Led Zeppelin performed one of their biggest shows when they played their first show in almost three decades in London at O2 Arena in 2007. It got so big that even the 2009 Guinness World Records stated that the show held the record for the ‘Highest Demand for Tickets for One Music Concert’ with 20 million people competing for the 20,000 available golden tickets.
Five years after the show, Jimmy Page sat down with Lori Spencer, where he watched the then five-year-old show and not only reminisced about it but shared his thoughts on The Who’s Roger Daltrey’s offer to replace Robert Plant.
The Rumors About Plant Being Replaced
The band took to the stage for the final time on December 10th to play 16 songs, two being encores. But before the show, there had been some rumors. Apparently, some fans thought Led Zeppelin would replace Robert Plant with some other singer. Page clarified the rumors in the 2012 interview with the following words:
“Well, look: If we’d have eventually settled on a singer, I don’t think that would have been a good idea to have done that prematurely. Of course, we would have played Led Zeppelin material. But I don’t know, it’s all hypothetical. But, you know, you want to be playing some really, really, really good new material to knock people’s socks off.”
The Misunderstanding Of Daltrey’s Role
Following the conversation, the host informed Page about a rumor implying that Daltrey might replace Plant. Page expressed his confusion as he did not know about the rumors, which was followed by Daltrey expressing his desire to collaborate with Page. It seems that there had been the talk but for something else, which was misunderstood. He explained:
“Well, we had discussed it. But for the Teenager Cancer Trust, yeah. Yeah, and I said: ‘You know, I’d love to do that with you, Roger,’ but certainly, at the time I was saying that I thought I was already going to be out there playing, you know what I mean? But although everything I’d been doing is something that’s musical, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s playing the guitar, do you see what I mean?”
Plant’s discussion about working with other musicians, including Daltrey, continued with the following:
“Like, you can imagine with all of this, this relative to the O2, and there’s some other things that are going on. Like the sort of re-mastering of the catalog and this sort of stuff. It’s all stuff that is highly musical, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you could sit there and play the guitar at the same time. So I’m going to be working with musicians I sincerely hope by… well, into next year. And then hopefully surface by the end of that year.”
