When I was fourteen, Led Zeppelin were as important to me as food and sleep. Other hard rock groups left me cold, but something about this one held my adolescent mind in total awe, for their music sounded indescribably heavy. Motorhead were fast, AC/DC were loud, but Led Zeppelin, the daddy of them all, were heavy and nothing could touch them.

I would repeat their name out loud and be astonished by the grandness of what it meant. It felt as if the whole enterprise had been divinely calculated to generate as much excitement in susceptible individuals as was humanly tolerable. In fact, the title of the band’s biography was a perfect simile for their sound: The Hammer Of The Gods.

November 26th’s show at the O2 Arena is being held to raise money for the Ahmet Ertegun Foundation, an organisation set up in honour of Atlantic Records’ founder Ertegun, to fund university scholarships in the UK, US and Turkey. The band claim that the event is also a tribute to the late Ertegun, a personal friend and protagonist in Led Zeppelin’s amazing success story, a dark and tantalising tale of the extremes of 1970s ro...

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