Led Zeppelin fans are pinching themselves over the news that the band’s first officially sanctioned documentary has been completed. Becoming Led Zeppelin, which was first announced in 2019, was directed by Bernard MacMahon of American Epic fame. MacMahon had unprecedented access to Zeppelin and its archives, featuring, “never-before-seen archive film and photographs, state-of-the-art audio transfers of the band’s music and the music of other artists who shaped their sound.”
Variety quoted MacMahon as saying, “Becoming Led Zeppelin is a film that no one thought could be made. The band’s meteoric rise to stardom was swift and virtually undocumented. Through an intense search across the globe and years of restoration of the visual and audio archive found, this story is finally able to be told.”
When the project was first announced, Jimmy Page said: “When I saw everything Bernard had done both visually and sonically on the remarkable achievement that is American Epic, I knew he would be qualified to tell our story.”
SIDE NOTES
- Back in March, rock fan Lloyd Godman discovered a Super-8 roll of unseen Led Zeppelin footage he had shot back on February 25th, 1972 at Auckland’s Western Springs Stadium. Radio New Zealand reported that rather than sell the film to a private collector, Goldman has chosen to make the film public, with an American fan dubbing on an audience recording of the show for presentation.
- Godman, an ecological artist in Melbourne, Australia said he was cataloguing his work when he stumbled upon the film among his files: “I knew I had this roll of film in the shed so I sent it off to get digitized. I knew there was band stuff on it but I didn’t know what it was. It came back and there was the Zeppelin film. (My reaction was) really one of joy because, of the still photographs I took, I only ended up with six shots, which were really the rejects because the promoter had picked through the best of them and they just disappeared. So finding this was like finding gold really.”
CHECK IT OUT:Newly discovered footage of Led Zeppelin on February 25th, 1972 performing at Auckland, New Zealand’s Western Springs Stadium: