Concert Hall. Sydney Opera House.

Tuesday 21 April 2026

Review by Anthony Frater (Arts Wednesday)

On a wet, steamy Sunday afternoon in February 1972 Led Zeppelin’s world tour took in Sydney at the old Showgrounds – now the E.Q at Fox studios. Proceedings were delayed, but I will never forget vocal supremo, Robert Plant, finally walking onto the stage, strike a trademark pose at the microphone – with his pals Jones, Bonham and Page ready at their instruments – fronting a by now restless, impatient audience, to ever so coolly declare nothing other than, “it’s a quarter past three”, followed by a chuckle, followed immediately by the blast of the opening guitar riff to the Immigrant Song. Well you might be able to imagine the audience’s  response, or, maybe you just had to be there, but my very clear memory of what followed is one of absolute mayhem and of an ecstatic rapturous audience gone wild. 

In contrast to the media heavy environment of today, in those days there was very little physical evidence that the band even existed. There was an opaque cloud of seclusion, an aura of mystery surrounded them; by Led Zeppelin IV each member was represented by a gothic style symbol; sometimes we would get grainy reel footage – very short – of them performing live somewhere, and of course we had their album covers to pour over and wonder at the vague images we saw of the band in them – it was music that could surely only be created and performed by extraterrestrial alien beings. It all served to enhance their almost god like status. 

Following the death of John Bonham in 1980 they decided to call it quits, such was the influence and essential nature of Bonham’s drumming to the band. Fast forward to 2007 and by now heralded as the planet’s greatest ever rock band, Led Zeppelin performed a historic one-off charity reunion concert at the O2 arena in London. Featuring the late John Bonham’s son, Jason, on drums, the show attracted 20 million ticket requests for the 20,000 seats available. It set a world record for concert demand, such was and probably still is the band’s enduring popularity. Post concert and revved up no doubt by youthful exuberance, Jason urged the band to reform for a world tour, him playing drums of course. Page and Jones loved the idea but it was Plant who said no, an emphatic veto – likely because his vocal was no longer able to sing the songs the way he did back then – the way the songs should be sung, his register had changed and they were all so much older, and as Plant argued, unable to truly capture the youthful magic of the music and the zeitgeist in which it thrived.

Fast forward to Sydney on a chilli autumn evening in the Opera House Concert Hall and so once again we get to see what might be the closest thing to the original band live in a show: Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening has been touring the world now since 2010. I say the closet thing simply because Jason Bonham brings some genuine Led Zeppelin DNA to the stage, in addition to it being sanctioned by the remaining original members: Plant, Jones and Page.

The line up here is Jason Bonham on drums; James Dylan lead vocals and acoustic guitar; Jimmy Sakurai lead guitar; Alex Howland, keyboards and rhythm guitar, and Dorian Heartsong on bass and mandolin. The band is renown for its performances of Led Zeppelin’s catalog often praised for capturing the original sounds of their live performances. Well, they didn’t disappoint. They stayed to script, reproducing the songs as though played from a musical score – like a symphonic orchestra playing the old masters. Led Zeppelin especially in later years were notorious at going off script so that the songs we were used to hearing on the albums were almost unrecognisable live – well not quite, but to hear the songs as per the studio recording was indeed a very rare treat.

On this tour they showcased Led Zeppelin’s 6th studio album, the double album, Physical Graffiti, every song, (an album some might argue is made up of tracks that did not make it onto previous albums and a little bit less because of it), in addition to that was a small selection of songs from their huge catalogue of work. It’s worth noting, for the purist, Led Zeppelin’s best was really about their second, third and fourth albums, this was their heyday, this was when they cemented their mythical like status, and let’s add to that their fifth studio album, Houses of the Holy. Nonetheless it takes nothing away from what was on show on this particular night, it was truly stunning in scope, musicianship, theatrics and sound.

Finally it’s worth mentioning, after a year and a half of not playing it in any of their live shows, then came Stairway to Heaven. The anticipation of how Akio ‘Jimmy’ Sakurai would play the most famous guitar solo in history was palpable, mind you it is always in competition with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmore and his solo from Comfortably Numb: this year Page’s sits at number one, last year it was Gilmore’s – you get the idea. 

It’s worthy of special mention not just because it truly is an iconic piece of rock music, there is no doubt – the arrangement, the trademark old England/Gothic style lyric, the musicality –  but because the recording of it broke some cardinal rules in that it features a deliberate incremental tempo increase. Starting at approximately 72 bpm in the acoustic intro and accelerating to around 100 bpm by the final rock section, it’s part of the songs magic for this gradual increase creates an organic emotional build, a forward momentum that intentionally defied the norm. That was then – Page pioneering, but it is more common now.

Somehow but not surprisingly Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening took us all back to to that incredible day in 1972. If you missed the Sydney gig the band have two more concerts left to play, in Adelaide, 23 April and Melbourne, 25 April.