New book reveals story behind impromptu performance in India in 1972, as rock band prepare to release recordings with classical musicians from same trip

It was the night Led Zeppelin played Bombay. Not in a stadium, park or concert hall, but in a bar called Slip Disc that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant had found as they searched for somewhere to drink in the Indian port city. There, the two British rock stars, at the height of global adulation, were joined by local musicians for an impromptu jam.



Forty-three years later, details of the one-off gig in the city, now known as Mumbai, have been revealed in a new book, while Led Zeppelin have announced they are to release previously unheard recordings made with classical Indian musicians on the same trip.

The news, reported in all major English-language newspapers in India and by the national press agency, has prompted a wave of excitement.

Kolkata’s weekly Junior Statesman reported the group’s visit. Photograph: Junior Statesman

“It was a pretty legendary moment. No one ever thought they would turn up and then they did and very few people got to hear them. The idea that they came [to India] is a huge thing,” said Aditya Varma, of the Rock Street Journal, an Indian music magazine.

The book comes amid signs of a revival of interest in the 1970s, a decade which saw political and economic crises in India but also the beginning of globalisation.

Authorities in northern India recently said they would be refurbishing the ashram in Rishikesh, the temple town visited by the Beatles in 1968 and which subsequently became a high point of the hippy trail through south Asia, while the Times of India reported a return to 70s-style flared trousers.

“Popularised by ‘the angry young man’ of Bollywood in early 70s, bell-bottoms are here again,” the newspaper’s correspondent in Ludhiana, a city in the north-west, wrote.

One Indian fashion blog described the 70s as “the most fashionable decade of India”.

Sidharth Bhatia, the journalist who revealed the 1972 Led Zeppelin visit and the author of India Psychedelic : the Story of a Rocking Generation, said there had been “a wave of nostalgia”. “It was a minuscule number of people at the time. It had no relevance in the broader scene musically. India at the time was very much into high culture or folk culture. But there’s been lots of reaction [to the new book] among the under-25s. They all say this is what my mum and dad told me about,” Bhatia said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Beatles and their wives at the Rishikesh in India with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1968. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Page and Plant, Led Zeppelin’s guitarist and singer, were returning from a tour in Japan when they stopped in India in 1972. They had tried the members’ only club at the luxury Taj hotel where they were staying but found it staid and boring. At the door of the Slip Disc, a grubby bar nearby, the two long-haired rock stars were stopped by a bouncer who told them “no hippies allowed” but were taken in by a regular who thought he recognised them, according to Bhatia.

Inside, Page and Plant ordered beers and watched a local band before the manager asked them to play. No one recorded their near hour-hour jam with two regulars and instruments that were at hand. The next night a queue formed round the block at the bar but the musicians did not return. Plant later described “playing in an old dive … for a bottle of scotch”.

“Jimmy and I played in a club in Bombay in 1972,” he told the Guardian in 2012. “I played drums and he played guitar and it was the only club in Bombay that had a drum kit. Somehow or other we ended up in there with loads and loads of illict substances. Some guy is writing a book about rock in India – and apparently it was born in this club with Page and I wired out of our faces. I’m not a very good drummer, to say the least, but for some reason or another it left a mark.”

Imports were tightly restricted at the time and local rock musicians had to make do with instruments and equipment that were locally made copies or old and repeatedly repaired.

“It was superb. I was singing through a Fender cabinet which was the size of a 12-inch telly, and Pagey was playing a guitar that must have had piano strings on it. And the people were so happy because they’d never witnessed anybody [who was] just passing through taking the trouble to stop and play,” Plant later told a journalist.

The idea that Led Zeppelin came to India is a huge thing Aditya V​​arma

The band had already become one of the wealthiest and bestselling of all time, filling vast venues across the world and with multiple platinum discs.

The recordings Led Zeppelin are releasing this year were made on the same trip with professionals from the Bombay Symphony Orchestra using traditional instruments.

Page later described it as a “tricky” but “exciting learning experience”. The band went on to record the hit song Kashmir, though it was apparently inspired by a drive through the desert in north Africa.

“Indian rhythm has long been admired by musicians worldwide. It’s very complex and pretty advanced. As for Led Zep’s influence here, it went into the mix. Call it a remix or whatever, but it’s there somewhere,” said B Narayanaswamy, a marketing consultant and music enthusiast in Delhi.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Zeenat Aman (centre) in Hare Rama Hare Krishna. Photograph: Youtube

There have been some signs of nostalgia for the 70s before. In 2011 a new version of the classic song Dum Maaro Dum of 1971 was a huge hit. The song comes from the Bollywood film Hare Rama Hare Krishna, which explored the complexities of the impact of western popular culture on India at the time and caused a storm by showing an Indian girl led astray by foreign hippies in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Bhatia pointed to the enduring appeal of India’s best-known film star, Amitabh Bachchan, as evidence. “Why the interest in a film star who is 72 years old? Or in Sholay [a classic Bollywood film starring Bachchan], which came out in 1975?”

The 70s saw widespread unrest in India, a war with Pakistan, the nationalisation of much of the economy and the declaration of a state of emergency by Indira Gandhi, the then prime minister. The decade also saw the coming of age of the first generation of Indians with no memory of life under British rule, which ended in 1947.

“There is a political nostalgia now for the decade too,” said Ramachandra Guha, a historian and commentator. “India has had so many weak leaders that people look back now to a time when we had a strong one, with all the advantages and disadvantages.”

However, any cultural nostalgia is limited to a small segment. “It’s restricted to people in the major urban centres and really to a certain type of middle-class generation born in the 1950s,” Guha said.