Astonishing high quality film of Led Zeppelin at the Bath Festival has surfaced

Less than a month after seven minutes of footage of Led Zeppelin at the Inglewood Forum in Los Angeles in 1970 found its way onto YouTube, a significant archive of pro-shot, close-up film of the band shot at the Bath Festival the same year has emerged.

The footage, which has appeared on the ledzepfilm YouTube account (opens in new tab),  was shot on June 28, 1970, at the Bath & West Showground in Shepton Mallet, where Led Zeppelin joined a weekend lineup that also featured Canned Heat, Steppenwolf, Pink Floyd, Johnny Winter, Fairport Convention, Jefferson Airplane, Frank Zappa, the Moody Blues, The Byrds, Santana, Dr John and many more.

In 2017, Professor Steve Chibnall from De Montfort University in Leicester claimed that up to 30 minutes of official footage of Led Zeppelin’s show – shot by director Peter Whitehead, who also filmed the Rolling Stones tour documentary Charlie Is My Darling – was in storage, and it’s that film which has now emerged online. 

“When Led Zeppelin played, they played in the dark and there was insufficient stage lighting for his cameras,” Chibnall told Tight But Loose Editor Dave Lewis (opens in new tab) during a panel discussion at London’s Royal Albert Hall. “So he reckoned that the footage, the live footage, was not usable. It is usable because, I mean, it can be, it can be restored now. So you can raise those lighting levels, you can see more digitally.”

The same year, Chibnall told Classic Rock, “What we need to do now is talk to Zeppelin’s management, find out who owns the copyright, and see if we can work on this, improve it and get it realised in time for the 50th anniversary of the festival. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

One ten minute segment has been synced to audio recordings of the show, while the remaining 16mm footage is silent, and includes film shot backstage as well as onstage. 

Led Zeppelin’s fee for the Bath Festival rose from £500 in 1969 to £20,000 the following year, with manager Peter Grant insisting their name was double the size of anyone else’s on the poster. 

“They were simply so enormous by then we knew that they’d bring in all the people,” said promoter Wendy Bannister. “The sum of £20,000 was the equivalent [then] of the price of a house in Knightsbridge, I can tell you that!” 

Source: loudersound.com