Due for release in 2025, Becoming Led Zeppelin is a documentary about the English quartet’s unlikely rise to prominence. 

From their inauspicious start in 1968, over the first half of the 1970s the hard rock pioneers became the biggest act on the planet.  

Along with a series of mammoth albums and world tours, Led Zep created the template for offstage rock’n’roll excesses that became the thing of legend. 

While guitarist Jimmy Page, vocalist Robert Plant, and drummer John Bonham were at the heart of the chaos, multi-instrumentalist John Paul Jones was generally more restrained. 

He even seriously considered quitting the band between 1973’s Houses of the Holy and the sprawling double album Physical Graffiti’s release in February 1975. 

“We toured a huge amount in those early days,” he told Mojo magazine. “We were all very tired and under pressure and it just came to a head.” 

Iron Maiden’s Adrian Smith is a keen angler. (Photo: John McMurtrie) 

While grounded in the blues, he helped rewrite the vocabulary for guitarists as the 1970s dawned and rock’n’roll evolved into something harder.  

Page was paired with Robert Plant in Led Zeppelin, a leather lunged blues vocalist from the Black Country. It proved a perfect union, with the duo responsible for much of the band’s song-writing.  

They were joined by Plant's former bandmate John Bonham, a drummer of destructive force, and Jones, who like Page had a storied past in London’s session scene. 

“We just burst upon the scene with very little fanfare,” Jones recalled of the band’s early days. “We started playing shows, and the press used to turn up and realise that people had got there before them. There’d be lines around the block and they’d be like ‘how on earth do all these people know?’” 

While Led Zeppelin reached number six on the UK album charts, their next eight albums all went to number one. They also conquered the United States, with six number one records. 

Their success was largely the result of hard touring, due to a hostile relationship with the press and not being embraced by mainstream radio. 

None of that stopped Led Zep becoming the biggest rock act of the 1970s, selling north of 300 million albums, dominating the decade with their metaphorical ‘hammer of the gods’. 

“There’s still not been another band or artist that glimmers with the same kind of oneness as Led Zeppelin once did,” Forbes business magazine noted earlier this year. 

For Jones, who stated that “the stage is my natural home”, the band’s peak era in the early to mid 1970s was very much a double-edged sword. 

“We controlled everything, we didn’t have to do stuff we didn’t want to do, we made the music we wanted to make,” he said. “We got pretty big I suppose. I can’t say I was in love with the stadiums. Especially the type of band that Zeppelin were, you need to connect with the audience.” 

When the band split following Bonham’s death in 1980, Jones related that he “couldn’t get arrested” for the next decade. People were too scared to ask a former member of Led Zeppelin to play. 

While he was happy to bring up his family in rural Devon, Jones also became more involved in music production and arrangement work. Over the years since then he’s worked with acts including REM, Peter Gabriel, and Heart.  

He produced New Zealand band The Datsun’s second album Outta Mind, Outta Sight in 2004, and visited Dunedin while on tour with them.

Having been involved in music since the early 1960s, Jones’ love of playing had never faded 

“I can’t do anything else,” he said. “I live and breathe it; I play an instrument every day of some description.” 

After Led Zep’s eventual demise in 1980, Jones pursued a quieter life as a producer and sometime session player. 

But in 2009 he joined forces with Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme and Dave Grohl of Nirvana and Foo Fighters fame. 

Them Crooked Vultures was the result, a perfect supertrio that played to the strengths of each member. While he was on the publicity trail for that Grammy Award winning album, I had the opportunity to speak to the very genial Jones. 

Most of the conversation was about Them Crooked Vultures, but of course Led Zep cast a very long shadow and were regularly referenced. 

Speaking about the amount of attention his new enterprise was receiving, Jones said that was a familiar feeling. 

“It’s another Zeppelin parallel,” he reflected. “In those days, Cream had come and gone and there was nobody else about that was really exciting when we hit the scene. Suddenly it was ‘wow, they’re here, and they’ve come to change the face of music’.” 

Led Zeppelin certainly did that. Part of the unholy trinity of pioneering heavy metal acts with Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, they made a huge statement with the release of their self-titled debut album in January 1969. 

Loaded with instant classics including Good Times Bad Times, Dazed and Confused, and Communication Breakdown, it provided a blueprint that’s still influential in heavy rock. 

 Page was the archetypal guitar hero, with a powerful arsenal of techniques absorbed during his time as a prolific session player on many British hits of the 1960s.