The Song Remains the Same is quite simply the best movie footage of a live concert I have ever seen. I was going to concerts in the 70s – I saw Santana do 5 encores at Wembley Arena, the last being simply an extended jam, and I watched Jethro Tull suffer an electrical failure (or so they said!) and perform a great acoustic set, only to get the power back on and launch into an incredibly 30-minute jam at the end, but I have never seen anything to top Led Zeppelin live at Madison Square Gardens in 1973. Now we have got that out of the way, for those who haven’t seen it yet, what are you missing?

I won’t discuss length, because, though long, you have to view this as a movie with many segments, so if you are any kind of rock music fan, you won’t get bored. The movie starts with short vignettes – fantasy snapshots – of each band member receiving ‘news’ of a new tour; Robert Plant is by a remote waterfall in Wales, Bonham on his way to the pub (where else?) in his hot rod, John Paul Jones in his mansion’s kitchen with his wife, and Jimmy Page is by a lake in his Sussex mansion. Finally, we get to see Peter Grant, the larger-than-life but often forgotten manager of Led Zeppelin, a man who has been called the 5th member, in his Sussex mansion.

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