Led Zeppelin: The Biography
Bob Spitz Penguin Press £30
Rating: 
Outsiders entering the sulphurous orbit of Led Zeppelin during the group’s 1970s pomp were presented with a written list of rules. First, the rules are as follows:
1. You should never speak with anyone from the band without first speaking to yourself.
2. John Bonham is not to be seen. For your safety, this is important.
Robert Plant (above), the self-described ‘Golden God’, preens with poetic superiority despite the fact that most of his lyrics are ripped-off blues songs stuffed with schoolboy innuendo
It was 1969 and The Beatles were tinkering in Twickenham making Let It Be. In the following decade, however, the louder sound that would define the decade was the roaring of motorbike riders roaring behind them like muggers. A certain amount of innocence was taken away.
Led Zeppelin, buoyed by sell-out stadium tours, record album sales, and an air of swaggering impunity in the early 1970s, were following a code that incorporated regal exceptionalism with criminal gangland violence.
Led Zep was more or less unstoppable during the time they released classic songs like Whole Lotta Love and Stairway to Heaven.
In these new times of enlightenment, their position is more challenging.
Led Zeppelin (above, at the Bath Festival in 1970) are avatars of the kind of unreconstructed sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll excess that has fallen out of both fashion and favour
Long acknowledged as the biggest, loudest, most unashamedly priapic rock group during the golden age of genre, they are also avatars of the kind of unreconstructed sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll excess that has fallen out of both fashion and favour.
Bob Spitz is in trouble.
Spitz genuflects before the power and pomp of the music while tutting (not very loudly, it must be said) at their appalling behaviour – and then writing about it all, anyway.
The band’s misdeeds have been infamous since the publication of Stephen Davis’s lurid biography Hammer Of The Gods in 1985, but Spitz rehearses them again at prurient length.
John Bonham’s death from alcohol in 1980, which led to the end of his band, is being accused of attempted rape by an air stewardess. Jimmy Page is a guitarist who enjoys playing with young girls.
Spitz is accused of rehearsing the misdeeds of the band at a grotesque length. He also alleges that Jimmy Page, the guitarist (above), enjoys the company of young women.
Nearly every page contains heroin and Cocaine, along with outrageous rip-offs from their manager Peter Grant and monstrous violence.
These young women were treated in a way that is both shameful and criminal. ‘There was no oversight, no accountability, no inclination to put the brakes on the pursuit,’ Spitz writes. ‘Rock and roll bands were given a pass.’
Janine Safer, publicist for the band’s own record label, says: ‘I adopted the band’s view that these girls weren’t quite human.’ Journalists were complicit, exchanging their silence for access to the band’s sanctum and a ticket to the circus.
The early days at least were less unsavoury and Spitz colourfully conjures up the band’s origin story.
Page and bass player John Paul Jones earn their stripes on the London session scene, while Robert Plant and John ‘Bonzo’ Bonham scrape around the West Midlands semi-pro circuit, finally coming to the attention of Page in 1968 while playing with the Band of Joy.
The most memorable part of the book is Page’s creation of Led Zep using the yardbirds’ rubble. After the initial strides of the group, however, it becomes clear that the principals are cartoonish characters and not three-dimensional ones.
Bonham is an uncontrollable, violent drunk who lives in a spiral of death. Plant, the self-described ‘Golden God’, preens with poetic superiority despite the fact that most of his lyrics are ripped-off blues songs stuffed with schoolboy innuendo.
Page appears to be a shadow. Jones doesn’t seem to be a person.
Spitz seems most interested in Grant, Led Zeppelin’s morbidly obese, borderline psychotic manager whose story has already been told, excellently, in Mark Blake’s recent biography.
The author leans heavily not only on Blake’s book, but several others written about the group.
With a lack of significant new interviews – no band members and few in their inner circle talked to him – Spitz pulls his sources together competently but remains marooned from the heart of the story.
Hearsay is presented to be fact, tall stories and myths are untested.
There is some insight into the creation of the band’s eight albums, but these 673 pages ultimately feel longer than a Bonzo drum solo, as they spiral around the same circular riff: new album, huge US tour and endless tales of excess, abuse and degradation – the latter offered up, disingenuously, for disapproval and titillation.
It is not fun to read all of it. Despite their enormous success, Led Zeppelin’s story is a strangely joyful tale of male privilege gone mad.
Four decades after the band’s demise, laid low by heroin, hooch and hubris, one feels it either needs to be told in a completely new way, or not told at all.
The Oracle of the Night: The Science and History Of Dreams
Sidarta Ribeiro Bantam Press £20
Rating:
What do the paintings of Salvador Dalí, the first sewing machine, the periodic table and the song Yesterday by Paul McCartney have in common?
Answer: They all come from our dreams. We dream of strange movies in our minds at night, but we never know who is actually directing them.
This fascinating book by Professor Sidarta Ribeiro is a Neuroscientist. It explains what happens when you close your eyes at night.
What do the paintings of Salvador Dalí (above), the first sewing machine, the periodic table and the song Yesterday by Paul McCartney have in common?
In the 1970s, scientists generally wrote off dreams as ‘brain farts’, random discharges of meaningless bits of information that cleared out the mind ready for next day’s challenges.
Ribeiro believes that dreams are a constructive process which allows us to reorganize the events of our day and create new strategies for the future.
What number of times have you woken up knowing the right thing to do when you woke up from a difficult situation in work or a romantic relationship?
It is because of this that ancient cultures all over the globe placed so much value on dreams.
Medicine men, such as magi and shamans, were venerated for being able to perform rituals that enabled their communities to gain valuable information about the weather or where to hunt for dinner.
It was the coming of Christianity that put paid to all that: dreams were now a sign that the devil was tempting you and your best bet was to keep schtum if you didn’t want to be written off as evil or crazy.
It wasn’t until Freud started taking an interest in his patients’ night-time excursions at the end of the 19th Century that dreams became legit again. There was still a problem.
Freud’s habit of interpreting everything from jewellery boxes to swords as sexual symbols meant many felt embarrassed about what went through their head at night.
Ribeiro says that the pendulum has swung in the other direction.
Many online communities allow members to share their hopes and dreams in order to find deeper meanings.
Many also practise ‘lucid dreaming’ when, every morning, you write down the dream from the night before the moment you wake up. Over time, you will begin to notice that your dreams become more vivid until you are able to do it at will.
Even better, your dreams may reveal the answers to problems that seemed impossible in your waking life.
Ribeiro explores the many worlds of literature, religion and psychology to offer a comprehensive and sometimes exhausting analysis of what it means to dream.
His dense vocabulary may make it difficult to fall asleep at times. You could argue that this is an advantage, as you might wake up with a new idea or song.
Kathryn Hughes
It’s Down and Out in England and Italy
Alberto Prunetti Scribe £12.99
Rating: 
Alberto Prunetti, the Orwell-heir apparent? He’d like us to think so, with a quote from the author of Down And Out In Paris And London at the top of every chapter and a title that echoes one of the most readable memoirs of the 20th Century.
He sets too high a standard. Orwell was the model narrator, never getting in the way of what he observed, immaculately sketching life in run-down English doss houses and revealing a hellish existence below stairs in Paris’s ‘Hotel X’.
Prunetti – a very sweary, grizzled old Italian Lefty – too often centres the story on himself.
Alberto Prunetti lapses into descriptions so surreal – often about Margaret Thatcher (above) – that it’s like entering a Corbynista fever dream
Fairness aside, Prunetti’s friends are often incredibly drawn. They were clearly influenced greatly by Orwell. Prunetti is the first to get a job at the Italian restaurant in Bristol, where John Silver was the pirate head chef.
An old seadog who’s worked all over the world, Silver can’t help switching between languages mid-sentence, swearing in all of them. ‘Necesito a ****ing day off, capeesh?’
Since the author confesses ‘I spoke like Google Translate’, there’s the odd moment of comedy here.
Prunetti doesn’t mince words, though. ‘This is an immigrant pizza chef’s stream of consciousness,’ he announces, after what was very obviously just that.
He then lapses into descriptions so surreal – often about Margaret Thatcher – that it’s like entering a Corbynista fever dream.
There is surely a great memoir to be written on life in the modern ‘precariat’ – among the Amazon and Deliveroo workers who keep so many of us pampered and well-fed – by the heir to Orwell. I’m not convinced this is it.
Heaven?