I fail to remember a time before Led Zeppelin were in my life.
My mum, usually referred to as Moo, educated me in the ways of such music from a very young age; playing the likes of The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Cream and The Rolling Stones around me when I was a child. One of my earliest memories is of being terrified of a VHS Mum had of The Who. Especially of Roger Daltrey and his fringed jacket. How times change.
My earliest memory of Led Zeppelin is Robert. As a child brought up around music, I was always singing (and went on to be classically trained) so my gravitation towards a singer with a monumental voice was natural. I can remember singing along with him on
Stairway to Heaven, although I'm sure I didn't know the words, when I was quite young, but it was never much of a big deal. Like
Satisfaction by The Stones and
Pinball Wizard by The Who, it was a song I loved the vocals to. (Later on I would try to persuade my elderly singing teacher to let me sing all three of these songs, but she never allowed it.)
I must have been about 14 when the
Early Days: Best Of album was released. I can remember the adverts for it on the television and when I heard that little snippet of
Stairway, my old childhood friend, the deal was done. I bought it and played it to death. It was probably the first time I'd ever bought an album by an "adult" band, and certainly the first time I'd listened to something all the way through without skipping. A lot of the tracks I had flashbacks of, songs I could sort of remember from my childhood, but not completely. Tracks like
Good Times Bad Times and
Dazed And Confused. I didn't know them well, but I could remember parts of them. It was like some sort of recovery from amnesia.
Of course when the album reached
Whole Lotta Love I leapt up! "I know this one!" I can distinctly remember how utterly bizarre it was to hear that opening riff without the ghostly electronic whisper of "Top Of The Pops" creeping into it. Every child in Britain knew that song thanks to it being used for the opening titles of everyone's favourite music chart show and I had finally discovered the band that had written it.
My love affair with Zeppelin marched on until I was rifling through my parents' vinyl collection one day and came across a little band with an equally enigmatic singer. My fickle teenage heart ran away with Queen that day and rarely looked at anyone else until my early twenties, whilst sitting on a tour bus, hundreds of miles from home. One of the boys in the band I was with had put a warn out cassette album on the bus stereo and as the opening bars of
Good Times Bad Times from
Led Zeppelin I reached my ears I fell in love all over again.
~Miss K
