Despite being one of the most significant events in the history of Led Zeppelin, the exact location of the band’s first rehearsal has remained unclear for decades.
However, “Becoming Led Zeppelin” includes an address for the first rehearsal which is a different place to the leading contender that has been accepted as the most likely location for years. This raises the idea that fans have likely been taking photographs outside of the wrong building for decades.
We know for certain that Led Zeppelin rehearsed together in a small basement room in Soho, likely on either August 12 or August 19, 1968. But where exactly was it?
With the help of interviews with people who were also in the basements of Soho in 1968, a new interview with the director of “Becoming Led Zeppelin”, architectural plans, 1960s music magazines and photographs from the period, LedZepNews investigated the possible sites and journeyed into the history of 1960s Soho.
After reviewing all of the evidence, it seems the mystery of exactly where Led Zeppelin rehearsed for the first time back in August 1968 has finally been solved after 56 years.
Additional reporting by Mike Tremaglio and Eric Levy.
What Led Zeppelin has said about the location
Until now, the closest thing there has been to an official band answer on the location of the first rehearsal could be found in the booklet that accompanied the 1993 Complete Studio Recordings box set.
“The group’s first get-together was in a tiny room below a record store on London’s Gerard [sic] Street,” the booklet says. “The building has since been torn down, and the district reshaped as the city’s Chinatown district, but Page remembers it vividly. ‘The room was about 18 x 30,’ remembers Page, ‘very small.’”
Despite misspelling the street name and falsely claiming the building was subsequently demolished, this provides some concrete information. We’re looking for a small basement in Chinatown, potentially beneath a record shop at the time that was likely on Gerrard Street.
References to the rehearsal location being small have remained consistent for decades. “Led Zeppelin began in a small, stuffy rehearsal hall, mid London, late 1968. Four of us got together in this two by two room and started playing,” Jimmy Page said in a 1969 press release published by Atlantic Records.
Both Page and John Paul Jones have specifically recalled Gerrard Street as the site of the first rehearsal. “We first played together in a small room in Gerrard Street, in a basement room, in what is now Chinatown. And there was just wall-to-wall amplifiers, Marshalls, there was a space for the door, and that was it,” Jones said in the 1990 CD “Led Zeppelin Profiled”.
In recent years, however, different locations have begun to creep into the recollections of band members. “The first time I ever met John was in a tiny basement room we had rented in Lyle [sic] Street,” Jones said in Mick Bonham’s 2005 book “John Bonham: The Powerhouse Behind Led Zeppelin”.
In an interview published in the 32nd issue of Tight But Loose magazine in May 2012, Jones ruled out Gerrard Street.
“No, it was not in Gerrard Street. It was in Lisle Street. It definitely wasn’t in Gerrard Street, that’s the wrong side of the road,” he said. “I went to the original Ronnie Scott club in about 1963 before it moved to Frith Street so I know it wasn’t there. It was the other way west down Lisle Street. It was in a basement. As you go down Lisle Street towards Wardour Street before you get to what was the Whiskey A Go Go club. It was on the right about three quarters down.”
By 2014, Page admitted not knowing exactly where Led Zeppelin first rehearsed. “It’s pretty hard to remember the exact location of that basement. To be fair, it was quite a long time ago,” he said in an interview published in the July 2014 issue of Mojo Magazine.
39 Gerrard Street
The previous widely accepted location of the first band rehearsal which has been mentioned in books and magazine articles for decades is the basement of 39 Gerrard Street.
“For many years, it had just been assumed that 39 Gerrard Street, where the Ronnie Scott’s ‘Old Place’ used to be, was the location,” Led Zeppelin author and researcher Mike Tremaglio tells LedZepNews.
“That attribution was primarily based on band members often stating that it had taken place on Gerrard Street, while numerous Melody Maker, NME, and Record Mirror ads for rehearsal space throughout August 1968 narrowed it down to 39 Gerrard Street,” he adds.
Tremaglio has spent years investigating where Led Zeppelin first rehearsed together. “In 2012, I wrote an extensive feature for Tight But Loose #32 magazine focusing on where Led Zeppelin’s historic first rehearsal might have taken place,” he explains. “Also included were several recollections throughout the years of the band’s first rehearsal by all four members. A condensed version of the piece was used for the ‘Evenings With Led Zeppelin’ book that I co-authored with Tight But Loose publisher Dave Lewis.”
Now the kitchen of Taiwanese restaurant Leong’s Legend, in 1968 the basement was a rehearsal room and nightclub that was the former home of the original site of Ronnie Scott’s legendary jazz club.
During the Second World War, the basement had been a bottle party club. These curiosities emerged as a way to circumvent licensing laws, allowing people to continue drinking into the early hours of the morning.
“To be admitted to a bottle party, you must be ‘invited,’ and to be ‘invited,’ you must be sponsored by one or more existing invitees,” explained the December 25, 1958 issue of Picture Post. “But you must also have an order with a wine company, so that the drinks you order after midnight are, in theory at any rate, already paid for, and are, in theory at any rate, fetched by winged bicyclists from the shop. If your merchant is not an all-night one, there is nothing for it but to bring your own bottle along in your own hands.”
Following the war, the basement became a coffee bar for London taxi drivers and in 1953 it was rechristened Zanzibar’s, a jazz bar.
The basement’s most high profile resident arrived in 1959 when Ronnie Scott opened his jazz club on October 30, 1959 which would remain open at the location until November 27, 1965.
“We started looking around for premises, and this guy I knew who had this place in Gerrard Street, which was a taxi drivers’ all-night hangout, wasn’t doing too well with it; he was the landlord, and he asked us if we’d like to take it over,” Scott recalled in a 1979 interview with Les Tomkins.
“He knew that we had run occasional jazz things in the vicinity, and he’d heard we were looking for a place. So he moved out, and we took over this bare cellar. Well. it wasn’t completely bare, it had a little coffee bar, with a gas stove or something, at one end, and a counter that they used to serve coffee at, and that was it,” Scott continued.
The basement’s landlord was Jack Fordham, a Soho entrepreneur who also ran a Wimpy burger restaurant at 1 Berwick Street. Anyone wishing to book the basement needed to speak to Fordham, often having to visit him in person at his restaurant.
With Scott’s club relocated to Frith Street, the basement continued to host jazz shows under the name The Old Place from September 11, 1966 until May 25, 1968.
Seeking as much money as possible from his space, Fordham also began operating it as a rehearsal location from around 1965 onwards.
“Rehearsal room & dancing academy, suitable for club dances, fan clubs, etc. 39 Gerrard Street. Available day and night,” read an advert placed in the August 10, 1968 issue of Melody Maker.
With Scott vacating the premises and closing The Old Place, Fordham was left without income from regular evening performances in the basement. He placed an advert in Melody Maker in the summer of 1968 which led him to Ian Harris, the lead singer of The Earth.
Harris began operating a regular club night from the basement on September 28, 1968, just weeks after Led Zeppelin potentially rehearsed in the room.
”It was a really tiny room and they couldn’t have held more than 100 people when it was a jazz club. I know we packed it out,” Harris says in an interview with LedZepNews. “And I called it The Coffin club, because it was a death trap. There were no fire escapes in that room.”
“So you went down the stairs, there was a curtain and then we took the money there. And then on the right, there was a loo. There was a little bar, but it wasn’t licensed. I don’t think it was licensed during Ronnie Scott’s time. I think they took drugs anyway,” he continues.
“There was a small stage at the back where we performed. I believe it was probably left there, that was where Ronnie Scott played. And there were a few seats around the wall. But most of it was standing,” according to Harris.
Harris has produced a new drawing of the basement for LedZepNews, showing the space as he recalled it in 1968. It shows the room as it would have appeared if Led Zeppelin did rehearse there in August 1968.
Newspaper adverts show Harris regularly played in the basement with his band The Earth until December 14, 1968 when a new band, Nosmo King, took over the residency.
“To fix our gigs we had to go to a burger bar round the corner and talk to the club owner who worked as a short-order cook,” Adrian Litvinoff, Nosmo King’s piano player, tells LedZepNews.
“I have to say it was insalubrious as a venue,” he continues. “The entrance was down some steep stairs in front of the building, and the front door was very close to the toilets – nice!”
“There was no rehearsal room, just one room with a smallish stage and seating on two or three sides, and a small band room behind,” Litvinoff continues. “If Led Zep wanted to use their full stage gear they would have found it all very poky and cramped. Of course musicians didn’t complain about such things then, but even a newly forming band of experienced players might have hoped for something better.”
Nosmo King performed weekly at the venue until January 1969, when gig listings for the venue stopped being published.
Could 39 Gerrard Street be the location of Led Zeppelin’s first rehearsal? It was certainly a basement rehearsal room in London’s Soho during the period. But it doesn’t seem to exactly match recollections from the members of Led Zeppelin, in large part because it appears bigger than the cramped space frequently referred to by band members in interviews.
Harris clearly recalls a stage left in the club from its time as Ronnie Scott’s, something that surely would have been mentioned in recollections from the members of Led Zeppelin. And Jones claims to have visited the basement while Scott was using it, something he also would have been likely to remember.
19 Gerrard Street
The release of “Becoming Led Zeppelin” means we have a new leading contender for the site of Led Zeppelin’s first rehearsal: the basement of 19 Gerrard Street.
A short walk over the road from 39 Gerrard Street, 19 Gerrard Street’s basement is now the lower floor of beauty studio Le Salon.
“Becoming Led Zeppelin” twice shows a photograph of the building as it appeared in the 1970s and the film clearly states this was the location of Led Zeppelin’s first rehearsal.
The building’s inclusion in the film came following extensive research, “Becoming Led Zeppelin” director Bernard MacMahon tells LedZepNews.
“That was obviously a huge amount of research looking into that. And so that was essentially based on a number of things,” MacMahon says. “Firstly, we were given access to a lot of paperwork and archives, which allowed me to check on locations and things like this.”
“And there were like two rehearsal places in Gerrard Street, two basements where there were rehearsal places in there. And so, yeah, I was able to confirm that was the place,” he says.
“Before I tracked down the paperwork, what I initially was doing was looking to see if I could find records of rehearsal spaces that were on Gerrard Street,” according to MacMahon.
“One of the places looked promising until I realized that it had been the original site of Ronnie Scott’s the jazz club,” he continues. “There is absolutely no way on earth John Paul Jones would not have remembered the first Led Zeppelin rehearsal being in Ronnie Scott’s.”
MacMahon visited the building and its basement as part of his research for the film. “You can actually go down there into the room and when you go down there, you can feel it’s the place. It’s exactly as described,” he says. “You imagine the amps. It’s a tiny little space.”
The possibility that established wisdom about the location of the first Led Zeppelin rehearsal was wrong began in May 2024 when Tremaglio posted research on the Royal Orleans forum identifying the basement of 19 Gerrard Street as a rehearsal space used at the time.
“Other than Jones’ Lisle Street recollection, it checked all the boxes,” Tremaglio tells LedZepNews. “It not only was a rehearsal space on Gerrard Street, but it was relatively inexpensive and had the added benefit of having recording equipment there too. That certainly would have come in handy for Page to assess the strength of the band, especially when he was anticipating recording their first album, which would occur just five to six weeks later.”
From 1961 to 1964, 19 Gerrard Street was home to the Zodiac Records record shop. That seems to match the official band explanation published in the 1993 box set that the rehearsal space was beneath a record shop, even if the record shop had closed by 1968.
The building being on the opposite of the road to 39 Gerrard Street also fits with Jones’ 2012 insistence that 39 Gerrard Street was “the wrong side of the road”.
In the tiny basement, Zodiac Recording Studios was founded in 1961, giving London’s budding pop stars a new space to record music. “Recording studios available, all facilities. Tape to disc services. Mono and stereo. Reasonable charges. Zodiac Recording Studios, 19 Gerrard Street,” read an advert placed in the July 14, 1961 issue of NME.
By July 10, 1964, the basement had been renamed Gerrard Sound Studios and had expanded to offering a rehearsal space. “Gerrard Sound Studios for quality ‘Demos’ tape-disc service. Sound proof rehearsal studio (suitable bands). 19 Gerrard Street,” read an advert placed in the July 10, 1964 issue of NME.
The basement was rebranded again in 1966, becoming Studio 19 which was owned by Peter Wicker. It would continue with this name until 1969, meaning if Led Zeppelin did rehearse there in 1968, it would have been via Wicker.
Architectural plans of the basement obtained from Westminster City Council show that the basement is a collection of small rooms, unlike the larger club space at 39 Gerrard Street. This tallies closely with the recollections of the members of Led Zeppelin that they first played together in a cramped rehearsal room.
One of the most compelling pieces of evidence for Led Zeppelin’s first rehearsal being in the basement of 19 Gerrard Street is the fact that Jeff Beck rehearsed there multiple times in 1967. It’s likely that Beck’s managers at the time, Mickie Most and Led Zeppelin’s eventual manager Peter Grant, booked the space for him.
Beck first rehearsed in the basement in January or February of 1967, returning there in August 1967. A photograph from the first set of rehearsals was published in the April 1967 issue of Beat Instrumental magazine, showing Beck playing in a small room identified as “Studio 19”.
Writing about Beck, the September 1967 issue of Beat Instrumental again places him in the basement of 19 Gerrard Street. “I caught him down at the Mickie Most office. He’d come, not so fresh from a van breakdown when he was on his way to rehearse at Studio 19,” the magazine reported.
It’s possible that Grant may have handled the booking of Beck at Studio 19 himself. He certainly seems to have been involved in booking Beck’s live performances at the time.
“With Grant jumping the gun by booking the band onto the bill of a package tour starring Roy Orbison and the Small Faces, rehearsals moved to Studio 19 on Gerrard Street, Beck tearing up to London in his Corvette Stingray,” says the 2011 book “The Faces: Had Me a Real Good Time, Before, During and After” by Andy Neill.
If Grant had booked Beck the 19 Gerrard Street basement rehearsal room in 1967, could he have done the same thing for Led Zeppelin the following year?
Interviewed for “Becoming Led Zeppelin”, Page says that Grant booked the first rehearsal’s location. “Peter Grant managed to get a two-hour rehearsal space in Gerrard Street,” he says in the film.
The October 1971 issue of Studio Sound magazine refers to the basement’s studio as “low priced” and “cheap”, a fact that would have appealed to both Grant and Page if the rates for booking rehearsals at the venue were equally affordable.
By 1970, the basement of 19 Gerrard Street had rebranded again as Sound 19. On December 18, 1971, the band Lifeblud visited the studio to record their album Be Thou My Very Armour.
Photographs from that recording session taken by John Sivyer which were provided to Led Zeppelin by Lifeblud singer Roger Knott show the same small basement as Beck’s 1967 rehearsal.
Sivyer’s photographs from 1971 appear to show the same room that Beck and his band rehearsed in during 1967, with the same design of “recording” and “stand by” lights fitted to the wall.
The above photograph taken by Sivyer shows that one of the basement’s cave-like storage spaces had been converted into a control booth for the recording studio.
If Led Zeppelin did rehearse for the first time in the basement of 19 Gerrard Street, it’s likely that Sivyer’s photographs capture the very room where Led Zeppelin’s music was first heard.
The other contenders
27 Lisle Street
What if we’re wrong about Gerrard Street and Jones’ recent mentions of Lisle Street are correct? Lisle Street has for years been mentioned as an alternative site for Led Zeppelin’s first rehearsal.
Writing in Mojo Magazine in October 2005, Mick Wall specifically pointed to “a studio in Lisle Street” as the location of the rehearsal. If that is the case, the basement of 27 Lisle Street would be the most likely candidate.
As Tremaglio wrote in the 32nd issue of Tight But Loose magazine, In the 1960s the basement was home to the record shop Transat Imports. Despite this intriguing link, there are no mentions of this basement being used as a rehearsal space.
44 Gerrard Street
Another contender for the first rehearsal location is the basement of 44 Gerrard Street. This space was a rehearsal room with an advert placed in the June 28, 1969 issue of Melody Maker promoting “Rehearsal rooms at basement. 44 Gerrard St”.
Like 39 Gerrard Street, the basement was home to a nightclub in the evening. The Happening 44 club had been opened in the basement in 1967 by naturist and Wiccan priest Jack L. Bracelin, with the basement free for rehearsals during the day. Bracelin’s club had already closed by the end of 1967, however.
A 1971 photograph of the building shows the basement rehearsal space advertised prominently on a sign outside. “Harmony In Keys,” the sign read, “rehearsal rooms daily”.
22 Gerrard Street
Another location sometimes listed for Led Zeppelin’s first rehearsal is the basement of 22 Gerrard Street. It’s listed in the 2001 book “Rock Music Landmarks of London” by Graham Vickers, for example. We’ve found no evidence that a rehearsal space existed at this location.
9 Gerrard Street
The July 2014 issue of Mojo Magazine, in which Page says he can’t exactly recall the location of the first rehearsal, includes various photographs of Page at Gerrard Street.
One of the images shows Page standing outside a basement on the street, perhaps an indicator of the location of the first rehearsal. But a close examination of the stairs shown in the photograph show that Page was actually photographed outside the basement of 9 Gerrard Street, a location that wasn’t a rehearsal room at the time.
whichever is the correct address it deserves a commemorative blue plague as part of a historical moment in the history of popular culture
How does one get big Marshall amps into & out of those TINY rooms ?? Drum kit would be hard enough !?
I would bet 6 cases of beer that the rehearsal spot was the same as Jeff Becks… knowing Grant had gotten it for him ( Jeff ) and knowing that Jimmy was tight with money ( don’t blame him )…and hey… what a tight knit they all were to begin with … !!
Page did not record thru a Marshall amp until the second. The wall to wall marshals comment is wrong