First of me and my friend went to the O2 Arena to pick up our tickets and wrist bands which went really smoothly, we only had to wait in line for five minutes and we thought we might had to stand there for hours. We also went by the merch boot to get a t-shirt from the show, this line wasn't as good as the other one and we stood there for about 40 minutes until we could make our purchase.
We went back to the central parts of London and to the pub "Crobar" for a couple of beers and some Zeppelin from the jukebox. After nine Zeppelin songs we went back to the eastern part of London.
The show started with a short documentary about Ahmet Ertegn and then Bill Wyman's Rhythm King came on to play a couple of songs by themselves and then also two with Paul Rodgers and two with Paolo Nutini. The last of the "opening acts" was Foreigner and they played their biggest hit "I wanna know what love is". An awesome song!
When Foreigner had finished we started to move towards the stage and we got halfway through the crowd, it was impossible to get any closer there were just so many people there! It was quite fun to see people in their 40s or 50s in the front of the standing area all excited about what was going to happen.
After we had stood in the crowd for 15 minutes or something, this came on:
They opened with "Good Times Bad Times", the first song on their first album and the crowd went crazy, me included. Through the first three songs I was just in an euphoric state with goose bumps all the time and just trying to realize what was going on. Was I really watching Led Zeppelin? And so I was...
The first three songs was of course an awesome part of the show but in the middle they played some of my favorite Zeppelin songs including "Since I've Been Loving You", "Stairway To Heaven" and "Dazed And Confused" which was really great. I didn't expect them to play "Since..." so that was a big surprise for me and I couldn't have been happier when Jimmy started to play the little guitar thing in the beginning of the song. The crowd didn't really cheer as much as I thought they would when Jimmy started playing "Stairway..", they played it really good though.
They ended their main set list with this "Kashmir" and when they thanked the crowd together Jason Bonham looked really emotional pounding his chest and looking up to his dad and it almost seemed like he had tears in his eyes, what a show it must have been for him!
They came back to play the first encore "Whole Lotta Love" which was obviously great and after this song we actually thought it was finished and slowly started walking towards the exit although there was a feeling that they weren't quite finished so we stopped just before the exit and stood and watched the empty stage for a while and listening to the crowd going crazy and cheering for Zeppelin to come back- which they did!
They started to play "Rock And Roll" with the screen showing lots and lots of old archive footage from their heydays and this gave the evening a perfect finish and I found myself close to tears it was just THAT GOOD!
Afterwards we talked to a couple of other people a lot of them had seen Zeppelin in the 70s as well and they agreed with us that it was a great show. They said that it wasn't as good as Zeppelin 30 years ago but it was not far from it. I felt that it was beyond my expectations, 60 year old guys trying to play rock music doesn't really sound to good but they sure as hell could pull it off! I hope for everyone else that they will do a tour next year so everyone can witness what I did yesterday, it was the biggest musical experience of my life!
Lots of (blurry) pictures from Led Zeppelin:
Havent seen you around. Hope you're havin a blast