The Best Led Zeppelin Album You've Never Heard

Recently it came to light that, when early sales of Led Zeppelin IV failed to meet Atlantic Records’ expectations, label boss Ahmet Ertegun urged the group to consider a new musical direction. He is said to have been worried that America’s record buyers had had their fill frantic guitar-playing and high-pitched shrieking, and longed for something rather mellower to listen to while ingesting Quaaludes. 

Group leader Jimmy Page’s idea, with which his former professional wrestler manager, Peter Grunt, avidly concurred, was to revive the idea of a close harmony group he’d toyed with briefly during the making of Led Zeppelin II. The idea had come briefly to fruition in the iconic Whole Lotta Love, on whose title line Page, bassist John Paul Jones, and drummer John Bonham pretended, when they were able to stop giggling, to be Crosby, Stills & Nash. 

The piglet-in-agony vocal style that Plant favoured at the time wasn’t compatible with the other three’s velvety baritones, and Grunt and Ertegun agreed that the project should be seen as distinct from Zeppelin, so Plant wasn't invited to participate. Moreover, Zeppelin’s hectic schedule precluded Page’s devoting much thought to the project until the conclusion of the group’s record-smashing 1973 world tour, on which they grossed $4.1 billion and set attendance records that still stand, or, in the cases of orthopaedic complications, sit. 

Only after retiring to Bron-Yr-Aur, a decrepit Welsh cottage in which he and Plant were going to compose material, or decide on which other artists’ material to plagiarise, for their next album, was Page finally able to compile a proposed song list while “Percy”, in his own bedroom, played video games and chatted with fans on Facebook and Instagram. Page’s proposed track listing included The Hi-Lo’s’ Everything's Ducky,  Moonlight Music, and The Scuttlebutt Walk, The Andrews Sisters’ arrangements of Beer Barrel Polka, Shortenin’ Bread, and Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree, The Ink Spots’ I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire and If I Didn’t Care, The Fleetwoods’ Mister Blue, and, perhaps, most surprisingly Patience and Prudence’s Tonight You Belong to Me (thought to be the most Caucasian record ever recorded), though it required Page to compose a third vocal line.  

At one point, insiders believe that Page toyed with the idea of inviting the two guitarists who’d preceded him in The Yardbirds — Jeff Back and Eric Clapton — into the group, in which case it would have been rechristened Jimmy, Jonesy, John & Jeff, if only the former joined, or Jimmy, Jonesy, John, Jeff & Junkie if both musicians liked the idea. The Jeff Beck Group, which had provided the template for Led Zeppelin, was in disarray by that point, with lead singer Rod Stewart having quit music to play for Arsenal's youth team, and Page knew that Beck had been secretly proud of the UK chart showing of his solo single Hi Ho Silver Lining, on which he had sung lead. Both musicians declined, though, Beck because he wanted to study Buddhism and change the oil on his collection of American hot rods, and Clapton because there were no Robert Johnson or Sight-impaired Persimmon Williams songs in the set list. 

Recorded at London’s Olympia Studios in July 1976, with former Cliff Richard priducer Norrie Paramour at the mixing desk, the album was shelved at the last minute when, motivated by offers of cocaine and concubines, American radio program directors put LZIV’s It’s Not Paedophilia If She Looks 18 into heavy rotation en masse. Ahmet Ertegun, who was said by his publicists to embody eastern European charm and decorum, but who I understand to have been Harvey Weinstein-ish, decided against releasing two Zeppelin-linked projects simultaneously. Cassette copies of rough mixes of the album sell today for up to $4.1 billion. 

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London Under Sharia Law

As an American expatriate, I am very often asked what it’s like living in London under the Muslim mayor Shadiq Khan, whose first action after taking office was to declare sharia law. The short answer is that it has its ups, and its downs too. Where once the miniskirted dolly birds of London were celebrated in every magazine (except some the stuffier financial and scientific ones) and on every early-evening television newsmagazine, it quickly became rare after Mr. Khan’s coronation to glimpse so much as a female ankle, as local women took to dressing no longer to inspire the lustful thoughts of men (and, to be fair, some lesbians). The most one can reasonably hope for in the London of 2017 is an occasional glimpse of wrist. No fewer than three new “lads’ mags” specialising in wrists have appeared on the newsstands since Boris Johnson evacuated the mayor’s office.

Poundland and its archrival The 99p Store now gives away packages of disposable razors with any purchase, as men, forbidden to shave, no longer buy them. With characteristic resiliency and the panache that had once made Carnaby Street the centre of the universe, male Londoners have developed the bewhiskered, flannel-shirted style called lumbersexual, though not in the hearing of Mayor Khan’s omnipresent thought police, recognisable from their MKOTP logo baseball caps. On the BBC television programme Dragons Den, on

which entrepreneurs try to get snooty tycoons to bankroll their ideas for businesses, a hundred hirsute boyos have introduced shampoos and conditioners formulated specifically for facial hair. The musical group Mumford & Sons introduced the lumbersexual look to the whole world, which, prudently, almost unanimously spurned it, except in a few craft breweries and determinedly old-fashioned (vinyl) record shops in Brooklyn, LA’s Silverlake,

and Portland, Oregon.

.As you might imagine, Mayor Khan’s ban on alcohol hit the city’s publicans and

sommeliers hard, and alcoholism, heretofore ranked third among Londoners’ favourite recreations (just behind defiantly refusing to queue for buses and trains anymore, and refusing to pronounce foreign place names properly, but ahead of football, alcoholism denial, and football hooliganism), fell out of the Top 5 for the first time since 1931, though alcoholism denial strangely hasn’t relinquished its hold on the public fancy. A great many pubs have been converted to mini-mosques, though few have troubled themselves to amend their signage. A recent article in the weekly lifestyle supplement of the Telegraph amusingly compiled a list of the most incongruously named mini-mosques. The Goose & Syringe, in Wandsworth, a favourite meeting-place of foie gras producers, topped the list.

Though publicans and so on have of course been very vocal in their disgruntlement, they are in fact considerably more gruntled than those formerly in the business of selling Prophet Mohammed-branded merchandise — coffee mugs, key rings, fridge magnets — in the popular-with-tourists West End. A great many of these latter businesses have been taken

over by the big retail names that clog every high street, mall, and airport. Exactly what London needed, in view of the woeful paucity of soulless boutiques selling identically boring, hideous clothing!

That which nearly all Londoners love about sharia is the public beheadings and stonings in Leicester Square every Saturday afternoon. In a city in which tickets to the latest Hollywood sequel or prequel can cost £20 (around $25 in real money), free entertainment is avidly cherished, though of course there are nay-sayers who deplore the high cost (£7) of

the halal popcorn on offer at these events. Some who have tried sneaking their own non-halal refreshments in have been beaten so badly with sticks as to be unidentifiable except via their dental records.

Sharia is cruel, but fair.