Molten
Rock-Immigrant Song-Kalevala LP
I never really liked Led Zeppelin. Not
for a long time anyway. I had them down as a bunch of long haired,
velvet-flared wearing knobheads. Maybe that was just their fans. Complete with old,
grubby greatcoats, bad haircuts, zsofo and four symbol patches in 1979, trying
to pretend Canute-like that there hadn’t been a sea-change with the advent of
punk and everything was old hat. (Of course it wasn’t, and ironically, the song
remained even more the same as before, but we weren’t to know that, replete as
we were with our X-Ray Spex singles under our arms and denim jackets punked up
with safety pins). Led Zeppelin fans, however, grimly held on through post-punk
when the ideology of the band was probably as unacceptable as it had ever been;
could you imagine how it would have gone down with a bunch of Au Pair fans,
singing about squeezing lemons until the juice runs down your legs? I think
that after that then Led Zeppelin just would have been seen as irrelevant and
never really fashionable. (A few years ago, I remember watching Robert Plant on
Jools Holland’s Later TV show. I only watched it because The Fall were on the
same show. I had to admire Plant though. He was hopping away on one leg for all
it was worth, gurning his wrinkled face like it was 1969 all over again in
visions of ecstasy and flailing his curly wrinkled locks around, all whist
wearing a pair of unfeasibly tight jeans. It was truly horrific, yet the sort
of thing that you couldn’t take your eyes off. The man had no sense of
embarrassment at all. He either thought he was extremely cool or just was
totally enjoying himself and didn’t give a fuck).
My conversion to Led Zeppelin only came
late in the day when, through a sense of boredom in the middle of a Saturday
afternoon shopping expedition, I saw their BBC Recordings double CD which had
just been released, in the racks at Sainsbury’s. Looking at the back sleeve of
the CD, I hadn’t realised that they’d recorded so much for John Peel’s old Top
Gear programme and thought that if had been good enough for Peel (even back in
the day), that surely it would be worth a go. With a sense of betrayal
therefore, I shuffled up to the counter with a tenner in one hand and the CD in
the other. I expected to get home and play it a couple of times and thereafter
for it to be consigned to the cds-I-should-never-have-bought pile. I had a heap
of ironing to do and thought it would be a case of killing two birds with one
stone; listen to the whole thing and get all the ironing done.
Two hours later though, all the shirts
and the rest were hanging up neatly and I was considering if embroidered
velveteen trousers would really look that ridiculous on a man of my advancing
girth and age. The Zepp rock!
Get/read/see "Totally Shuffled" here
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