From the land of the ice and snow….. to Knebworth to see Led Zeppelin
The date 11 Aug always sticks in my head: Not a birthday or anything equally trivial, but the first concert I attended. Led Zeppelin at Knebworth Festival in 1979.
Still in high school my buddy Grahame, his older brother Clive and I, with virtually no preparation, jumped on a train to London on the Friday night.
Armed with nothing more than what we were wearing (demims and velvet jacket of course) and a few Scottish pound notes we set off on British Rail from Greenock to Glasgow then to London.
We travelled overnight and arrived bleary eyed at 7am in London. Bizarrely, we tried to see some big city sights before catching a train to Stevenage along with tens of thousands of other Zeppelin fans.
We plodded through crowds, heat, mud, 70,s festival toilets, tiredness, joints, beer festival junk food and latter day hippiedom to see Led Zeppelins final ever show in the UK. It was quite a long day as we watched a few other non-descript bands until Zeppelin appeared around 10 or 11 pm (as I remember)
With no video, cameras we only have vague memories and a few dodgy 8mm film clips on YouTube to cling to. Ironically I wasn’t even a particular fan of Led Zeppelin up to that point.
But the sheer scale of the music, stage, setting, lights and atmosphere blew me away and changed me forever. Music is where its at: such a captivating, addictive, powerful and uniting force, it travels through the air and sinks deep in to your soul to touch you in a way that nothing else can.
I have been a huge fan of Led Zeppelin ever since. Jimmy Page is such a great riff writer on guitar, something which is very hard to do on keyboards. Inevitably, I am utterly useless at writing riffs.
A few mementos I have include a cheap badge, a T-shirt that is a little tight on my significantly older and wider torso and two concert programmes: an official colour one and the obligatory scammers bootleg programme 🙄…..what can i say, I was a daft 15 year old.
Scammers seem to be have been present since the beginning of time and Knebworth was no different. We fell prey to them too, paying an eye watering 90p for the bootleg and £1 for the official one…..gasp!
This wee video shows both programmes.
