Led Zeppelin: the only official documentary, "Becoming Led Zeppelin," premieres on TV

On Wednesday, August 26, Sky Arte will broadcast the exclusive premiere of "Becoming Led Zeppelin", the first officially authorized documentary dedicated to the history of Led Zeppelin. Directed by the multi-award-winning Bernard MacMahon, who co-wrote it with Allison McGourty, also the film's producer, the documentary reconstructs the birth and dizzying rise of the English band through archival footage, previously unseen material and testimonies from its members.
MacMahon's aim was to move beyond the traditional structure of the music documentary, building a narrative with the rhythm and immersive power of a musical. "With Becoming Led Zeppelin my goal was to make a new kind of film, a documentary that felt like a musical. I wanted to weave together the four different stories of the band members before and after the group's formation, letting large parts of their story be told only through music and images, so as to tie the songs to the places where they were created and the events that inspired them", the director explained.

At the heart of the film, then, are Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham, whose stories are initially told through their separate personal and musical paths. The four trajectories end up converging in the summer of 1968, when the musicians come together to rehearse for the first time. It's the beginning of a story destined to accelerate at a staggering pace: in an extremely short time, Led Zeppelin go from their debut to conquering the United States, establishing themselves as one of the most important and influential bands in the history of rock.
To reconstruct that phase, not always adequately documented at the time, MacMahon was able to count on the full support of the band and an immense effort to recover archival material. The director explained that he "used only original film and negatives, with over 70,000 frames restored by hand" and that he "devised fantasy sequences, inspired by 'Singin' In The Rain', overlaying previously unseen live performance footage with photomontages of posters, tickets and travels, to visually recreate the sense of frenzy of their early days".

You can't properly talk about Led Zeppelin without showing them live: making the docu-film was no easy task precisely because not much footage exists from the band's early period. The director stated that he used "only original film and negatives, with over 70,000 frames restored by hand". The viewer can thus immerse themselves in the March 1969 concert at the Gladsaxe Teen Club in Denmark, a stop on a Scandinavian tour in which Led Zeppelin performed as The New Yardbirds, before they had even become, once and for all, what history would remember them as. Also notable are original clips from the tours - three of them - that the British band undertook in the United States during that period, stunning American audiences with the fury of their sound, as happened for instance at the Fillmore West in San Francisco. Nor are the homeland concerts in Bath and at London's Royal Albert Hall missing: the latter is a true homecoming for the band members, who, after gruelling but necessary stretches in the United States, could finally show with joy and pride to the English public and their own families just how far they had come by early 1970.
"Becoming Led Zeppelin" thus alternates rare footage of the earliest performances, photographs, documents and material never shown before, often letting the music and images, rather than a traditional narrating voice, guide the story. Rounding out the picture are the intimate, exclusive comments from the band members, who have always been especially private when it comes to telling their own story from the inside.

The result is a journey to the origins of the Led Zeppelin legend: from the four musicians' years of individual growth to their decisive meeting in 1968, all the way to the international breakthrough that, in an incredibly short time, transformed them from a new British outfit into one of the most overwhelming phenomena on the world rock scene.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google