Hank Bordowitz: Led Zeppelin On Led Zeppelin

Myriad musings from global print and broadcast archives make for a new Zep commentary.

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To what extent you have “authored” a volume that chronologically anthologises existing articles, broadcasts and interviews is perhaps questionable. But Hank Bordowitz sifts and collates an admirably diverse range of Zeppelin musings here.

He begins at the end of 1968, not in the UK but in the States, where Go! magazine declared “Jimmy Page Is Wild About Led Zeppelin.”

Bordowitz prefaces and contextualises each successive piece, some fun, some weighty and some ponderous, the more so as the band’s fame proliferated. A series of Q&A “ask-ins” with the NME in 1970 reveals John Paul Jones a huge fan of Stevie Wonder; a 1976 radio interview by Alan “Fluff” Freeman with Jimmy Page is endearing and engaging.

Other sources range from Mojo to Billboard to Australian radio station 2SM to a Coverdale/Page promotional press kit, amid much for the devotee to bathe in./o:p

Paul Sexton

Prog Magazine contributor Paul Sexton is a London-based journalist, broadcaster and author who started writing for the national UK music press while still at school in 1977. He has written for all of the British quality press, most regularly for The Times and Sunday Times, as well as for Radio Times, Billboard, Music Week and many others. Sexton has made countless documentaries and shows for BBC Radio 2 and inflight programming for such airlines as Virgin Atlantic and Cathay Pacific. He contributes to Universal's uDiscoverMusic site and has compiled numerous sleeve notes for the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and other major artists. He is the author of Prince: A Portrait of the Artist in Memories & Memorabilia and, in rare moments away from music, supports his local Sutton United FC and, inexplicably, Crewe Alexandra FC.