The Daily Swarm

NME Review:

You might think it couldn’t possibly live up to expectation but, it transpires, the opposite is in fact true of Led Zeppelin’s first public appearance in 19 years.

They seem buoyed by the deafening roars that greet their every twitch tonight – everyone present in the O2 Arena is willing their performance to the realms of greatness. It’s almost impossible to be subjective, to not be sucked in.

Independent:

It’s like the adage about being in debt: if you owe the bank £10,000, you have a problem; but if you owe them £10,000,000, the bank has a problem. Likewise in this case, if you’ve paid £135, you have more of a vested interest in believing you’ve had a great time than if you’d only paid £20 or £40.

So although the terms “awesome” and “brilliant” could be heard amongst the departing throng following Zeppelin’s first full-length concert since John Bonham’s death in 1980, they were perhaps more an inevitable self affirmation than a considered judgment on the show itself – which like all performances, had its highs and its lows.

Hollywood Reporter:

For two hours and 10 minutes Monday night, legendary British rock band Led Zeppelin had the privileged fans accommodated by London’s O2 Arena ecstatic listening to 16 of their greatest hits. It was something not seen for almost 20 years.

[...]

Original members Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Robert Plant blasted onto the stage with drummer Jason Bonham taking the place of his father, John Bonham, who died in 1980.

Page, 63, is stout these days, with puffy features and frizzled hair, but his fingers move just as quick. Plant, 59, whose visage is more familiar with all the publicity he’s been doing for his hit album “Raising Sand” with Alison Krauss, appeared like a well-fed Anglo Wild Bill Hickok, commanding the stage and still finding those elusive trills.

Jones, 61, was clean cut, all business on keyboards or bass, and Bonham at the drums looked beefy but fit.

New York Times:

At the O2 arena here on Monday night, in its first full concert since 1980 — without John Bonham, who died that year, but with Bonham’s son Jason as a natural substitute — the band found much of its old power in tempos that were more graceful than those on the old live recordings. The speed of the songs ran closer to those on the group’s old studio records, or slower yet. “Good Times Bad Times,” “Misty Mountain Hop,” and “Whole Lotta Love” were confident, easy cruises; “Dazed and Confused” was a glorious doom-crawl.

It all goes back to the blues, in which oozing gracefully is a virtue, and from which Led Zeppelin initially got half its ideas. Its singer, Robert Plant, doesn’t want you to forget that fact: he introduced “Trampled Underfoot” by explaining its connection to Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues,” and mentioned Blind Willie Johnson as the inspiration for “Nobody’s Fault But Mine.” (Beyond that, the band spent 10 luxuriant minutes each in two other blues songs from its back catalog — “Since I Been Loving You” and “In My Time of Dying”).

Daily Mail:

Any doubts that this return was going to be a tame affair were dispelled by a blistering opening salvo featuring three songs from the early and middle periods of the group’s career.

Good Times, Bad Times was short, sharp and explosive while Ramble On allowed guitarist Jimmy Page, dressed in a long black jacket and waistcoat to unleash the first of several solos which were to illuminate the evening.

But it was the third song Black Dog which really raised the roof of the former Millennium Dome, a venue finally being put to good use as a state-of-the-art rock arena.

And while Robert Plant, his long curly hair flailing didn’t reach for the high notes with quite the same frenetic regularity as he might once have done, any fears that his voice, always passionate, might not be up to scratch proved wholly unfounded.

The Sun:

The trio — with a combined age of 183 — burst on stage and opened with Good Times Bad Times, the first track of their debut album.

Robert Plant — wearing jeans not quite as tight as they were in his heyday — still had the energy to strut his 59-year-old body across the stage.

Page, 63, and Jones, 61, kept less energetic pace with him.

As the band settled into a series of songs old and new, grown men in the mostly middle-aged and male audience began playing air guitar. Some of the old Zeppelin remained — during a monumentally long instrumental, Plant had time to go off stage as Page continued to play.

One thing not so new was when in the middle of Dazed And Confused, Page got out his violin bow and started to play his guitar with it, in his trademark style.

Alan Light @ MSN:

By the fourth number, though, a thunderous version of “In My Time of Dying,” the foursome reminded everyone in the O2 Arena (who had reportedly traveled from 50 countries for this night) that no other band ever sounded like this one, merging blues, rock, and folk into a noise that was purely their own. Other than a torridly funky “Trampled Underfoot,” the faster songs generally felt like they could have used another week of rehearsal – without the full access to his upper register, Plant sometimes struggled to be heard about the glorious din.

But the heart of the show stayed firmly in a slow-to-medium sweet spot, demonstrating once again that it was Led Zeppelin that truly put the “heavy” in heavy metal. Page was in command of his full arsenal, from swooping slides to slashing, angular flurries, and Bonham more than held his own propelling this mammoth sound, confidently navigating the precise stops-and-starts and shifting tempos that define Zeppelin’s attack. It climaxed in a majestic, thrilling version of the Middle Eastern-tinged epic “Kashmir,” which closed the main set.

Times UK:

In a set of trusted crowd-pleasers the inclusion of Stairway to Heaven was inevitable, but the song’s ubiquity made it difficult to summon much enthusiasm for it. Perhaps it just comes down to the fact that some tunes have dated better than others — because the moment Page and Bonham locked into Kashmir something transcendent took hold. Over a rhythm that have a way of advancing like Martian tripods, John Paul Jones billowed out chords of portent while Plant’s used his wildcat roar to the best effect of the evening.

An on-stage embrace and sundry bows seemed to hint at the band’s relief. They returned for a cathartic Whole Lotta Love and a sublime Rock’N’Roll. “It’s been a long, lonely time since I last rock’n’rolled” screeched Plant. Well, at least since he has showed this sort of fire-eyed intensity. And so, was it all for a one-off show in memory of their label boss Ahmet Ertegun? Come on. With a synergy like this going on, it would be an act of cosmic perversity to stop now.

Photos here>

Getty Images photos here.

NME:

‘Good Times Bad Times’
‘Ramble On’
‘Black Dog’
‘In My Time Of Dying’
‘Your Life’ (“That’s not something you get to hear often these days, Led Zeppelin giving a song its live debut.”)
‘Trampled Under Foot’
’‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine’
‘No Quarter’
‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’
‘Dazed And Confused’
‘Stairway To Heaven’
‘The Song Remains The Same’
‘Misty Mountain Hop’
‘Kashmir’
‘Whole Lotta Love’
‘Rock And Roll’