Led Zeppelin: The Full Report From David Fricke

For the second encore of their first, full concert in twenty-seven years, at London's 02 arena last night, Led Zeppelin tore into "Rock and Roll," from their untitled fourth album, with a joyful vengeance. As drummer Jason Bonham hammered with the ghostly precision and ferocity of his late father, guitarist Jimmy Page fired dirty chunks of Chuck Berry and bassist John Paul Jones kept iron time with familiar reserve, singer Robert Plant sang the most obvious words of the night: "Been a long time since I rock and rolled." Overhead, images of a much younger Zeppelin, in concert during the early and mid-Seventies, flashed on a huge digital-video screen. In those films, Led Zeppelin were the biggest, loudest and most cocksure band in rock. Jimmy Page's now snow-white hair was still jet black; Robert Plant was a golden god, not yet a Viking elder, and the late John Bonham — whose death in 1980 abruptly ended Zeppelin's reign — still ruled the engine room.

But the band that played underneath those memories last night was not the one that misfired at Live Aid in 1985 or again in New York in 1988. This one was rehearsed, ready and out to kill. This band was Led Zeppelin in every way.

Page, Plant, Jones and Bonham the Younger opened their two-hour show with the confident wit and colossal nerve of "Good Times Bad Times," the first song on Led Zeppelin's 1969 debut album. Even before Plant opened his mouth, the original fury — a surprisingly lean, dub-like crossfire of cannonshot chords, frantic, gulping bass runs and polyrhythymic swagger — was in order and in force. "In the days of my youth/I was told what it means to be a man," Plant sang, in the slightly lower register of someone who gives those lessons now. It was an appropriate effect, too — an admission of age delivered with feral pride — on a night dedicated to the memory of Zeppelin's late friend and mentor, Atlantic Records' co-founder Ahmet Ertegun. (Proceeds fromticket sales will go to music scholarships, created in Ertegun's name, at schools in New York, England and his native Turkey.) Earlier, a quote from Ertegun, who died in 2006 at age 83, hung from banners at the sides of the stage: "It is a great life, this life of music." Zeppelin honored that sentiment by playing like a band renewed, not merely reunited.

You could see the pleasure — in the way Plant kicked at the base of his mike stand in "Ramble On," sending it in an arc over his head '72-style, and in the big grin on Page's face, blown up on the screen, as Bonham flew into the climactic drum thunder of "Black Dog." For much of the show, even with a full, wide stage to themselves, Page, Plant and Jones stood in tight formation at the foot of the drum riser, often facing Jason, as if they were still in rehearsal. "I just want to have fun!" Plant barked at one point, as the band swerved from the extended, frenzied mid-section of "In My Time of Dying" back into the song's blues-march backbone.

Zeppelin did not walk or waltz through any of tonight's sixteen songs. You could hear the care, the weeks of practice that started back in June, in the live debut of "For Your Life" from Presence, a song which, according to Plant in our recent cover story, the band tried in the first rehearsals but dropped after two days. Obviously, there was no staying away from its eccentric oceanic chop. There was no getting away from the warhorses either. "No Quarter" came with the obligatory dry ice. "There are certain things we had to do — this is one of them," Plant said, almost in apology, introducing "Dazed and Confused." Page was soon back in ancient ritual — pulling long wah-wah groans from his Gibson Les Paul with a violin bow under a rotating steeple of green-laser beams.