It was June 7, 2008 and Alter Bridge frontman Myles Kennedy was relaxing on the band’s tour bus as it drove through the German countryside following a performance by his band at the Rock im Park music festival that afternoon.
That evening, hundreds of miles away, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones made a surprise appearance on stage with the Foo Fighters in London, performing “Rock and Roll” and “Ramble On”.
What the delighted crowd at Wembley Stadium didn’t know was that secret talks were underway behind the scenes to audition singers for a new band featuring Page, Jones and Jason Bonham.
The outreach to singers began that evening when Bonham sent a text message to Kennedy, who he had met years earlier while filming the 2001 movie “Rock Star”.
“I get this text out of the blue. ‘Hey … can you give me a call? I have a favour to ask’” Kennedy recalled to Lemon Squeezings in 2009.
“I thought, ‘Oh, maybe he has a friend over here who wants to come to a show, get tickets or something,’” Kennedy told 5.5 KLOS’ “New & Approved” in 2022.
Curious about the nature of the favour, Kennedy called Bonham. “Look, I’m here in London. Would you be interested in coming over this weekend? I’m jamming with some friends,” Bonham said, according to Kennedy.
“I’m on tour,” Kennedy responded, “just out of curiosity, who are your friends?”
It was only then when Bonham explained that the friends he was jamming with were Page and Jones. The three men had secretly been rehearsing together in the UK in the months following Led Zeppelin’s December 10, 2007 reunion performance at the O2 Arena in London.
With Robert Plant showing no signs of willingness to continue performing with Led Zeppelin, the other band members were keen to experiment with singers for a new project.
By assembling interview fragments and press coverage that has emerged over the years, LedZepNews has pieced together the most definitive picture yet of what is arguably the most surreal year in Led Zeppelin’s history.
As Page, Jones and Bonham attempted to form a new band and audition singers, the media repeatedly leaked news of their plans and Plant was forced to make a public statement denying rumours that he was going to rejoin Led Zeppelin.
Before the media leaks, interviews and statements, however, Bonham still had to persuade Kennedy to fly to London.
“Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and I are in London jamming, and we were wondering if you’d be up for coming in,” Bonham told Kennedy, Kennedy recalled in a 2016 interview with Classic Rock magazine.
“Okay. Yeah, I think we can make that work,” Kennedy told Bonham according to the 5.5 KLOS interview.
Kennedy had a handful of days to prepare a selection of Led Zeppelin songs given to him by Bonham for a rehearsal with the band in London on June 13, 2008.
“I was on the phone and everybody was upstairs in the bus at that point. I don’t know how long it took me to actually say anything, but all of a sudden Mark [Tremonti] came down and saw my body language,” Kennedy told Classic Rock magazine in 2014.
“Whatever the impact it had on me when Jason uttered those words was so heavy Mark thought somebody had died. He’s like, ‘Are you okay? Did somebody die?’ I said ‘No.’ I couldn’t really go into it with him at that point, but I think that speaks volumes for how I felt.”
The next morning, as the band arrived at the Nürburgring on June 8, 2008 for the Rock am Ring festival, Kennedy nervously walked the famous racetrack as he contemplated his impending audition with the members of Led Zeppelin.
“There’s that track,” he told Eddie Trunk in 2017, “and I remember pacing that entire morning before our set just like could barely put one foot in front of the other, like ‘is this for real? Am I dreaming all this that this weekend I’m flying to London?”
The Alter Bridge tour continued, but after the band finished its performance at the Hultsfred Festival in Sweden on the afternoon of June 12, 2008, Kennedy was driven to an airport to fly to London in order to attend his secret audition the following day.
The abandoned Led Zeppelin reunion tour
Page, Jones and Bonham had been rehearsing together for months following Led Zeppelin’s reunion show. Initially, they hoped that Plant would agree to join them for another Led Zeppelin tour.
In the lead-up to the 2007 reunion performance, Plant hadn’t ruled out further Led Zeppelin performances. That was enough to keep his bandmates optimistic about the future.
“It was intimated way, way back, before we started rehearsals, that we would do more,” Page told Mojo magazine in an interview for its February 2010 issue.
“It was mentioned at one of the rehearsals where all the members of the band were there,” Page said. “And it certainly wasn’t denied. It certainly wasn’t when it was being discussed along the way. We all knew that we were working towards the one show. There weren’t other dates that were penciled in, but it was intimated that we were doing more.”
It seems that Page had hoped to turn the one-off December 2007 show into an eventual Led Zeppelin tour. “It’s a bit silly not to [play further concerts] because there is such massive demand,” he told Mojo magazine in December 2007. “It’s a bit selfish to do just one show. If that’s it, we probably shouldn’t have taken the genie out of the bottle.”
Bonham, seemingly in the hope that more Led Zeppelin shows were round the corner, left the band Foreigner following the December 10, 2007 Led Zeppelin reunion show.
“Some of us thought we would be continuing, that there were going to be more concerts in the not-too-distant future… Because there was a lot of work being put into the show,” Page told Rolling Stone in 2012. “I know that Jason, who was playing with Foreigner, resigned from that band. But Robert was busy.”
Indeed, Plant was focused on his collaboration with Alison Krauss. Their Raising Sand album was released in October 2007. On December 13, 2007, just three days after Led Zeppelin’s reunion performance, it was announced that Plant would tour with Krauss in 2008, not Led Zeppelin.
Whatever he privately thought of Plant’s tour plans, Page remained publicly optimistic about the prospects for Led Zeppelin.
“Robert Plant has a parallel project running and he’s really busy with that project,” Page told reporters in Tokyo, Japan on January 28, 2008 as he promoted Led Zeppelin’s Mothership compilation album. “Certainly until September, so I can’t give you any news.”
“I can assure you the amount of work that we put into the O2, for ourselves rehearsing and the staging of it was probably what you put into a world tour,” he continued.
Behind the scenes, however, Page was growing frustrated by Plant’s decision not to move forwards with Led Zeppelin.
“He was doing his Alison Krauss project,” Page told Rolling Stone in 2012. “I wasn’t fully aware it was going to be launched at the same time. So what do you do in a situation like that? I’d been working with the other two guys for the percentage of the rehearsals at the O2. We were connecting well. The weakness was that none of us sang.”
Hopes of a Led Zeppelin reunion tour faded quickly in the first months of 2008. On March 2, 2008, the UK’s Sunday Mirror newspaper reported that Plant had turned down a planned world tour that would have netted each band member £100 million.
“Despite the enormous offer, the decision did not come down to money. They always said they would do the one-off show and then see how they felt,” an anonymous source supposedly told the newspaper.
“Jimmy had enjoyed the concert in December enough to want to tour. He argued they still had something to offer. He likes the idea of another chapter in the band – the grown-up tour. John sided with Jimmy. He loved making music with the others again.”
“But Robert wanted to leave last year’s concert as their legacy. They had proved they could still do it and that was enough,” the source continued. “He has other commitments and is happier looking forward to those. Robert put the mockers on the tour.”
The Page, Jones and Bonham project
Page, Jones and Bonham faced an uncertain future. With Plant out of the picture, they decided to continue their rehearsals as part of a new project outside of Led Zeppelin. However, it seems Page at least may have hoped that Plant would step back into the group.
Secret rehearsals continued in April 2008, with the three men experimenting with writing new music together.
“We’d played no new material on the way to the O2. It would have been quite disrespectful to do that. It would have been the wrong thing to do; it wasn’t in the ethic of what we were doing, which was Led Zeppelin material,” Page told Mojo magazine in its February 2010 issue.
“But now would be the time to bring out new material, just get together carrying on with this great buzz we’ve got, carry on playing and just see what we come up with,” he added.
Speaking to Mojo in 2012, Jones recalled this period. “Having worked quite that hard with Jason and Jimmy, I just thought, ‘Let’s get another band together.’ We would have had to do some Zeppelin songs because of who was in the band, but we did have a lot of new material too. We went into rehearsal and we wrote stuff in rehearsal.”
“We’d done so much work together, it seemed crazy just to leave it at that,” Jones told Guitar World in 2010. “So we thought we’d start another band. It wasn’t going to be Led Zeppelin, as was reported in the press. We wanted to write new material.”
Page introduced songs known as his “Embryo” sketches to the rehearsals. One of the songs, known as both “Embryo No. 2” and “Domino”, had been performed by Page at the NetAid concert in 1999.
The three “Embryo” songs were later featured in the 2009 documentary “It Might Get Loud” featuring Page. The bulk of the filming of the documentary took place in Los Angeles in January 2008, with Page later adding his new music during additional shoots that coincided with the ongoing rehearsals.
“It would have been just like in the past or with any other band that you’ve got where you all get together and you come in, somebody’s got material, somebody may not have so much material or whatever, or something just comes out of thin air — and that’s exactly how it was going,” Page recalled of the songwriting sessions with Jones and Bonham in Mojo in 2010. “It was really, really good.”
“Led Zeppelin’s music is known for riffs and the musical content of what is there as much as for the vocals and the lyrics,” Page added. “I was very keen to continue what had made us fire up when we were approaching the O2 show, but with no pressure. Even if we were doing a few days there and a few here, then we were coming up with more and more material.”
“And the Zeppelin riffs have always been quite a major thing that have attracted people to the music. I was very keen to concentrate on that element, the musical content that all three of us were very capable of doing with the variety of it. I really wanted to do that,” he explained.
The rehearsals had gone so well that Page and Jones agreed to join the Foo Fighters on stage at Wembley Stadium in London on June 7, 2008 to perform “Rock and Roll” and “Ramble On”.
With new material being worked on and Page and Jones back on stage, albeit temporarily, it was time to experiment with adding singers to the new project.
It was Bonham who reportedly persuaded Page and Jones to bring in an outsider to the secret rehearsals. “I think Jason got the ball rolling, from what I understand and sold the idea to the guys,” Kennedy told Lemon Squeezings in 2009.
Myles Kennedy auditions for the project
Exhausted following his flight after Alter Bridge’s June 12, 2008 performance in Sweden, Kennedy arrived in London ready for the audition on June 13, 2008.
“I’d pretty much been up most of the night,” Kennedy told Trunk in 2017. He greeted Bonham at a hotel before arriving at the rehearsal studios where Jones was warming up.
“I walk in the studio. It was just a little rehearsal studio,” Kennedy told 95.5 KLOS’ “New & Approved”.
“But I heard piano playing, and it was great piano. I was, like, ‘Man, is somebody listening to Bill Evans or something?’ It was really good stuff — legit. And then I walk in the room, and it’s John Paul Jones playing piano.”
“He was so sweet; he was just so nice and welcoming,” Kennedy continued. “Obviously, I’m very nervous. And then in comes Jimmy. And he has such a presence. He just comes walking in the room, and it was as if a deity had come from the heavens.”
Kennedy had been given a shortlist of Led Zeppelin songs to rehearse. Together, the group performed songs including “No Quarter”, “Kashmir”, “Carouselambra” and “The Rain Song”.
“That first day the song that really stuck out which was just a special moment was ‘No Quarter’ … it’s always been one of my favourite songs,” Kennedy told Trunk in 2017. “And I remember after we got done, or maybe during the song, I looked up at Jimmy and Jimmy was really into it, he really enjoyed what was happening.”
“Working with them felt surreal,” Kennedy told Classic Rock magazine. “Jimmy played the Les Paul and just being in the room with that guitar would have been enough for me. But standing next to him as he’s playing those iconic riffs, the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up. We played ‘No Quarter’, ‘Kashmir’… We did ‘Carouselambra’, which was a really challenging arrangement. A lot of wonderful moments.”
After running through the Led Zeppelin songs, Kennedy was introduced to two new songs that Page, Jones and Bonham had been working on.
“We have a little time to kill before you go back and you have to get on the train. We’ve got some things we’ve been working on, do you want to just kind of sing over the top of it,” the three men said, Kennedy recalled during a May 2017 interview with Trunk.
“So I just kind of scatted and made something up and it was crazy,” he added.
“The riff that I remember was, did you see ‘It Might Get Loud’? The riff that we jammed on I think was called ‘Embryo Number One.’ Jimmy was playing something and I think that was what we were jamming on, I remember that riff in my head,” Kennedy explained to Trunk in 2017. “Really cool riff.”
“There was this one [riff] in particular where he … it’s an amazing riff. John Paul Jones was playing the lap steel or the pedal steel,” Kennedy told Howard Stern in 2014.
“They were jams, essentially, that they had,” Kennedy added. “That was pretty cool because ‘We’ve got some ideas, just put whatever over the top’. They started playing and I start scatting. At one point Jimmy [said] ‘Stop, that’s great. Are we getting this on tape?’”
The rehearsals do seem to have been recorded. “We didn’t do any professional recording. We just had a little digital recorder,”Page told Rolling Stone in 2012.
Jones, however, told Mojo magazine in 2012 that the new material “will never be heard”.
With the audition complete, Page and Jones drove with Kennedy to a train station, Kennedy told Classic Rock in 2016.
“On the drive, Jimmy and John Paul told me what they were considering. It was a new project, it wasn’t going to be Led Zeppelin, and would I be interested in perhaps singing with them? My answer – and this is the dumbest answer of all time – was, ‘Well, yeah, you guys are pretty much the shit.”
The rehearsals are revealed
With the audition complete and Kennedy back on tour with Alter Bridge, rehearsals continued without a singer. Bonham travelled back and forth between his home in Florida and rehearsal studios in the UK.
In August 2008, Bonham spoke to Detroit radio station 94.7 WCSX about the project. “I’ve been over [to England] a couple of times. I’ve been working with Jimmy and John Paul and trying [out] some new material,” he said. “I don’t know what it will be, but it will be something. At the moment, all I know is I have the great pleasure to go and jam with the two guys and start work on some material.”
“When I get there [in the studio] I never ask any questions. If I get a phone call to go and play, I enjoy every moment of it. Whatever it ends up as, to ever get a chance to jam with two people like that, it is a phenomenal thing for me. It’s my life. It’s what I’ve dreamed about doing.”
“[The] possibility of doing something is on the cards,” Bonham continued. “I really felt it was on the cards from the moment we walked offstage at the O2. Lots of politics [would need to] get ironed out [before an album could be made].”
Bonham’s comments caused extensive media speculation. “Led Zeppelin Back In The Studio,” Uncut magazine reported. The Guardian newspaper took a slightly more conservative tone with the headline “Led Zeppelin members working on new material”.
With speculation about the rehearsals running rampant, Page played down the project’s prospects in comments made during a September 6, 2008 press conference in Toronto for the film “It Might Get Loud”.
“We’re not actually recording,” he said. “Playing at the O2, that was our reunion and it was one day and it was at the O2 in London. And basically that was it because if you’re going to do a reunion, you need four members. John Paul Jones, myself and Jason had a little sort of jam afterwards but it was nothing as monumental as people are speculating and projecting.”
Despite Page’s comments about the rehearsal, the project continued to gain momentum. As Page returned to the UK following the press conference, this time two singers also flew into the country for auditions.
Myles Kennedy returns for more rehearsals
After finishing Alter Bridge’s latest tour with a performance in New Zealand on September 12, 2008, Kennedy boarded a flight to London for four more days of rehearsals with Page, Jones and Bonham.
“I was actually pretty sick. I’d come off a tour in Australia and I remember I got there and was really … I had some bronchitis or something and I remember it took a few days for my voice to come back,” Kennedy told Trunk in 2017.
The reunited group again performed Led Zeppelin songs. “We spent another four or five days together, and we’d done a few more songs. One of my favourite songs is ‘The Rain Song’, and when we played that, I remember when John came in with the Mellotron part, the descending part of the second verse, I actually had to pull away from the mic because it was such an emotional moment,” Kennedy told Classic Rock magazine in 2014.
“It was so intense. I looked up and I saw him playing that part, and I saw Jimmy… There’s still a part of me that’s hesitant to talk about it much. I don’t know why. I guess it’s kind of sacred in a way.”
Kennedy described the same moment in a 2021 interview with LineaRock. “When I came back later that year, we did ‘The Rain Song’ … and that was something I’ll never forget,” he said. “It was goose bumps. And I got a little teary. I kind of had to turn around like, ‘Don’t let the guys see that I’m getting emotional.’ But it was pretty heavy.”
Jones has fondly recalled the rehearsals with Kennedy. “I quite liked Myles Kennedy. He’s got the range, but his voice is completely different than Robert’s. Which was fine by me, because it was going to be a completely different band,” he told Classic Rock magazine.
“There was one singer I liked, largely because he had the range to sing Zeppelin songs although he sounded nothing like Robert,” Jones told Mojo magazine in 2012. “As he wasn’t a replacement for Robert it didn’t matter. He sang the new stuff really well.”
Steven Tyler auditions for the project
Despite Kennedy’s follow-up audition going well, another singer performed with Page, Jones and Bonham: Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler.
Aerosmith had taken a year off touring, with sessions for a new album due to begin at the end of September 2008. Before then, Tyler flew to London.
“We played all day for a week,” Tyler later recalled to Classic Rock magazine. “Every time we took a break I smoked a cigar and Jimmy smoked a cigarette. We went out back and I spoke with Jimmy about everything on the planet.
“It started out with: ‘Jimmy, you have no idea how grateful I am to have the chance to come over and jam with you guys.’ And he goes: ‘Well, maybe we can play some shows together.’ And I said: ‘Stop right there. I’m playing in a band with John Paul Jones?’”
“They let me sing every song I wanted – ‘Black Dog’, ‘Stairway To Heaven’. But it was just a week.”
Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry, who had been hoping to record a new Aerosmith album with Tyler in the US, was shocked to learn of Tyler’s involvement in the project.
“On Sunday I left messages on all his phones but never heard back. Monday and Tuesday—no sign of Steven,” Perry wrote in his 2014 autobiography “Rocks: My Life In and Out of Aerosmith”
“Then late Tuesday night came the news: I learned that over the weekend he had flown to England, where he was auditioning for Led Zeppelin. What the fuck?”
“I was like ‘Why don’t you tell me?'” Perry told CBS News in 2014. “I mean, it still surprises me when he does stuff like that.”
Accounts of the Tyler rehearsals have described them as “shambolic” and “awkward”.
“They had a great time but Steve kept fluffing his lines. He got quite flustered about it,” The Daily Mail reported in October 2008. Rolling Stone also reported in November 2008 that the rehearsals with Steven Tyler “didn’t go well”, citing one source.
Writing in the updated version of “When Giants Walked the Earth”, author Mick Wall claimed that “Tyler appeared to be suffering from a heavy cold and his voice was not in its best shape the first day, forcing the rehearsal to be curtailed.”
“When they reconvened the second day, however, according to insiders Tyler made the bold suggestion that the new material Jimmy and Jonesy had been working on didn’t yet contain any recognisable hits,” Wall’s updated book claimed. “Trying to be helpful but fatally misjudging the situation, Tyler then suggested they might like to try out some of the new songs he’d been working on with his co-writer Marti Frederiksen.”
“Frederiksen was not the kind of behind-the-scenes worker-bee likely to appeal to Jimmy Page. As a result, according to one insider who does not wish to be named here, ‘Jimmy never said a word when Tyler came out with this stuff, just told his staff to get him a plane ticket home.’”
Exactly how Tyler came to be invited to audition for the project has been the subject of debate. Tyler has repeatedly claimed that Page’s manager Peter Mensch called him and invited him to fly to London for the rehearsals.
“I spoke to Jimmy Page’s manager, Peter Mensch, who’s been a good friend of mine forever,” Tyler told Stern in 2011. “He said Robert wouldn’t play with them again, and would I want to come over and jam with the guys?
Perry, however, claimed in his autobiography that Tyler had “hounded” Mensch and his childhood friend, former Led Zeppelin roadie Henry “The Horse” Smith.
“Henry wasn’t happy about being put in the middle,” Perry wrote. “He also wasn’t happy that Steven had missed the first day of the audition or that, when he finally did show, he had been embarrassingly unprepared.”
According to Tyler, Page mentioned the prospect of recording an album while they were rehearsing. “Jimmy spoke to me about maybe doing an album,” Tyler told Classic Rock magazine.
Tyler has claimed that he turned down further involvement in the project in a follow-up conversation with Page.
“I went home and thought about it for a couple days, and I got back to him and said: ‘Look, Jimmy, you’re in an iconic band and so am I. I can’t, in good faith, leave my band and be in your band,’” Tyler told Classic Rock magazine.
“I called Jimmy up two weeks after I left and said, ‘You’re a classic band, and so is mine, and I just can’t do that to my guys, and I can’t do it to Robert,’ and I couldn’t see finding a year to really put my full self into it. So for whatever the band thought, never in a million years was I going to quit Aerosmith to start Zeppelin,” Tyler told Rolling Stone in 2011.
Aerosmith guitarist Brad Whitford, speaking in an October 2008 interview with the “Todd n Tyler Radio Empire” radio show, claimed the rehearsals with Tyler were an attempt by Page to bring Plant back into Led Zeppelin.
“They did it for fun,” he claimed. “I actually think Jimmy wanted Steven to come over and play a little bit because, I think, he was trying to light a fire under Robert. ‘Come on! Come on, Robert, let’s go!’”
The Led Zeppelin leaks
Days after the rehearsals with Kennedy and Tyler, word of the sessions leaked to the media.
“Jimmy, Jason and John are determined a tour will go ahead next year,” an anonymous source told The Sun newspaper for a story published on September 19, 2008. “They’ve been rehearsing frequently in London and the band is really gelling.”
The story identified the location of the rehearsals as Ritz Rehearsal Studios in West London.
“There’s an American guy who has been standing in for Robert regularly and doing a great job,” the source continued. “Obviously they want the original frontman to join them on the road but he still won’t commit. They will be finalising plans for shows over the next couple of months and will tell Robert that if he doesn’t want to be involved they will go ahead without him.”
It took less than a day for Kennedy’s name to be linked to the sessions. “Myles Kennedy. Remember that name,” the user BUK posted on Led Zeppelin’s official forum on September 20, 2008.
A week after The Sun’s story about the rehearsals, it then reported on September 26, 2008 that Plant had relented and agreed to tour with Led Zeppelin after learning of the rehearsals.
“The rest of the band had all but given up on Robert joining them, but they were determined to go ahead so had started to seriously explore other avenues,” an unnamed source claimed.
“When Robert realised the band were serious about doing it without him, it made him think long and hard. He realised he couldn’t face the thought of not being involved.”
“The band were over the moon when he told them the news,” they added. “They are now forging ahead with the tour plans and they can’t wait to get on the road.”
Robert Plant publicly denied a Led Zeppelin reunion
It remains unclear what the source of the leaks was. Could someone from Led Zeppelin’s team have been spreading word about the rehearsals and a potential reunion tour to either persuade Plant to return to Led Zeppelin or to test public appetite for performances by the new band?
Regardless of the source of the stories, the second article from The Sun caused a forceful reaction from Plant.
In an online statement published on September 26, 2008, Plant said it was “both frustrating and ridiculous for this story to continue to rear its head when all the musicians that surround the story are keen to get on with their individual projects and move forward”.
“I wish Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Jason Bonham nothing but success with any future projects,” he continued.
The statement listed Plant’s remaining tour dates with Krauss and mentioned a recent charity show he had performed at.
“After those dates, Robert has no intention whatsoever of touring with anyone for at least the next two years,” the statement explained. “Contrary to a spate of recent reports, Robert Plant will not be touring or recording with Led Zeppelin. Anyone buying tickets online to any such event will be buying bogus tickets.”
Kennedy and Tyler are identified
The leaks from the world of Led Zeppelin continued. Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider publicly revealed in an interview with MuchMusic on October 8, 2008 that Kennedy had been rehearsing with Page, Jones and Bonham.
He claimed the other members of Led Zeppelin had told Plant: “We’re all rehearsed, we’re ready to go. Here’s a gazillion dollars on the table. If you don’t do it, we’re going out with this kid [Kennedy]. And he can sing the shit out of Zeppelin and they’re gonna hope that Robert, at the last minute, will go, ‘OK’, and step in.”
On first glance, Snider was an unlikely inside source for Led Zeppelin rumours. But with former Atlantic Records employee Phil Carson as his manager, he clearly had the scoop on what was going on.
Three days later on October 11, 2008, The Sun also reported that Kennedy had been rehearsing with the group. “Zep are so pleased with him they have decided to take him on the tour, with Robert continuing to drag his heels,” it claimed.
Then, on October 25, 2008, The Daily Mail newspaper revealed that Tyler had also been participating in the rehearsals.
With media accounts of the supposedly secret band rehearsals appearing almost weekly, Jones was asked about the project during an on-stage interview in late October at the Manson Guitar Show in Exeter, Devon.
“Jimmy, Jason and I are actually rehearsing and we’ve had the odd singer come in and have a bash. As soon as we know, which we don’t, we will let you know,” Jones said.
“But we really hope that something is going to happen soon because we really want to do it and we’re having a lot of fun, actually, just rehearsing. Jason is actually tremendous … And what we’ve done so far sounds absolutely fantastic. When it does come, it will come, and you’ll know about it,” he added.
“We really wanna do something and Robert doesn’t want to do this, at least for the moment,” Jones continued. “I don’t really know what his plans are. He really doesn’t want to make loud music anymore. We do. I mean, I love acoustic music, but it doesn’t stop me from turning something up.”
Speaking to BBC Radio Devon at the event, Jones said: “We are trying out a couple of singers. We want to do it. It’s sounding great and we want to get on and get out there.”
“It’s got to be right,” he added. “There’s no point in just finding another Robert. You could get that out of a tribute band, but we don’t want to be our own tribute band. There would be a record and a tour, but everyone has to be on board.”
Kennedy was no longer in the UK, but it seemed his auditions had made an impact on Page, Jones and Bonham. Billboard reported on October 31, 2008 that Kennedy was the frontrunner to be the singer for the project.
The members of Led Zeppelin other than Plant “are ready to pull the trigger on a tour with a new singer if Plant refuses to join in,” it reported. “Sources tell Billboard the frontman first in line for the gig is Myles Kennedy, who has most recently led the rock outfit Alter Bridge.”
The project is abandoned
But as November 2008 arrived, momentum on the project seemed to stop. Media reports of future tours or a new album ceased. Celebrity gossip newsletter Popbitch reported that Page had told a fan that “he’d never tour without Robert Plant.”
There was a brief glimmer of hope when Page and Jones reportedly attended Alter Bridge’s November 8, 2008 show in London. But they didn’t join him on stage and Kennedy didn’t rehearse again with the members of Led Zeppelin.
An unnamed source from Page’s management company QPrime briefly addressed the project in a November 2008 Rolling Stone story. “Whatever this is, it is not Led Zeppelin,” they said. “Not without the involvement of Robert Plant.”
News of the project went quiet until January 7, 2009 when the BBC published an interview with Mensch, Page’s manager, on its website.
“They decided that if they could find a singer that they thought would fit their bill – whatever their bill was at this stage in their career – that they’d make a record and go on tour,” Mensch said.
“John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page enjoy playing with each other, Jason Bonham is a really good drummer so why not? We just need to find a singer,” he added.
The online story mistakenly stated that it had been published a year earlier, leading to confusion about potential tour plans.
Hours after the interview was published, MusicRadar reached Mensch and asked for more information about his new BBC interview.
“What interview? I haven’t spoke to those guys for like four months or something,” Mensch said, according to MusicRadar.
It seems the BBC had interviewed Mensch months earlier, possibly around September 2008 when the rehearsals were ongoing, but held on to the interview until January 2009.
In an interview with MusicRadar, Mensch addressed the state of the project directly. This time, it seemed to have been abandoned for good.
“Led Zeppelin are over! If you didn’t see them in 2007, you missed them. It’s done. I can’t be any clearer than that,” he said.
“They tried out a few singers, but no one worked out. That was it. The whole thing is completely over now. There are absolutely no plans for them to continue. Zero. Frankly, I wish everybody would stop talking about it,” Mensch continued.
By January 2009, Kennedy publicly denied he was involved in any Led Zeppelin projects. “I am not singing in Led Zeppelin or any offshoot of Led Zeppelin, but I did have a great opportunity and it was something that I’m very grateful for. But Alter Bridge will go on, and that’s that,” he told the Eric Blair Show while at the NAMM conference.
Why did the project fail?
The new band that had briefly formed in 2008 with Kennedy fronting a version of Led Zeppelin without Plant never made it out of the London rehearsal studios.
No clear explanation has been given for exactly why the project failed. Kennedy has often discussed the surreal rehearsals in media interviews.
“They just decided after a few months that they were just going to leave it alone,” Kennedy told Stern in 2014.
“I heard back from their managers a few months later, and they’d decided not to do it,” he told Classic Rock in 2016.
Page has claimed that Kennedy was brought into the new band too early. “We had no singer in mind immediately to bring on board, so I felt it was somewhat like putting the cart before the horse, because it was bringing in an unknown into an environment of three known elements,” he told Mojo in its February 2010 issue. “And I thought it would be premature because we were coming up with so much material that was really vibrant, urgent, and it was scary. It wasn’t scaring the pants off me; it was inspiring me.”
“Then there was a statement made that we were teaming up with Myles — who I think is a really fine singer — but I thought the whole thing was really premature, because we hadn’t really had the time to bring what the three of us had to fruition. I felt that once we’d done that, then that would have been the time to bring in a singer,” Page added.
“I certainly don’t think I would have felt comfortable if we’d proceeded the way we were going. I would have felt pushed into something and compromised,” Page said in the Mojo interview. “I don’t know that John Paul Jones or Jason Bonham would have felt the same thing. But when it came to playing music, what we were doing was certainly happening; there’s no doubt about that.”
Speaking to MetalXS in 2015, Page again attempted to explain the issues with the project.
“I think the most important thing is to concentrate on your strengths, not your weaknesses. With the weaknesses, none of us sang, but we could play,” he said. “So let’s concentrate on getting the music together, shaping up these songs so we’ve got a collection of them, and then we’ll see what we’re gonna do. But then we kept trying singers and we compromised, and it actually became a total nightmare.”
In Page’s accounts of the rehearsals, Kennedy and Tyler were brought into the process too early which sabotaged the creation of the new band. “I thought we really should play to our strengths here, which was the music,” Page told Classic Rock magazine.
“But there were a lot of movements to bring in singers and do this, that and the other. And that would’ve changed the character too early from what we were doing. I won’t say there was pressure, but there was a lot of hinting about this singer and that singer,” he continued.
Jones has repeatedly suggested he disagreed with Page about the singers attached to the project. It seems Jones may have been more keen than Page on moving ahead with Kennedy.
“Jimmy and I couldn’t agree on singers,” Jones told Classic Rock magazine. Speaking to The Telegraph in 2009, Jones again said: “We couldn’t really agree on singers and it didn’t work out.” And in a 2010 Guitar World interview, Jones said: “We auditioned some singers, but we couldn’t agree on one.”
“I don’t think Jimmy’s heart was in it,” Jones told Mojo in 2012. “I might have press-ganged him into it, but I did feel that we should do something, anything, but it fell apart.”
An unnamed Led Zeppelin source, speaking in Wall’s updated band biography, claimed that the benefits of Kennedy as a new singer “were ultimately outweighed by the sheer body of negative opinion against the idea of returning to life as Led Zeppelin without Plant.”
“Plant may ‘still drive him mad’ but even a hugely frustrated Jimmy now sees that to try to continue without him could damage the long-term credibility of the band,” the source continued.
Despite the abandonment of the 2008 rehearsals, Jones did continue the momentum as he formed the group Them Crooked Vultures group with Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters and Josh Homme months later in February 2009.
“I was in that mindset where I’d probably do some touring,” Jones told The Telegraph. “My parents were in variety, so I’ve always felt at home on stage. When Dave came along and said, ‘Do you fancy trying out with Josh’, I jumped at it.”
Jones’ rapid switch from the 2008 rehearsals to recording and touring with Them Crooked Vultures seems to have upset Page, who claims to have been cut out of the project.
“You guys should come to the States and record with us,” Grohl told Page following the Wembley Stadium guest appearance with the Foo Fighters, Page claimed in an On This Day website post.
“I didn’t hear anything more from Grohl, and John Paul Jones’ communications seemed to dim. The next I heard, they were promoting their new group,” the post from Page continued.
2008 was a surreal year for Led Zeppelin and was likely the last time that a reunion of the group was possible. But when Plant committed to touring with Krauss, it left the remaining band members in a difficult situation.
The unprecedented level of media speculation about the rehearsals, fuelled by almost weekly leaks to newspapers, raises the prospect that some of the stories may have been intentionally planted in the press.
Kennedy hasn’t attempted to define an exact reason why the project moved ahead, instead diplomatically recalling the positive aspects of the rehearsals in interviews. Tyler has always insisted he turned down the project, despite repeated claims that his auditions were beset with problems.
It’s likely that we’ll never know the full story of what went on in those London rehearsals rooms. The sessions were recorded, however, so there’s always the hope that audio from this surreal late stage of Led Zeppelin’s career may one day emerge.
Do you have information to share on the Led Zeppelin rehearsals in 2008? You can contact LedZepNews on ledzepnews@gmail.com
Page wasted nearly a year waiting for Robert Plant to get involved. While he would not it meant they had to write new material, none of which was all that remarkable as Tyler stated. Ultimately, JPJ did do it right by forming a new non-Led Zeppelin band with Dave Grohl & Josh Homme.
What a saga.
Tht nothing came of it is, I think, the appropriate ending.