Knebworth Park, August 1979: last UK shows with Bonham
Knebworth Park, twenty-five miles north of London, held two Saturdays for Led Zeppelin in August 1979: the 4th and the 11th. Britain had not had them since 1975. The bill was a festival, Fairport Convention one week and Ronnie Wood’s New Barbarians the next, but the field was there for Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham. Promoter Frederick Bannister built the days around a capacity the press put at about 100,000. Peter Grant liked larger numbers. The photographs simply show a Hertfordshire slope with no easy edge.
What distinguishes these nights is the homecoming under pressure. A long American tour in 1977 had ended badly, and the four had been mostly apart. In Through the Out Door was days from release. They were not a band in weekly practice. The shows had to prove that the old scale still worked outdoors, with new songs on the sheet and four years of absence in the air.
The set carried two new pieces into the open air before the record shops did: Hot Dog and In the Evening. Around them sat the old cathedral pieces: Kashmir, No Quarter, Trampled Under Foot, Achilles Last Stand, and late, Stairway to Heaven. Page’s violin bow came out under a laser that lit the hair of the bow red and threw a thin green line over the crowd. A video screen the size of a house tried to give the back of the field a face. Two encores followed on the stronger night: Rock and Roll and Whole Lotta Love. A third, Heartbreaker, was on the sheet and then abandoned. It was one in the morning.
Against the studio records, Knebworth is longer, rawer, and less certain. Page is uneven; the waits are long; a band that once seemed incapable of missing now occasionally does. Plant’s voice, Variety noted after the second Saturday, was strong. The contemplative songs struggled to carry the field. The physical ones did not. Jones holds the low end and the keyboard colours; Bonham drives the slope like a second engine. That unevenness is not a defect to hide. It is what a reunion after silence actually sounds like.
Stairway to Heaven, however, with which the band closed before two encores, was a notable success, ranging across several tempos and moods, and superbly sung by Plant, who ended up bathed in an effective rainbow backlight.
(Variety, August 1979)
The ambience is summer dusk turning to dark, lasers on a violin bow, and a crowd that had waited four years. Arguments backstage about the cameras delayed the start. By the time Stairway closed the main set, the field was answering. The relationship is not intimacy. It is scale meeting memory: a singer in a rainbow backlight finishing the song everybody had come to sing back.
What nobody in the field could know was the arithmetic afterwards. These were the last Led Zeppelin concerts in Britain. Bonham died in September 1980, and the group chose not to continue under the name. The 2007 night at the O2, with his son on the drums, is another story. Knebworth is the last time the four of them stood in front of a home crowd and let Kashmir do the walking. Not the tightest shows of their career. A loud, slightly frayed homecoming, and the clearest document of what the band still was before the end.
