Newly unearthed Super 8 footage of Led Zeppelin performing in Denmark in 1979 has surfaced online, giving a candid taste of what watching the band at their peak was like.
Shot by Led Zep fan and filmmaker Lennart Ström on a camera he snuck into Copenhagen’s Falkoner Theater on July 24, the film had sat idle in a drawer for 45 years before getting a carefully executed glow-up.
The shows came on the eve of the band’s iconic Knebworth sets, with the two dates in the Danish capital acting as warm-ups for the main events. Ström’s 13-minute, set-traversing footage serves as a stunning time capsule of the night.
Notably, the footage was captured without audio as Ström was only filming the snippets of the show to test the camera out. The Dane says he’d occasionally showcased the footage to friends during the intervening years, but it has remained largely unseen. That was until he told the Heart of Markness podcast – which had run an episode on Zeppelin’s Copenhagen shows – of its existence.
That led to the clip’s revival at the hands of Reel Revival Film and the Pink Floyd Research Group – which played its part in reviving fan-shot footage of David Gilmour and Pink Floyd performing in 1975. Together, the parties have digitized and color-corrected the footage, and paired it with audio recordings from the show.
The finished film has been uploaded to YouTube by the channel ledzepfilm and features a plethora of Led Zep classics. It kicks off with The Song Remains the Sameduring which Jimmy Page makes light work of his legendary twin-neck Gibson EDS-1275, and later takes in Whole Lotta Love, Black Dog, and Kashmir.
There’s also a guitar solo, unleashed by Page on his “Number 1” Les Paul, which is given a stirring visual accompaniment via a laser display that also sees Page playing with a violin bow that looks like a lightsabre.
Other bands, such as The Who, were already incorporating lasers into their live shows by this time, but Zeppelin were reportedly one of the first to use a high-powered laser. However, it often wreaked havoc with venues, which the band had learned the hard way the night before.
“We brought the Super 8 camera to test a new film that would work indoors,” Ström tells Led Zeppelin News. “It was no problem getting the camera in. It was quite small and I think I had it in my trousers.
“The gig the night before was, according to the papers, a disaster due to the electric failures that the laser had brought,” he continues. “So there were generators standing in the alley we passed before going in. We didn’t understand why they were there, but I remembered from the army that (they were) generators. So we were of course concerned about the gig.”
Footage of a thankfully uninterrupted solo shows that the generators weren’t needed, but had likely been drafted in as a precautionary measure. It seems the force was with them on the night.
“I have kept this film in a drawer all the years,” Ström says. “I showed it to some friends, guitarists who went nuts. And that was the silent version.”
The film’s release comes just after the cinematic release of Becoming Led Zeppelina brand-new tell-all documentary on the band’s rise. Last year, unseen footage of the band’s record-breaking show at the Pontiac Dome in 1977 surfaced online.
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