Some music really doesn’t age. The Come Together series of concerts is a wonderful showcase of some true classics, revitalised by a young, passionate and talented team of musicians and singers, and last night at Auckland’s Civic Theatre it was the turn of Led Zeppelin, the last truly great heavy metal dinosaurs of the 1970s, to have their greatest album refreshed and brought back to life.
It’s a testimony to Zeppelin that a four-piece band took ten performers to bring their music to the stage. True to the Come Together format, the show opened with a dozen-song greatest-hits compilation; the featured album was Led Zeppelin IV, savage riffs like Black Dog alongside the delicate beauty of Going To California. There were no surprises, no true deep cuts, and the audience—it was a full house, the show having been moved from the adjacent Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre to accommodate demand for tickets—while perhaps a tad subdued initially, seemed delighted with all the selections, kicking off with a hard-hitting Immigrant Song howled out by Jennie Skulander, stepping away for now from her day job fronting Devilskin and bringing a new dimension of power to the song. But the problem with trying to do justice to Led Zeppelin isn’t simply that the band wrote exceptional songs, or that Jimmy Page was as innovative and creative as any guitarist to come out of the late John Mayall’s London music scene in the late 1960s, or that John Bonham was a drummer sui generis.
Brett Adams was more than up to the challenge of recreating Page’s guitar excesses, from the sheer breathtaking power of Rock n Roll, surely one of the most ear-rending riffs to be wrung from a Les Paul, to the controlled intensity of the electric playout to Stairway To Heaven, faithfully rendered on a double-neck SG. Alistair Deverick’s drumming was spot-on, his snare drum stings matching Bonham’s punch and sheer venom. And Jol Mulholland rose to the challenge of The Battle Of Evermore‘s mandolin complexities.
But the real challenge, of course, is Robert Plant. The man was possessed of one of the most gloriously magnificent and absurdly overblown voices in rock history, and so five people—wisely, impressively—shared the challenge, each finding their own niche within Plant’s unfairly broad range. Skulander had the power, EJ Barnes (Jimmy’s daughter, incidentally) had the swing, Julia Deans had the swagger and the rock-chick attitude, Milan Borich had the “don’t spill my pint” edge, and Seamus Johnson…well, Johnson had a bit of everything. My date for the evening was my mate Dean, perhaps the greatest Zeppelin fan America has produced, and after Johnson ripped the heart out of Communication Breakdown, he turned to me and said “Well, I didn’t think anyone could do justice to that, but…”
The whole thing was, then, in short, quite exceptional fun. The joy of the Come Together shows is that we get to revisit bands we thought were gone forever. Some bands, like the Rolling Stones, are still hanging on—but, let’s be honest, it’s time for Keef to hang up his Telecaster and call it a day—but there’s something special about hearing our favourite songs played with at least some of the youth and energy and immediacy that you’d imagine Plant and Page and Jones and Bonham brought when they first played IV. And the joy of the “whole album” format is that we get to hear songs that we might hear otherwise hear—Misty Mountain Hop brought a huge smile to my mate Dean’s face, but perhaps the band might not have found room for it if they’d played a straight greatest-hits set. And The Battle Of Evermore wasn’t the most prominent regular feature of Zeppelin’s own live sets, but last night it was an absolute highlight.
So, basically, I loved it. I’m not quite old enough to have seen Led Zeppelin live myself—they were formed the same year I was (although I did see Robert Plant once; he was magnificent, of course, but that’s a story for another day). Last night’s show was the next best thing. I would give the last word to Dean, but he’s biased—as we walked out he told me “That’s the best music ever written.” But Dean approved. It was a bloody good show.
The Come Together series continues with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in August.
