Reviewers have Whole Lotta Love for Zep show

ON THE morning after Led Zeppelin’s long-awaited reunion concert, the music reviewers were already calling for more.

Playing a full set for the first time in nearly three decades, the authors of Stairway to Heaven and Whole Lotta Love rocked London’s O2 Arena on Monday for more than two hours.

“With a synergy like this going on, it would be an act of cosmic perversity to stop now,” Pete Paphides of The Times wrote.

The band’s three surviving members — singer Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist-keyboardist John Paul Jones — were joined at the sold-out benefit show by the late John Bonham’s son Jason on drums.

The 16-song set mixed the classics with the thumping Kashmir and the hard-rocking Dazed and Confused, which Plant introduced by saying: “There are certain songs that have to be there, and this is one of them.”

Plant’s high-pitched screeches and moans filled the arena, while Page used a cello bow during the solo in Dazed and Confused and picked on his double-necked guitar to ring out the famous notes to Stairway.

“Page dispensed power chords like an aged Thor lobbing down thunderbolts for kicks,” Paphides wrote about Black Dog, the band’s third song of the night.

“They sound awesomely tight,” Alexis Petridis wrote in The Guardian. David Cheal of The Daily Telegraph said the band’s “familiar old sinew and swagger were still there”.

The Independent was a little less effusive in its praise, but Andy Gill wrote that the call-and-response routine between Plant and Page during Black Dog was “one of the night’s more engaging moments”.

Gill also singled out Bonham, sitting in for his father, John Bonham, who died in 1980 after choking on his own vomit. “Jason Bonham makes a more than merely able replacement for his father on drums: indeed, there’s a stronger funk element to his playing which kicks the songs along with more elan,” wrote Gill.

The New York Times reviewer Ben Ratliff said Plant “was authoritative; he was dignified”.

Kim Murphy of the Los Angeles Times said the band “played the first sets with easygoing confidence. Their good humour built into triumphant intensity as the night wore on”.

Daily Star writer James Cabooter wrote: “Led Zep were pure class,” adding, “now bring on the full reunion tour”.