Becoming Led Zeppelin Is The Year’s Must-See Music Documentary

Becoming Led Zeppelin, the first official documentary sanctioned and approved by the legendary band, has surpassed all expectations. The film includes never-seen-before footage and new interviews with Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones. Best of all, it includes unearthed interviews from the late, great drummer John Bonham, and it’s a wonderful, loving tribute to one of the greatest bands of all time. And the box office agrees.

“The first week was mad in IMAX in America,” the film’s director Bernard MacMahon tells CLASH. “It was completely sold out. It was made for IMAX, and that run sold out and by the end of the first week it was IMAX’s biggest music film of all time. Now it’s broken Sony Classics biggest music film of all time.”

“It’s absolutely incredible,” agrees producer and co-writer Allison McGourty. “I’m blown away and absolutely honoured. I’ve met people who have seen it, two, three, four, even five times. We worked really hard on this film but it’s just surpassed all our dreams and expectations. It’s mind-blowing.”

“The feeling of connection with all these people we’ve never met is extraordinary. By them going again and again, it tells us we were right to put all this work on. You have all these people who look at the world the same as you do,” Macmahon adds.

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And the film took a lot of work. Led Zeppelin were notorious media-unfriendly in their 1970s pomp, and little has changed in the intervening years. Fiercely protective of their legacy, Page, Plant, Jones and the Bonham family had never approved any form of external re-evaluation until McGourty and MacMahon, a pair of dedicated fans (as is proven throughout our conversation) hit upon how to follow up their lauded documentary ‘The American Epic Sessions’ in 2017. 

“The whole thing was storyboarded and it was worked out scene by scene,” explains MacMahon. “A couple of people said, ‘You’re absolutely crazy doing all this work, they’ve never agreed to a documentary. Why are you spending eight months doing this? You’re mad!’ And we went, ‘Well, we think it’s a great film so we’re going to do it.’ We reached out to the group, with all this work done. We had this whole thing worked out, and incredibly, they agreed to a meeting.”

“We met Jimmy Page first, and it transpired that he was a big admirer of ‘American Epic’. He talked at great length about how much he’d loved them. So we sat down, pulled out this storyboard and started flicking through it. He arrived with these shopping bags, which he put by the door. It was a seven-hour meeting, and I would say things like, ‘This is where you see Robert Plant with for the first time.’ I said to him, ‘This is where you work with Petula Clark for the first time in June,’ and he said, ‘Are you sure about that?’. I said, ‘Yeah, pretty sure,’ and he said, ‘Let’s check.’ He went over to his bags and he poured them all over the table, and it was all his diaries, going back to 1963, of all his session work. We had the meeting, and then he said, ‘I’m into doing this.’”

McGourty picks up the tale: “He phoned up and said, ‘Would you like to come to Pangbourne on Tuesday?’ We immediately said yes, met at Paddington Station. We went to The Swan pub with him, and we wandered all-round the place, trying to get a view of the back (of the studio). We spent a few hours with him, and he told us it was the first time he’d been back since he moved out. Then months later, he told us that was a test. If we’d said no, we wouldn’t be making the film. We thought, Who’s going to say no to Jimmy Page?”

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“Similarly, with Robert,” adds MacMahon, “It transpired he was a big admirer of ‘American Epic’ too. He was on tour (with The Sensational Space Shifters), so we had to go to multiple dates around the world, just having little chats with him. We met him in Perth, then he said, ‘Meet me in Sheffield’, we had a chat there. ‘Meet me in LA’, so we had a chat there. Then he said, ‘Meet me in Birmingham.’ He was with Pat Bonham (John’s widow), and we sat down and started chatting. It was amazing that he turned up with her, because it was a real sign that he was seriously doing this.”

“You can’t pitch a film backstage after a concert,” McGourty adds. “So the first meeting was entirely social. When we were given an invitation to come backstage in Perth, there was no one there. It was a full theatre but no one had been invited backstage. (Plant) just came up and went, ‘’American Epic’ was amazing, how fantastic. What are you going to do next?’ So we’d had the meeting with Jimmy, but when we met him, he didn’t know! One by one, we went to each band member.”

“With John Paul Jones,” says the film’s director, “The label called the managers and, ‘We said can we send a copy of ‘American Epic’. Just ask John to watch the first twenty minutes, if he’s not interested, you’ll never hear from us again.’ Amazingly, we got a call back and he wanted to meet us in London. When we met him, he was super-friendly and said, ‘I made a pilgrimage to the Maces Spring in Virginia,’ which is really off the beaten track…”

“And actually met the people we had interviewed (for ‘American Epic’)” says McGourty, still amazed at the coincidence. “Not many people have been there and met those people, but it was pure serendipity but he recognised that he had something in common with us.”

Of course, the movie wouldn’t be complete with some sort of insight from Bonham, who sadly left us in 1980. However, so determined were MacMahon and McGourty to make the film, they ended up embarking on a globe-spanning quest, as the former explains: “I started tracking down all the hardcore fans I could find, hoping someone from the underground could find something. This is the most press-adverse band of all time. Most people have never heard John Paul Jones say more than a few lines either. John Bonham was the most press-shy of the most press-adverse band. The only handful of interviews with him in the print media are in the early part of the band’s career, so I tracked down all those journalists and asked if they had tapes. It was a no.”

“But I found this bootleg recording, which was a short interview segment with John Bonham and Robert talking to an Australian journalist. I could tell it was a radio interview. I sent the excerpt I had to every prominent person in the Australian media I knew, trying to identify who this journalist was. I think it was a guy called Graham Berry from a Sydney radio station. I called them and asked if they had it. After a few days looking in their archive, they said they didn’t have it. Then I said, ‘Have you ever sent any of your tapes to any other archives?’ and they said they’d sent some stuff to the University of Canberra, which is the repository for a lot of Australian radio. I called them, they looked and said they didn’t have it.”

“I asked if they had any unmarked tapes, and they said they had thousands. Fortunately, they’d done an ‘American Epic’ festival and we’d stayed up doing a video presentation for the films. I mentioned that, and said, ‘Would you mind having a look?’ A couple of months later, and I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of tapes they’d been through, they send a pristine file of John Bonham audio over. I persuaded them to send it over to LA, and it was incredible sound quality. It just came to life. It felt like the quotes we wanted to use where things the rest of the band hadn’t said. He wasn’t doubling up with key things we’d lined up for John Paul Jones to say, or Robert. Then after that we found two other tapes in America, with some terrific quotes.”

“In some sort of spiritual way, he was able to place himself in the movie. Jimmy said, ‘It’s wonderful, in many ways John is the star of the show here. He’s right in the moment,’ because they are very early interviews.”

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The four band members are the only voices present in the story, offering a unique insight into what happened to Led Zeppelin, and much of the footage included was new even to the band members. “You see in the film, a couple of times, for example Jimmy looking at the Bath (Festival) footage,” explains McGourty. “And you hear them listening to John Bonham’s voice. We used that technique all through the interviews with all of them. We’re taking them back in time to the moment by showing them photographs of their childhood and their early careers, before they were Led Zeppelin. We managed to bring them back to a moment they remembered fondly, and that really brought the best out of them. They really look they’re enjoying themselves, and that’s what they were like.”

“A lot of the story is being told visually,” adds MacMahon. “You’re removing as much expository dialogue as possible, so the dialogue is as emotional and connecting as it can and telling as much of it visually… I’ve never particularly enjoyed musical documentaries, so the reason we made this one was because we wanted to find a way to tell the story in a dramatic theatrical style. Here, you’re getting whole songs.”

Becoming Led Zeppelin includes full band performances of certain songs and, while one would expect there to be countless hours left on the cutting room floor, it seems an extended cut is off the table, as MacMahon confirms: “Although it’s stuffed to the gills, what you’re seeing in this film is very artfully done by our editor Dan Gitlin. It’s actually everything that exists from that period. We have trawled the world and this is all that’s there. The only thing that’s on the cutting-room floor, there would occasionally be an additional song from a performance. There’s not even a fragment of them walking down the road that’s not in the film. Robert didn’t think there was enough material even for a ninety-minute film!”

“We reached out to the fanbase and allowed them to spread the word.” McGourty adds. “That’s how we found the Bath footage, and we found the Texas Pop Festival footage. People have been holding on to this stuff for years, and it took a long time to persuade people to release it!”

As such, the documentary is a treasure trove for Led Zeppelin fans, showcasing the power of the group on the live stage, so watching it at the cinema with a competent sound system is the optimum way to experience it. Better still, it harks back to a time that grows further away every day: the story of a band who refused to play by the music industry rules but still conquered the world. It’s a testament to what human beings can achieve with collaboration and talent, which Page outlines at the end. Led Zeppelin achieved their dreams, but in the making of this film, so too did Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty. 

“If you’re a kid now, the message in this film is: Don’t sit on your phone,” emphasises MacMahon. “Go out, meet people and collaborate with them. It’s the human reaction that makes interesting things happen. Throw yourself into situations with people you’ve got nothing in common with. Be there. Nothing interesting happens if you don’t show up. That’s what it’s telling the kids. Drink in all the information, and at some point, an opportunity will happen, and you’re ready for that moment. Life mirrors art. Jimmy arrives with the diaries, and he’s ready. If that meeting goes the way that it might, he’s prepared.”

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Becoming Led Zeppelin is out now.

Words: Richard Bowes
Photography via Paradise Pictures

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