Rock fan Lloyd Godman discovered a Super-8 roll of unseen Led Zeppelin footage he had shot back on February 25th, 1972 at Auckland's Western Springs Stadium. Radio New Zealand reported that rather than sell the film to a private collector, Goldman has chosen to make the film public, with an American fan dubbing on an audience recording of the show for presentation.
Godman, an ecological artist in Melbourne, Australia said he was cataloguing his work when he stumbled upon the film among his files: “I knew I had this roll of film in the shed so I sent it off to get digitized. I knew there was band stuff on it but I didn't know what it was. It came back and there was the Zeppelin film. (My reaction was) really one of joy because, of the still photographs I took, I only ended up with six shots, which were really the rejects because the promoter had picked through the best of them and they just disappeared. So finding this was like finding gold really.”
He went on to say of the band: “It's really timeless music, some of that stuff. It's so powerful and I think the combination of musicians that came together to form the group — it was just like a giant cyclone. The way a cyclone's formed is, you know, all the energy was there — it just came together and it just formed into this amazing vortex that not only carried them along but carried everybody else along as well.”
Jimmy Page reflected on how as Led Zeppelin evolved as a live act, they seemed to grow more bombastic on stage: “I think what happened was it was very physical — the music — but in the early footage of us we're sort of, quite contained within it. But, you start to explode more physically as well. So there was quite a physical performance to all of this. Now, by this time, the sets are getting pretty long, 'cause the hardest and most challenging thing was, as we did a new album, it was what material to put in and we'd just keep extending the sets because you didn't want to drop anything. Because all the numbers, once they went in the set, you could have real fun with them and change them around on the night.”
Back in the day, Robert Plant shed light on what form a Led Zeppelin gig might take on any given night: “It all depends — it could be two hours, it could be three hours. It just depends on the mood that we're in and the mood the audience is in. With the impression we got at the airport and that young people. . . that we have a really good time and the audience really enjoys themselves, I'd like them to really get loose and jump about and scream and shout and listen and really get their money's worth.”
