, to be fair, buy Crowley’s house near Loch Ness, which only added to the association). Plant has wisely dismissed the suggestions in pragmatic terms. “There are a lot of people who are making money [out of these suggestions],” he has said. “If that's the way they need to do it, then do it without my lyrics. I cherish them far too much.”

While, though, there is some sense of Stairway being something of a millstone for the surviving members of the band, its place is rock music history hasn’t been lost on them, least of all Page: “I thought Stairway crystallised the essence of the band,” he told Rolling Stone in 1975. “It had everything there and showed the band at its best - as a band, as a unit.” Page called it a milestone for the band, and remains proud that it was never released as a single, a point that only adds to its enigma and its lasting significance. That, though, hasn’t indemnified Stairway from critics (even Plant once said in an interview with Q magazine: “If you absolutely hated Stairway To Heaven, no one can blame you for that because it was so pompous” (he has also branded it a “wedding song”). 

Its appearance on Led Zeppelin IV drew no shortage of accusations of being pretentious and bloated. For a song so eulogised now, it wasn’t always so loved by the music press, but then again, they were never the most receptive audience to anything deemed progressive in the early ’70s (although, in my experience, even the most pro-punk/anti-prog journalists all had plenty of art rock in their record collections…).

With John Bonham’s death in 1980 Led Zeppelin came to an abrupt halt. Plant, Page and Jones were persuaded to play at Live Aid five years later, using both Chic drummer Tony Thompson and Plant’s friend Phil Collins on drums (Collins and Page have since traded barbs, with the latter saying the drummer was unrehearsed, and Collins suggesting the guitarist was somewhat out of it on the day. Stairway To Heaven closed the 30-minute set, which also included Rock And Roll and Whole Lotta Love. The song was performed again in 1988 at the Atlantic Records 40th anniversary concert, with Jason Bonham playing drums. The performance wasn’t great, with Plant even managing to forget some of his own lyrics. A better rendition appeared - for the last time - in 2007 when Plant, Page, Jones and Bonham Jr agreed to play at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute at London’s O2 Arena, the final time Led Zeppelin as a band performed on stage. Stairway was a part of Heart’s tribute set in 2012 at the Kennedy Center Honor show, attended by Barack Obama and intended to take a hat off to artists who’d made an important contribution to American culture (the only other British recipients have ever been Cary Grant, Sean Connery and Paul McCartney).

When it was released on Monday, 8 November, 1971 Led Zeppelin IV went to Number 1 in the UK, only narrowly missing out on the top spot in the US. It is still regarded as one of the greatest albums of the classic rock era, and you can take from it what you want in terms of its legacy. It wasn’t Zeppelin’s first and it wasn’t their last, and certainly wasn’t the only memorable entry in 1971’s lengthy parade of classics. But with so much of the music produced that year, it was the work of a group of young men for whom anything went, creatively (though as numerous biographies have revealed, the same could be said of Zeppelin’s touring antics). Unlike today’s somewhat over-curated, packaged pop, it comes from a time when bands had licence to do what they liked, and weren’t dictated to by popular taste or the need to appeal to radio airplay algorithms. Led Zeppelin IV can also be broken down into the individual DNA of the four proponents - the very people depicted by the inner sleeve’s runes - in so far as it draws, in different degrees, from all the different musical interests Plant, Page, Jones and Bonham had at the time - blues, rock, folk, heavy rock and more. “I think that was the beauty of the players, of all of us, that maybe the style went over here, and then over there, and we could cut it wherever,” Plant told Mojo. “But we were in a really fluid creative place.” 

That manifests itself in the album’s eight tracks: in Black Dog’s riff; Rock And Roll’s nod to the musical revolution of the 1950s that set everything in train; The Battle Of Evermore hippy-dippyness (enhanced by Sandy Denny’s co-vocals); Stairway To Heaven’s sheer audacity; the bonkers groove of Misty Mountain Hop, Four Sticks’ rhythmic veracity; the wistful beauty of Going To California; and those signature, pounding drums of When The Levee Breaks, which consciously made the genetic link between original Delta Blues and hard rock. 50 years on, what it lacks in the innovations of more revered albums like Sgt. Pepper before it, or The Dark Side Of The Moon which followed two years later, over 42 minutes it remains an utterly compelling album. 

These days albums seem designed to be dipped in and out of, with tracks extracted for streaming playlists rather than complete, start-to-finish playback. Led Zeppelin IV, over its eight tracks, defies that. It’s also, by the way, much, much more than that one song that closes Side 1.

Robert Plant's Carry Fire

Pop quiz: can you name any frontmen - and notably, British frontmen - famed for being the focal points of legendary rock groups and who have now spent considerably more time on their own than they ever did in the bands with which they made their reputations?

Off the top of my head there is Paul McCartney (the you-know-whos). Peter Gabriel (Genesis), Bryan Ferry (Roxy Music) and, latterly, Morrisey (The Smiths). There are probably many more. Perhaps you can play this very entertaining game on your next dull car journey.

One further entry to this canon must be Robert Plant. His musical alma mater, Led Zeppelin, of course, only lasted 12 years before John Bonham's untimely death brought a sudden end to one of rock's most defining bands. Like Gabriel's eight years with Genesis or McCartney's 'paltry' decade with The Fabs, Plant's Zeppelin history has been both a blessing and the proverbial millstone. He can't avoid it, and on his last tour (which I got to experience in both Paris - at Le Bataclan, a matter of yards from the stage - and at the Montreux Jazz Festival) there was no shortage of Zeppelin material, albeit carefully selected and adapted to the eclectic sound of his diversely-influenced band, the Sensational Space Shifters. But the so-called Zeppelin reunion ten years ago at the O2 Arena (technically it was Plant, Jimmy Page and John-Paul Jones playing together at a benefit for Ahmet Ertegün) - while suitably respectful of the Zeppelin legend - unwittingly whetted appetites for a full revival. Page is said to be still up for it, Jones is apparently non-committal, while Plant...

'Indifferent' barely covers Plant's attitude towards returning to the band he joined in 1968 at the outset of a 12-year lifespan that, at times, resembled more of a military campaign than simply four men playing blues-inspired rock'n'roll (and, in the process, inventing heavy metal). Even last year's legal dispute, in which the LA band Spirit challenged the providence of Stairway To Heaven (claiming a close resemblance to their 1968 instrumental Taurus) brought Plant, Page and Jones together, briefly, without anything more coming from it.

Plant has always been somewhat diffident on the subject of a return to Zeppelin, and in a recent interview with Rolling Stone he maintained his distance: "Um, well, what was once a steady date becomes a cup of coffee. That's basically how it turned out, a cup of coffee from time to time. But nothing intimate," he replied to being asked whether the reunion was like old times. While Plant and his former cohorts could earn tens of millions from a Zeppelin revival, Plant's focus is clearly doing his own thing - enjoying life back home in England, on the Shropshire border with Wales, and pursuing his rock-meets-roots music.

Thus, Carry Fire - released on Friday - continues the eclecticism of 2014's Lullaby And...The Ceaseless Roar - "grooves and moves," he recently describe the album, albeit with a greater rooting in Plant's musical past, indeed to the blues and rock'n'roll of his teenage. There is a subtle mood of contemplation about it, as the recently-turned 69 Plant embraces age and, possibly, even his own mortality, as well as the world around him. Not that it is morbid or stark in nature and he is typically self depreciating about his encroaching years ("I play soccer every Wednesday at 7pm," he revealed to Rolling Stone. "I play till someone says, 'Go in goal – it looks like you're gonna die.' Then somebody brings the defibrillator quick.").

Plant's voice throughout Carry Fire is gentle, closer to a whisper, gently coating some songs rather than dragging them forward as he did with that banshee scream in his Zeppelin pomp. Ah, yes, that band again. Perhaps he doesn't do himself any favours by opening the album with The May Queen, though he maintains that it is somewhat coincidental that he should draw reference to that character bustling in the hedgerow of Stairway, even if the song is as steeped in Plant's romantic side as that song from Led Zeppelin IV.

Sonically, The May Queen sets the tone for the remaining 11 tracks, each drawing on reverb-drenched rockabilly, Appalachian folk, the strings and sounds of North Africa, as well as pastoral England. They mark a certain contentment with the form, one that has never settled into anything simple - even his bluegrass tie-up with Alison Krauss, Raising Sand found channels of exploration. There are obvious comparisons to be drawn to Peter Gabriel, especially with the richness of the Sensational Space Shifters' screeches and scratches, bleeps and blurps, many the result of guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Justin Adams, ex-Cast guitarist Liam 'Skin' Tyson, former Massive Attack and Portishead keyboard player John Baggott and the Gambian purveyor of all manner of exotic stringed instruments, Juldeh Camara, separating into their own recording unit to come up with parts of songs to reattach to Plant's core material.

The man who once screamed out "Valhalla!" on Immigrant Song returns to migration with New World..., taking a gentler view of human movement ("In songs we praise a happy landing, on yet another virgin shore") while Adams' guitars screech out a chugging rhythm like angle grinders. Plant expresses his dismay at the current occupant of the White House with Carving Up The World Again...A Wall And... while addressing man's desire for war with Bones Of Saints, both songs constraining any anger while the ensemble's rugged, reverb-shaped soundscapes do as much to express anger as any screaming vocals might have done.

Indeed, Plant's voice - at times an entire register lower than in his Zeppelin pomp - is more like a coating: on A Way With Words it is hushed almost to the point of a whisper, hauntingly drawn over a reluctant-sounding piano. It is in these textures that Plant now plays: even Bluebirds Over The Mountain, a duet with Chrissie Hynde and a cover of an old rockabilly number once done by both the Beach Boys and Ritchie Valens, is given a low-key, looped-up twist that sounds like Garbage doing a hoe-down.

The overall effect of Carry Fire is one of confident maturity. Plant knows he's an elder statesman, but has no need to exploit past glories. Instead he is flying his own kite, boldly, in the way this album's songs are arranged and delivered. It may, at times, sound like Eddie Cochran doing trip-hop, but it is - I wager - utterly unique. And utterly brilliant.

Still dazed, but not confused: Led Zeppelin - The Complete BBC Sessions

There are many things to love about the BBC. I do, willingly, admit a bias on this, since dear old Auntie put a roof over my head from birth (my dad was a BBC studio cameraman at the time and remained with the Beeb until his retirement). I therefore have a close affinity with the organisation, as distinguished and grand a public institution as the National Health Service, and probably equally as flawed.

But despite all the things about the BBC you could probably fill an entire edition of the Daily Mail with (which they do), one of its finest traditions has been the curation of music, from pop to the Proms and all stops in between, recorded in its own studios and theatres, and during in-show sessions for programmes like John Peel's suspiciously titled Top Gear (nothing to do with motoring, folks...), Radio 1’s landmark In Concert broadcasts, and other specials over the last half century or more.

This incredible wealth of music history lying in the BBC's vaults writes the history of pop and rock, and many of the recordings have found themselves released by the bands themselves, often providing fascinating snapshots of bands in development. The two Beatles' Live At The BBC compilations, recorded in the early 60s for the BBC Light Programme (Radio 1's forerunner) are wonderfully reverent captures of a band in the initial throes of superstardom, while Bowie At The Beeb covers The Dame's emergence in the late 1960s, as he trod a line between progressive rock and the vaudeville of his Anthony Newley/Jacques Brel phase (it also includes brief but fascinating exchanges between Bowie and Peel, for example, introducing his "new" guitarist "Michael Ronson"). The recently released Yardbirds Live At The BBC double CD captures the raw energy of the band as it launched the British R&B boom, along with the careers of three Surrey guitarists - Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. Amusingly, it includes interviews between the BBC's plummy-voiced Brian Matthew - whose corny questions and use of phrases like "hit parade" became ironically parodied years later by Smash Hits magazine - and Page, sporting a slightly Epsom-posh, high-pitched voice.

By the time he played at the BBC with The Yardbirds in 1967, Page was already a seasoned 23-year-old session guitarist, having recorded with The Who (augmenting Pete Townshend on their first single, I Can't Explain) and The Kinks, played on Van Morrison/Them's Baby Please Don't Go and Here Comes the Night, and on Petula Clark's Downtown. In 1968, The Yardbirds' Keith Relf and Jim McCarty left, leaving Page to recruit replacements for a tour of Scandinavia. The musicians he brought in were vocalist Robert Plant, drummer John Bonham and another prolific session musician. John Paul Jones. And thus was born "the New Yardbirds", until a Keith Moon quip about a "lead Zeppelin" brought about another change of name: Led Zeppelin.

Ten years after Zeppelin formally broke up in the wake of Bonham's death, Page took on the role of band curator, overseeing a series of CD remasters of the original studio recordings. However, despite being one of the greatest stage acts in rock history, there had been a paucity of official Led Zeppelin live recordings to work on, despite the 1970s vogue for live albums. The one exception had been the soundtrack for The Song Remains The Same, the critically flawed concert film recorded over three nights at Madison Square Garden, and added to with bizarre fantasy sequences, such as Plant in soft focus rescuing a castle-bound maiden while in search of the Holy Grail. No, me neither.

For the rest, however, Zeppelin fans had to make do with myriad bootlegs, many of which had been poorly recorded on dictaphones smuggled into venues. This has long irked Jimmy Page, believing that fans have been denied access to the full power of the band live. So, on November 11, 1997 (coincidentally, my 30th birthday folks...), Led Zeppelin released BBC Sessions, a CD package containing BBC recordings from 1969 for the likes of Peel and Alexis Korner's Rhythm And Blues show, as well as exclusive BBC gigs between 1969 and 1971 during which early versions of Dazed And Confused (which Page had first performed with The Yardbirds), Communication Breakdown and the Whole Lotta Love medley, a staple of their later tours, were premiered.

The BBC Sessions package - which included a limited edition version containing band interviews - was a masterpiece. Coming more than 20 years after The Song Remains The Same, it gave fans a chance to hear Zeppelin in their raw state, capturing in sessions often recorded in small radio studios the energy that would later expand into the arenas that became their domain in the 1970s. Of note, however, was the quality of the recordings: in 1997 the CD was still in its infancy, along with digital media in general, but fans were amazed by the detail in the recordings, such as the squeak of Bonham's hi-hat levers going up and down on one of the Dazed And Confused performances.

"The BBC really had very well trained engineers who would have done orchestral sessions, jazz sessions, folk, rock - even skiffle at one point," Page told Johnny Walker last week during a Facebook Live interview to promote the reissue of the BBC recordings - The Complete BBC Sessions, which was released on Friday. "These engineers did a terrific job, considering [most sessions] were recorded for just one broadcast. But to go in with something this avant garde for them to listen to...we were absolutely fearless!".

BBC engineers were products of highly respected training centres, such as the BBC technical college at Wood Norton, near Evesham in Worcestershire. For Page - who, on top of his experience as a session musician, was already a skilled hand in the studio - the BBC's staff responded to the challenge of Led Zeppelin's loud, raucous blues. "[The BBC] didn't know what they were going to be confronted with. For instance, with the Dazed And Confused recording we went in with that and the shorter Communication Breakdown to give two sides of the coin of what we were doing. But there were also usually three, maybe four, songs on the session, but we also used to make up songs on the go, like Sunshine Woman, The Girl I Love and Travelling Riverside Blues. We were creating music so freely and these songs were just in the moment."

Some of those 'made-up' songs didn't appear on the original BBC Sessions CD package, something Zeppelin fans have been known to growl about, feeling that they'd missed out on unheard songs from the canon. "20 years ago a lot got left off because of the amount of space you get on a CD," Page explained to Walker. To this end, the 'new' BBC set contains all 20 tracks from the 1997 release along with nine previously unheard performances from a 'lost' session. These include two more versions of Communication Breakdown and What It Is And What Should Never Be, another version of Dazed And Confused, the semi-improvised Sunshine Woman, and the instrumental White Summer (which appeared as a track extra on the 1990 CD reissue of Coda).

For those who missed the 1997 release, The Complete BBC Sessions is a terrific and thoroughly worthy indulgence - available in three options: an eight-disc (five vinyl and three CD) package containing a 48-page book, an individually-numbered, limited edition luxury print and access to high-definition digital downloads. A five-disc 180g vinyl package is also available, along with a CD-only version containing all 33 tracks on three discs. And, as if that wasn't enough, all versions come with comprehensive sleeve notes by Dave Lewis, editor of the long-running Led Zeppelin magazine and the fan site Tight But Loose, as well as author of several highly informative books about the band.

That The Complete BBC Sesssions just covers the period between 1969 and 1971 shouldn't mean that fans should clamour for more. The 1971 recordings were their last for the BBC, perhaps marking the moment that, with their fourth album, they were propelled into the superstar period of their career, spending the next nine years as their original line-up marauding across the world - and especially North America. Some will say, with some justification, that Led Zeppelin became the perfect example of bloated stadium rock (I will always disagree), but the thing that makes The Complete BBC Sessions so engaging is where the band were, musically, at the outset of their journey.

This was the dawning of the rock era and Led Zeppelin were, arguably, the vanguard, bridging that period between pop's maturing and British rock's transatlantic dominance. By 1969, Page had, in just a few years, gone from suburban Epsom to playing on Petula Clark and Tom Jones as a teenager, and then on to founding one of the most notable - and notorious - bands. At the BBC, though, you can hear Led Zeppelin, as a collective, playing with, toying with the blues and finding the voice that would eventually be branded "heavy rock". Most amusingly, however, is the idea that BBC engineers - whom, it seemed from my visits to Television Centre with my dad, were mostly called Brian and wore cardigans - were studiously, scientifically even, recording Robert Plant's overtly sexual singing, Bonzo's simply enormous drumming, Jonesy's measured, cultured bass and keyboards, and Page's incredible guitar work for posterity.

On this new collection there are also lighter moments - the Isleys' It's Your Thing as a bolt-on to Communication Breakdown, for example, plus a far greater array of experimentation than Zeppelin usually gets credit for. There is little wastage, either. "John Paul Jones and I had both been session musicians ourselves so we were used to working under very controlled conditions, where every second is literally costing money," explained Page in the Facebook Live session. "We were always very efficient - ruthlessly efficient."

Without getting into the marketing economics of the Led Zeppelin reissues - with middle aged, credit card-burning fans like me clearly the target demographic - they are clearly a labour of love for Page, and his earnestness at curating the Zeppelin legacy shines through. "With the renaissance of vinyl it was crying out to do this, and to put it in context of the reissues of the studio albums," Page explained to Walker. "This is a historical document. There wasn't anywhere else in the world that was like the BBC. It's a great time capsule. You can hear the band progressing from 1969 to 1971 - only two years!"

The process has also been rewarding, but highly time-consuming for Page: "The BBC Sessions are 'complete' as the name of the package says! I've been doing this a long time - you have to listen to everything in real-time. There are no short cuts," to which he added "Now it's time to dust down the guitar!", pointing to his eagerness to get on with a new project - with, or probably, without Plant.

Defending the indefensible: Phil Collins - what's he done to you?

"No wonder people were annoyed with me! And I do apologise!” So said Phil Collins in a 2014 Daily Mail interview in which he was asked to atone for near-ubiquity in the mid-eighties and early nineties that subsequently led him to being charged in Britain with a number of alleged offences, such as:

• Getting married often (true)
• Getting divorced often and writing songs about it (true)
• Divorcing by fax (not true)
• Being a Tory (not true and flatly denied)
• Being mates with Prince Charles (true - he was a trustee of the Prince's Trust).
• 'Going Hollywood' (true)
• Being respected by US hip-hop artists (true)
• Footballer Steven Gerrard being a Collins fan, thus "dragging the game back into the Dark Ages" (partly true)
• Leaving the UK after Tony Blair became prime minister (true - he married a Swiss national)
• Divorcing for a third time...and now, apparently, moving back in with her (true)

Let's face it, not even Gary Glitter and his odious proclivities has been slammed as badly. So, on the occasion of Collins' 65th birthday, it's time to give the man a break because, frankly, all this hatin' is undeserved.

For a start, Collins was, to begin with, a reluctant pop star. This makes his subsequent superstardom (joining Macca and Jacko as the only performers to have sold over 100 million albums as solo artists and as band members) something of a paradox. That's not to say Collins regrets his success, but that his success has only really been a problem in his country of origin.

Despite being a child actor (including the Artful Dodger in the West End production of Oliver! and blink-and-you-miss appearances in Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang and A Hard Day's Night), being part of a touted late 1960s band, Flaming Youth, who went nowhere, and then joining Genesis in 1970, the Phil Collins most people know about only came to be at the beginning of the 1980s. 

When Peter Gabriel left Genesis in 1975, Collins was the last resort to replace him as lead singer. He would have been happy to have remained on the drum stool, applying a God-given drumming talent that had seen him play percussion on sessions for George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, would later see him farmed out to play on Brian Eno's acclaimed Another Green World, as well as starting his fusion side project, Brand X.

Joining Genesis to begin with had been an act of professional curiosity. Having seen them as one of those bands that were always appearing in Melody Maker's gig pages, Collins had figured that they would be a good source of regular work when he was offered to audition at Gabriel's parents' house in Chobham, Surrey. While he paddled around in the swimming pool, as you do, listening to the other auditioneers, he absorbed the material, subsequently nailing the job.

Collins wasn't a particular fan of prog rock. His music was soul, R&B and jazz. But with the obscure time signatures and meandering fantasy songs of the early Genesis, Collins' drumming style evolved with intricate, jazz-like flourishes and melodic fills, taking the power of peers like John Bonham and Keith Moon (whom he could have replaced in The Who) and adding a musical 'voice' to the drums.

His contribution to Genesis wasn't, however, merely percussive. With Steve Hackett joining in 1971, the two grammar school-educated West Londoners provided a grounded buttress to the rarified environment created by Gabriel, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford, who'd formed Genesis at Charterhouse, the public school better known for turning out prime ministers, archbishops and captains of industry than hairy rock stars.

As Collins has often remarked, band politics were often an extension of school politics, and arguments over pencil cases and protractors, long forgotten, easily erupted again over guitar tunings and piano solos and other petty musical disagreements. Collins, with his stage school self-assurance and considerably greater streetwisery, was the perfect pin with which to puncture the air when things became too overwrought.

But with a new album to record in the autumn of 1975, and no lead singer emerging from 100s of applicants, Collins - who had been coaching the auditions - was clearly better at singing the new material than those trying out for the job.

And so, on February 2, 1976, three days after Collins' 25th birthday, the first post-Gabriel Genesis album, A Trick Of The Tail, was released. Fans had heard Collins' voice before - perfectly complementing Gabriel on stage, as well as providing lead vocals on album tracks like Nursery Cryme's For Absent Friends and More Fool Me on Selling England By The Pound. But with the new album Genesis started to assume a new persona, with Collins its focal point.

With Gabriel out of the picture, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford took on more of the songwriting. A Trick Of The Tail retained much of the whimsy that Gabriel and his Lewis Carroll-like wordplay had laid over complex musical arrangements, and with Dance On A Volcano and Squonk the band's association with fantasy - rather than poppy romance -continued. But in Ripples and Entangled, in particular, Collins' vocals brought Genesis closer to Crosby, Stills and Nash, and the band started to become a little more accessible. Robbery, Assault & Battery also added some levity. No surprise, then, that it was co-written by Collins.

Live, Collins' precocious sense of fun provided a different dynamic. Gabriel had been a relatively shy individual, gauchely telling obscure stories between songs and dressing up in costumes to help illustrate the meandering music. Collins, at a glance, brought another energy and the cheeky-chappiness of an end-of-pier comedian (while not abandoning drumming duties - joining touring drummers like King Crimson's Bill Bruford and long-standing stickman Chester Thompson on the instrumental parts of the so-called "long songs").

When Steve Hackett left the band after the release of Seconds Out - still the best live album ever - Genesis contracted into a trio. Banks, in particular, and Rutherford were still the core of the band's songwriting, but Collins had emerged as the band's personality, and with it had some influence. The irony of this is that the next album, ...And Then There Were Three produced a hit single, Follow You, Follow Me, a love song that introduced the band to a female audience for the first time. And it was, in fact, written by Rutherford.

If A Trick Of The Tail "launched" Phil Collins, to some extent, the commercial success - and enormous US tours that followed - was the making of him. After the 1978 tour, Rutherford and Banks went off to do solo albums. Collins was struggling to save his four-year-old first marriage - arguably the victim of his workaholism - and he offered to move to Canada where his wife Andrea Bertorelli had moved to with their children. It didn't work out, so he withdrew to his now empty West Sussex cottage and started noodling around in a makeshift bedroom studio.

The outcome was only intended to provide catharsis for the divorce he was now going through, plaintive, heart-on-sleeve songs like If Leaving Me Is Easy, Please Don't Ask ('given' to Genesis for their Duke album) and, of course, In The Air Tonight - famously self-described as "not a happy song" about Bertorelli.

It's pioneering use of both drum machines and that now-familiar 'gated reverb' drum sound (created during Collins' contribution to Gabriel's third solo album) turned In The Air Tonight into a huge hit, taking the singer from reluctant front man to Top Of The Pops, famously appearing playing a keyboard on top of a Black & Decker Workmate with a paint pot on it, a dig at Bertorelli who'd apparently run off with the decorator.

This was two of Collins' most enduring qualities at work: firstly, his comic schtick and secondly, his lack of any typical English reserve. What you see is what you get, which is why Face Value's sleeve was dominated by Collins' full moon face on the front cover, and thinning hair on the back of his head on the rear.

The child actor-turned drummer from Hounslow was no longer the reluctant front man. In The Air Tonight would make Collins part of the 80s zeitgeist: Michael Mann included it in the pilot episode of Miami Vice - its hissing Roland CR78 drum machine and simple three-chord arrangement played on a Prophet 5 keyboard underlaying a pivotal scene featuring Crockett and Tubbs driving moodily down - appropriately - Collins Avenue in Miami Beach.

Face Value's follow-up, Hello, I Must Be Going! (a title quoting Groucho Marx) took Collins up another notch, its cover of The Supremes' You Can't Hurry Love - to some, a throwaway retread of an old soul number - becoming a global pop hit in 1982.

In 1983, and with another Genesis album behind him, Collins came to work for no less a figure than Robert Plant. Led Zeppelin had broken up following John Bonham's death, and Plant turned to Collins to kick start his solo career. "I was graced by my first two solo records, Pictures at Eleven and The Principle of Moments," Plant has said more recently. "A drummer contacted me and said, 'I love Bonham so much I wanna sit behind you when you sing'. It was Phil Collins. His career was just kicking in and he was the most spirited and positive and really encouraging force, because you can't imagine what it was like, me trying to carve my own way after all that."

Having scored another global hit about divorce with the power ballad Against All Odds, the title song of Taylor Hackford's film of the same name, 1985 came around. He'd begun the year drumming on Band Aid's Do They Know Its Christmas?, but things took off spectacularly with the album No Jacket Required. Its lead-in single Sussudio was a bold, brassy hit of the age - all electronic drums and synths, though it bore great similarity to Prince's 1999 (Collins admits to have been a fan). Still, that didn't stop the album garnering more hits, including Take Me Home, the video for which featured Collins at various points on a world tour that seemed to just say "I'm now a global superstar".

And he was. On July 12, 1985, he managed to be at both the Wembley and Philadelphia ends of Live Aid. In his inimitable manner, Collins maintained that he was just trying to do the cause a favour: originally a number of the London performers were going to try and get over to Philadelphia on Concorde, but in the end it was only Collins. However, what seemed like a good idea turned out to be anything less as, along with doing another solo set, he was asked to drum for Led Zeppelin (who already had The Power Station's Tony Thompson on board). With Jimmy Page apparently "drooling in a corner", what should have been a magnanimous gesture ended up as an unrehearsed nightmare. Not that the crowd would have cared.

That year, Collins even made an acting appearance in Miami Vice, playing dodgy game show host "Phil the Shill". By 1986 - in which Genesis sold out Wembley Stadium for a record four nights - he was, literally, everywhere, even playing Great Train Robber Buster Edwards in a supposed romantic comedy that had largely been written with the singer in mind. Though Collins hadn't signed up for Buster purely to act in it, songs for the soundtrack were inevitable, and the old Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders song Groovy Kind Of Love gave him yet another hit.

At the same time, in Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho, we had Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman indulging hypothesising on Collins' career while entertaining a pair of hookers: "I also think Phil Collins works best within the confines of the group, than as a solo artist, and I stress the word artist", he suggests, having just instructed one of the girls to "eat it". Phil Collins was now an inextricable feature of the era.

Genesis, for much of the 1970s, had been a band that that the music press appreciated, but hadn't always raved about. There were cooler bands, quite frankly, but Genesis were regarded as merely "interesting". That, though, didn't hamper their inexorable rise. But with Collins becoming the band's breakout star on the back of his own solo work, when he returned to the group that had launched him, the trio found a camaraderie and creativity that only they could achieve together. Thus, via the albums Abacab, Genesis, Invisible Touch and We Can't Dance, they became darlings of the nascent MTV, their profoundly American-orientated videos for singles playing on both the band's sense of humour and, in particular, Collins' own love of hamming it up. 

Being everywhere via Genesis, his own solo music, and his myriad side projects created a monster that would always be at odds with the press back in the UK. Things reached their nadir with the NME's Steven 'Seething' Wells writing a vicious piece headlined "Ugly Bald Bastard Speaks (to Phil Collins)". By then, I had possibly been the last author of any review in the NME of a Collins gig. Quite why he'd agreed to speak to the paper baffles me still. The NME and its IPC stablemate Melody Maker had taken to baiting Collins, with the Maker's letters page even printing his home address as an attempt to close off a correspondence that Collins himself had persisted with, such was his anger at comments the paper had published.

With the release, in 1990, of But Seriously, Collins reached the zenith of his fame. An album featuring then-neighbour Eric Clapton, his ubiquity - both in the charts but also at the all-star charity gigs so in-vogue at the time - saw him achieving commercial success few other British solo artists had reached then and certainly not since.

However, the album's hit single, Another Day In Paradise, a song about the plight of the homeless, drew derision. How could a multi-millionaire rock star be claiming to trying to solve the problem of urban homelessness? Undeterred, the Collins machine rolled on, with another Genesis album, We Can't Dance in 1992, more hits and another mega tour.

But in 1993 the machine hit turbulence. With Genesis on hiatus (Collins was never to record an album with them again), he released his next solo album, Both Sides. Recorded mostly at home on his own, it sounded like a collection of bedroom demos. Face Value may have begun that way, but Both Sides was committed to release in that form. It appeared that the man with the golden touch of the previous decade was losing it. A live jazz album - A Hot Night in Paris - followed, featuring arrangements of Genesis and solo songs that, actually, wasn't bad.

Collins was far from over at this point, but even with the next album Dance Into The Light, it felt like Collins was coasting. Towards the end of the 1990s Disney invited him to write songs for the animated Tarzan film, producing an Oscar-winning smash hit in You'll Be In My Heart. This, though, just added to the British disease of sniffing at success, with Collins being regarded at the start of the new Millennium as having "gone Hollywood".

In marrying his third wife, Swiss translator Orianne Cevey, Collins moved to Switzerland, settling down in a small village near Lausanne. This, of course, became interpreted as "Tory Phil leaves UK" in the wake of the Blair government coming to power in 1997. The Sun also claimed that Collins had divorced second wife Jill Tavelman "by fax" (the truth of it was that certain documents had to be sent by fax but this wasn't allowed to get in the way of a good story). Of course, much of this was the doing of the media, a classic case of a Brit being built up and then knocked down. By comparison, the US didn't stop being a fan, though Collins' increasing invisibility while he enjoyed playing dad in Switzerland started to place him on "Where are they now?" lists.

With Genesis reforming for a limited, greatest hits-spinning tour in 2007, Collins was still not committing himself to a major return to the fore. By the tour's end, Collins was having to play drums with the sticks gaffer-taped to his hands, the result of a worsening back problem. More medical problems were to follow, with an infection causing hearing loss in one ear. Not long after the lame Motown covers album Going Back came out in 2010, Collins announced his retirement. By this stage, the music press didn't care. Even some fans were of the view that Collins was no longer the writing, drumming and performing force he had once been. Perhaps success had changed him.

It is, though, time to reassess the album that took Phil Collins from drummer and then singing-drummer with one of Britain's hardest-to-place bands, to becoming a solo star who, in many respects, was the 1980s.

With a hint that he might be reconsidering his retirement, Collins has this week re-released Face Value, adding previously unreleased tracks, and updating the iconic black and white cover shot with a new picture showing the considerably aged and somewhat gaunt Collins of today.

It requires listening to afresh. For an album that was supposed to be about a bitter divorce, once past the truly innovative In The Air Tonight and, later, the quite obvious If Leaving Me Is Easy, This Must Be Love and Thunder & Lightning joyfully celebrate moving on. The album ends with a stunning cover of The Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows, embracing all that the studio had to offer the Fabs themselves on the original. Behind The Lines is a cover version of the Genesis song Collins co-wrote for their Duke album, and with the addition of Earth, Wind & Fire's Phenix Horns, it is a totally different song, and even better for it. Likewise, I Missed Again is a riotously uptempo song. The Roof Is Leaking, with its depression era theme and mournful banjo, captures Collins' sadness as well as an expected nod to other musical styles not previously in his oeuvre.

Face Value was, for Genesis fans, a shock, especially when the same horn section turned up on the next Genesis album, Abacab. Those still wedded to 20-minute epics like Suppers Ready and Cinema Show took a while to adjust to "their" lead singer pouring his emotions out in heart-on-sleeve ballads. Even In The Air Tonight, a song which has since found new life in hip-hop (the tribute album Urban Renewal featured artists like Ol' Dirty Bastard, Kelis and Montell Jordan doing Collins covers), sounded like nothing any of his previous outlets had ever produced. And even now, from the first hiss of the drum machine through to the now-famous tom-tom fill, it is a song to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. In the hairs tonight, if you will.

I won't pretend that I went off Collins' music as it lost its edge at the turn of the Noughties. But in Collins himself, his history as one of the greatest rock drummers of all time, the accessibility he brought to Genesis before they became music TV mainstays, and his work as a producer and collaborator with people like my musical hero John Martyn, warrants greater appreciation than the short cuts too many take to ignorantly dismiss him for his supposed politics, his personal life and the unashamedly populist end of his music.

You don't have to love him at all, or at least love the bits of his career you don't have to like, but if you like music and appreciate musicianship, there are parts of Phil Collins' musical history that deserve enormous credit. And I would start by listening to an album that was released 40 years ago next week, A Trick Of The Tail.