How meeting Robert Plant in Perth led to new Led Zeppelin film
The creators of a new documentary about Led Zeppelin have revealed how a meeting with Robert Plant in Perth helped it come together
Without a meeting in the city's concert hall though, a new film documenting the rise and early years of Zeppelin may never have been made.
Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty, the latter of whom grew up in Barrhead, are the director and screenwriters of Becoming Led Zeppelin, the first documentary ever made about the band featuring its surviving members.
The pair were behind the American Epic series which tells the story of America being democratised through music.
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Following the release of the acclaimed serial they decided Zeppelin were the next step.
McGourty tells The Herald: "We were wondering what the next big area of transformation was in music.
“Bernard felt the time of the next big change, technologically, was in the late 1960s.”
MacMahon says: "Zeppelin are this force that comes in and changes everything, but like the American Epic acts we did they’re very mysterious. They’d never agreed to do a film, they’d never done a book telling their story.
“We like telling stories that haven’t been done before and this was one of the biggest, perhaps the biggest, in music that had never been told before.
"We started working out how we’d do that movie, and fortunately we prepare a lot in advance when making a film, we work out how we’re going to make a film – write it, script it, storyboard it – before we go and see anyone.
"That means when you meet someone like Zeppelin, who have probably been saying no for 50 years, you’re prepared and you know the subject.
"They were big fans of our American Epic films and we had very long meetings where we were almost walking them through scene-by-scene.
"They agreed it would be an independent film that we would edit and make, they haven’t exerted any editorial control over the film whatsoever, they haven’t altered a single frame – which is unheard of for a group of that magnitude.
"Almost every big musical documentary you look at is ultimately controlled by the group, and they’re telling the director ‘take that out, remove this’. They didn’t do that at all.”
The group disbanded following the death of drummer John Bonham in 1980, and have performed together on only a handful of occasions since.
The last was in 2007, at a tribute concert for Ahmet Ertegun, after which both Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones planned to take Led Zeppelin on the road - something Plant had no interest in.
Led Zeppelin performing at the Royal Albert Hall in 1970 (Image: 2025 Paradise Pictures Ltd) One might think, then, that the singer might not be on board for a dive into the archives, but it was a meeting in Perth that ultimately led to his involvement.
McGourty explains: "Robert Plant and the Sensational Shapeshifters were playing at the Perth Concert Hall, so we went up and had a meeting with him after the concert.
"We were talking about American Epic, which he really liked, and he said, ‘what’s your next project?’ and we went, ‘well, actually…’”
MacMahon continues: "Robert thought a lot about it.
“One of the things you see in the film is that they’re all very different, John Paul Jones comes from this musical family so he’s in a tradition of musical entertainers and writers.
“Jimmy is on this mission, he had the idea of this sound and this thing he wanted to do, and once he’d achieved this extraordinary thing it was like, ‘I’ve done it’.
“Robert is different, he’s like a kind of troubadour. Before Zeppelin he’s got all these different looks and is in all these different bands: one day he’s a mod, the next he’s this Tom Jones character, the next he’s in a psychedelic band.
“Led Zeppelin is, obviously, monumental but then after that he’s going off and doing pop music and then he’s off to Timbuktu with Justin Adams and playing with the Tuaregs in the desert.
“I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but the way I look at it is that Zeppelin, as monumental as it was, is one stop – a very huge stop – on this constant road doing different musical things.
“So, and again I don’t want to put words into his mouth, I think he was looking at it as, ‘what purpose will it serve for me to go back and look at this?’.
“When he saw it in the context that this would be helpful for young kids, I think he saw the validity in it.”
Anyone expecting a lurid portrait of rock & roll excess will leave disappointed - drugs, death and mudsharks are notable by their absence.
Indeed, the opening of the film is largely dedicated to scene-setting, images of post-war London combined with the various musical inspirations of the four members of the group.
For Page the Scottish skiffle musician Lonnie Donegan was huge, for Plant the showmanship and vocal style of Little Richard, Jones vaudeville via his parents and Bonham jazz drummers such as Gene Krupa.
MacMahon says: "I really believe in the intelligence of the audience, if you show a good chunk of that music that’s influencing them on the screen the audience will pick up on it and go ‘oh yeah, I hear it’.
“The idea is that when you come to that first Zeppelin performance you’ve seen all the ingredients that are going into the stew and you say ‘oh right, that’s what it is’ – but it still tastes incredible all mixed together.”
As one might expect, Becoming Led Zeppelin is packed full of archive footage, many of it never seen before.
While Page, Plant and Jones are all interviewed on-screen it's Bonham who gets almost the film's final words, his side of the story having been pieced together from a long-lost radio interview.
MacMahon says: "The Bonhams are amazing, Jack Bonham, John’s father, had bought an 8mm camera and taken lots of film and, amazingly, that film was in great condition. They must have developed it and only played it once because it was pristine, it looked like it came out the lab yesterday.
Jon Bonham and Pat Phillips in a home video (Image: 2025 Paradise Pictures) “His sister, Deborah, provided these home movies so it allows you to see him, and what’s wonderful is the one band member who’s not there with us in the beginning is there on motion picture – there isn’t any motion pictures of Robert or John Paul Jones as young boys, but they’re right there telling their story.
"There are actually three Bonham interviews but the first was the breakthrough.
"I tracked down this bootleg and there was this Australian voice interviewing him.
"All we had was this Australian voice, so we called the University of Canberra who have an archive of radio recordings.
“We sent the bootleg to them, and after a week or two they were able to work out who the journalist was.
"From that we could work out this was the early 70s – I think late ’71 – and what station it was done for.
“We called the station and they didn’t have the tape, they’d sent some to the University of Canberra – but they didn’t have them listed.
“I asked how many unlisted tapes they had and it was thousands. I persuaded them to start looking through and a few months later I got a phone call close to midnight saying ‘check your email’ and clicked on it and heard John’s voice, they’d found the tape on an unmarked reel.
“After we found that we found two other recordings, so there are three unheard recordings of John and it’s all high quality."
While the film will be a treat for hardcore Zeppelin fans, it's as much the next generation the filmmakers are targeting.
MacMahon says: "It’s a quest. It’s these kids growing up in the rubble of World War II then looking over to America and seeing this land of plenty and opportunity, with this wonderful music coming out of it.
"Our hope is that a younger generation will watch this and whether they want to become a musician, or they want to be anything that isn’t a normal day-to-day job and their parents are maybe saying ‘no, you can’t do that, get a steady job’, this film is about how you follow your dreams.
"There’s an emotional thread tied through those songs, with the key message about perseverance and dedication – if you have a dream, follow it and don’t let criticism get in your way.
“The media tore Zeppelin apart - just carry on, double down, keep pushing through.”
Becoming Led Zeppelin is in cinemas now.
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