Credit: Far Out / ©2025ParadisePicturesLtd
Sat 8 August 2026 19:58, UK
In the late 1960s, rock and roll was just starting to emerge.
After years of becoming one of the biggest genre movements in the world thanks to the work done by The Beatles, an offshoot blues rock scene emerged featuring some of the best players in the music scene, like Jimi Hendrix and Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac.
Although Jimmy Page had a lifetime of amazing material lined up for him with The Yardbirds, he had something bigger on his mind when forming Led Zeppelin.
After putting together a lineup with Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham, Led Zeppelin wanted to take the blues into different areas, creating songs that morphed into jams that would let the music carry them to some other place, like ‘Dazed and Confused’. Although the tunes speak for themselves, not every song translated into the most marketable single material.
Despite being one of the biggest bands on the planet, Zeppelin were never ones for releasing singles, with their first efforts with ‘Good Times Bad Times’ only peaking on the far end of the top 100. As much as they might have dwindled in the charts, none of that mattered once they settled on the album as their prime medium of choice.
That stubbornness became part of the appeal. Zeppelin were never interested in behaving like a neat little singles band, knocking out three minutes of radio fodder and moving on. Their records were meant to be lived with, flipped over, blasted through speakers and argued about afterwards. For a group so obsessed with atmosphere and scale, the idea of being judged by one track at a time probably felt a bit beside the point.
No longer limited to a tight three-minute package, most of Zeppelin’s greatest pieces existed on their albums, telling an audible story that sent listeners on a ride. While critics might have torn the band to ribbons for their unconventional style of promotion, every one of their albums went over well with fans, going so far as to not give their fourth album a name so that fans could find it on their own.
Further reading: From The Vault
After years of playing by their own rules, the Zeppelin magic suddenly ended during the early ‘80s when Bonham was discovered at Page’s house unresponsive, having passed away of alcohol poisoning. Though the band called it a day from that moment forward, fans didn’t forget about their impact years later.
In 1997, Zeppelin scored their first hit in the UK with a re-release of their song ‘Whole Lotta Love’. Being a staple of their live show, ‘Whole Lotta Love’ reached the masses right as Zeppelin released some of their BBC Sessions compilations, documenting their incomparable power on the live stage.
There is something beautifully backwards about that. By the time ‘Whole Lotta Love’ finally gave Zeppelin the kind of chart showing most bands spend their whole careers chasing, they had already been gone for years and had nothing left to prove. The hit did not validate them so much as confirm how far the music had travelled without ever needing the singles game in the first place.
Although the allure of Zeppelin may have still been alive and well, the band would never regroup after the fact for a reunion tour. Having carved out his niche as a solo artist, Plant was content to leave the past where it was, only playing a handful of shows with Bonham’s son Jason in 2007. That hasn’t stopped Zeppelin from having a huge shelf life for fans, popping up in countless movies and their song ‘When the Levee Breaks’ becoming a staple of hip-hop samples.
Despite sounding impossible for a band like Led Zeppelin to have their first major hit that far after the fact, chart success was never what they were about. It was about Zeppelin’s main body of work, so why try to distil the album statement down to just a handful of songs?
ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE 
The Far Out Led Zeppelin Newsletter
All the latest stories about Led Zeppelin from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.