Footage of Led Zeppelin performing at Bath Festival on June 28, 1970 has resurfaced online for a second time.
Hathor Publishing, the business run by the estate of film director Peter Whitehead who shot and edited the footage, has published a 35-minute screener copy of part of Led Zeppelin’s Bath Festival 1970 performance on its website.
The company continues to seek licensing interest in the film and is using the screener copy to advertise it.
The screener copy of the film includes audio of “Immigrant Song”, “Heartbreaker” and “Thank You” but parts of the film are muted.
The video also includes footage of Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant discussing the festival with tour manager Richard Cole.
“He told me you agreed that Country Joe goes on after the Flock,” Cole tells Grant during the discussion. “That’s what he’s fucking told me.”
The history of the ‘lost’ Bath Festival 1970 film
Whitehead’s footage of Led Zeppelin performing at Bath Festival 1970 was thought for decades to be unusable because of low light levels during the band’s performance.
It was only on May 27, 2017 when it was revealed that between 20 and 30 minutes of the Bath Festival film survives. Then on September 29, 2022, British film licensing company Kinolibrary published parts of the film on YouTube without fanfare. At the time, the film was silent without any audio.
The emergence of the film, which comprises colour and close-up footage of Led Zeppelin, shocked fans. “This footage is mind blowing! Thank you so much for sharing. I’m speechless,” wrote one user on Led Zeppelin’s official forum. “Holy fucking fuck,” wrote another person on the Royal Orleans forum.
The Bath Festival 1970 footage was removed from YouTube in 2024. Last year, however, Hathor Publishing released a trailer for the film which included some of the audio recorded by the film crew.
In January, LedZepNews published an interview with Robert Chilcott, an archivist at the business who also edited the trailer.
The rediscovery of Whitehead’s film was an “accident”, Chilcott said. “A number of cans were not clearly labelled. [Network Distributing] transferred a random batch of materials which they thought related to ‘Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London’ and showed it to [De Montfort University] to identify it. Mixed in with this was the 30+ minutes of the Bath 1970 Festival.”
This is awesome! Thank you for sharing.
Another discovery from the Led Zeppelin official forums: If you go to the “All Videos” tab and watch the video Tonite Rushes 01 it features all the rest of the Bath 1970 footage starting at 24:40, meaning all 87 minutes are now publicly available.