Becoming Led Zeppelin

If you wake me from a deep sleep during the night, aggressively shake my shoulders, and demand to know what the greatest band of all-time is, I'll answer ten times out of ten the same thing; Led Zeppelin. I am a super fan of Led Zeppelin's, a real fanboy, a dedicated Zeppelin nut. I own CDs, LPs, posters, books, autographs, and everything in between, and have a framed portrait of John "Bonzo" Bonham right here next to me on my office wall. Zeppelin are my household gods and I consider Physical Graffiti to be the finest rock album of all-time in close competition with Synchronicity by The Police.

When Sony announced last autumn that they were working on the first real, official, proper, in-depth documentary about how Zeppelin came to be, I started to sweat profusely. I started counting down the days and now that Becoming Led Zeppelin is finally available to rent via several Video on Demand services, I have seen it. Twice, in fact. So, how good is it? Not a super hit, exactly. I'm sorry to say, but it's No Ramble On... Or Immigrant Song, if you like. This is, in my opinion, more Going to California than Stairway to Heaven. A bit mediocre and unfortunately pretty forgettable.

Becoming Led Zeppelin is based on The Yardbirds and Jimmy Page's early years in the band with guitar god Jeff Beck. When the funky rockers broke up and Page, along with John Paul Jones and Bonzo, formed Zeppelin and started churning out tunes like Communication Breakdown and others, I as a viewer get to follow along via interviews with all three living band members as well as old, noisy, grainy, flickering archive footage of a number of 60s gigs. The chats with Page, in particular, are always interesting and here we as fans learn a bit more about the band's first record deal with Atlantic and how it was that British debutants got one of America's biggest record companies to sign papers promising not to interfere with the band's music or productions, at all. This was great, and something that despite reading several biographical books I didn't really know about, but the rest of this documentary is just old news, unfortunately.

Becoming Led Zeppelin, like so many other modern "documentaries", feels more "interview film" than a real documentary. Three guys talk about a few old memories and archive footage of the band that we've already seen, countless times, is played at the same time. It never really comes alive, we never get any great insight and the way they just gloss over Bonham and the legacy he left behind annoys me. On the whole, two hours with the best band in the world is never badly used time, but as hyped as this film has been, I definitely expected more.