If you're 49 years of age and you're going to wear tight leather trousers and wear your hair in the shaggy perm style, your name had better be Robert Plant. The Led Zeppelin singer, with his satin shirt open to his bully button, is bent over backwards as he bellows out from somewhere deeper than his diaphragm "Way Down Inside" - making 14 syllables of the four in the phrase. A grown man in a suit (probably just arrived from a sales conference) is close to tears as the more modestly dressed 54-yearold guitarist, by the name of Jimmy Page, takes a violin bow, Hendrix style, to his guitar fretboard and the two of them play Whole Lotta Love with all the vigour and drive of a garage band of 17-year-olds.
It's been 20-odd years since Led Zep last played their classic tunes on a British stage and tonight in the heaving club-like surrounds of the Shepherd's Bush Empire, it's like The Sex Pistols never happened.
Except it's not really Led Zeppelin, and it never can be again, since their drummer John "Bonzo" Bonham died in 1980 and they have now dispensed with the services of their original bass guitarist John Paul Jones, but it's good enough for the head-bangers and the air-guitarists down the front: Page and Plant are doing a low-key gig to launch their new album and new world tour, and because the album's not in the shops until next week, they do 90 per cent Led Zep material.
It's not just the forty-somethings who are in heavy rock nirvana at Plant's wailing and Page's axing; there are mere children here tonight who weren't alive when the band broke up, wearing unfashionably long hair and singing along with every vocal line as if their lift home depended on it. There's also the rockerati: a few rows back, ex-Stone Roses guitarist John Squire stares at Jimmy Page's handwork for the whole two hour duration of the show while a few rows ahead, Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie enthusiastically air-drums along to every song.
If Page took out his acoustic and picked out the first few chords of Stairway To Heaven, this building would probably implode from ecstatic delight. There is no Stairway though, probably for the same reason that most every guitar shop in the world has signs on the wall requesting customers trying out guitars not to play "Stairway To Heaven" - it's the cliche factor. They do play Rock 'n' Roll, How Many More Times, the acoustic Going To California, You Shoot Me and Robert Johnson's Crossroads. For the anoraks: Mike Leigh is on drums and Alan Jones on bass. Once the biggest band in the world, by a country mile, Led Zeppelin sold 100 million records over their 12-year tenure at the top of the rock heap but still, for all but the die-hard fan, their most enduring legacy is their contribution to, if not creation of, of the rock 'n' roll myth. See Oasis getting into trouble with an airline for smoking cigarettes on a non-smoking flight (gosh!), see Ozzy Osbourne's on-stage antics getting him banned from many a country, see so many 12-groupies-ina-bed sex marathons and see any strung-out rock star tilting at an establishment windmill and you're looking at mere amateurs in the excess stakes.
Led Zeppelin did it all and far better (or worse, depending on your point of view) in the days when the words "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll" were more than the lyrics to a popular song.
Formed in 1968 and taking their name from one of Keith Moon's (The Who) puns: "It'll go down like a Lead Zeppelin", vocal supremo Robert "Percy" Plant was a mere journeyman blues singer in a Birmingham pub band before meeting with fretmaster Jimmy Page (who as a sought-after session guitarist had played on Lulu's Shout and Procul Harem's A Whiter Shade Of Pale), and John Paul Jones and John Bonham. Freely pillaging from the back catalogue of classic blues numbers and adding a hard rock sheen in the studio, they broke big courtesy of non-stop touring, particularly in the US where they sold two-thirds of their 100 million albums.
Being on the road so much, they developed quite a taste for the touring lifestyle with groupies, drugs and booze (in no particular order) being the only constants.
With their own private jet, the Starship, also known a bit more prosaically as "the flying brothel", they earned more money than any other rock band in history and a clatter of more commercially than critically acclaimed albums (From Led Zep1 to their meisterwork Physical Graffiti) made them pre-MTV icons.
The stories about their on-the-road exploits soon took on a disturbing hue - there was talk of widespread heroin and cocaine addiction, one too many trashed hotel rooms (to this day, the band are still banned from the Hilton Hotel chain - now that's what I call rock 'n' roll) and Rolls Royces driven into swimming pools, under-age sex charges and the underlying presence of violence among their management and entourage.
Most bizarrely (even for Led Zep) they were even accused of being devil worshippers - which stemmed from Jimmy Page's interest in the occult and the fact that he bought the former house of Aleister Crowley, who was once dubbed "the most evil man in Britain". The story went that "Satan's own rock band" had a curse put on them and there were many knowing looks when the Led Zep express came off the rails at the end of the 1970s. First Robert Plant and his wife were seriously injured in a car crash leading to the band cancelling all gigs for two years, then Plant's five-year-old son, Karac, died following a stomach infection, and drummer John Bonham died from inhaling his own vomit after a marathon drinking session (36 vodkas, apparently) at Jimmy Page's house.
The devil worship stuff was nonsense, but nevertheless the band felt they couldn't go on without the drummer and the three remaining members went off to pursue moderately successful solo careers leaving the rest of the world to ponder on the myth of Led Zep.
There was a reunion of sorts in 1994 when Page and Plant got back together to perform "unplugged" but despite a successful tour, there was still no firm commitment and no sign of new songs. Until now. With the release next week of the first new material since 1980 on the album, Walking Into Clarksdale, and a massive world tour which should take in two nights in the Point in Dublin during the summer, it's a very upbeat Page and Plant who settle down for a chat, although questions about the occult and the more salacious rumours about the band are not allowed.
Will the new tour be a bit more "sedate" than the legendary tours of the 1970s? "You know, Zeppelin was like a rock 'n' roll band that just turned up and played some magnificent and some dire shows," says Robert Plant. "But now we have to keep a certain standard - for our own egos' sake - because we have something behind us that is phenomenal. I think if we had done this as a four-piece, we probably wouldn't be here now to be honest. There's no slouching, this is no sort of re-run of old glory, it's a new thing. It's much more than a comeback thing - `hey, the boys are back' and all that sort of crap."
Do you still have as much of an audience as in the good ol' days? "Success breeds its own problems," says Jimmy Page, "which we all know about, both psychologically and ambitiously - because there still is, in certain parts of the world, the desire for us to be exactly as we were in 1970 and for Stairway To Heaven to be the ultimate finale. You gotta do some of those songs or whatever, but we are able to tackle that problem and still stretch and expand and anybody who was around when we were putting out records as part of Led Zeppelin will know that whatever the next move will be, it will always be different to the previous one."
The new album seems pretty spontaneous? "Yeh, there was no great deliberation on it," says Plant, "it was like `Yeah, that's good' but we need a bit more power here and there. I should say about 50 per cent of the stuff was as we first played it after half an hour of messing about in a rehearsal room. And we didn't want to play them again, we said `don't play that anymore' because if it's not played again, by the time we come to record it, those little nuance areas would have that tentative, shaky sort of `not quite sure but . . . whoooah" atmosphere which comes out on the tracks." The lyrics? "Some at the beginning and some with a great deal of effort and some from the Dylan school of lyric writing - last minute as you're singing the song!" says Plant. "I just carry my pencil and reading glasses - terrible isn't it! Once upon a time it was just some old blues standard, now it's a pencil and reading glasses."
Steve Albini, who is best known for producing Nirvana, produced the album - a deliberately "hip" choice? "Well I don't think it's two different cultures clashing," says Plant, "because the music he's been associated with, apart from Nirvana, has been quite eclectic, bands like Big Black and Rapeman and stuff like that. Steve's a guitarist and he likes what Jimmy does. I suppose we asked him because he's always been outspoken and he wouldn't do someone like Simply Red. He said to me at the beginning `how do you think I feel telling you, Robert Plant, that your vocal line is shit or you're a bit flat on that note there, or imagine me telling Jimmy Page that his solo wasn't as good as it can be,' so that was very sweet of him."
You're coming back into a very changed musical world, what do you make of today's sounds? "Well, I'm really excited by drum 'n' bass" says Plant, "and all those funky James Brown rhythms that have been sped up. I love those pirate dance radio stations and that whole Asian dub scene." What about old sparring partners like Dylan and The Stones, are you still in touch? "I loved Dylan's last album and the Stones, well most of the people from our generation have changed tack a little bit" says Page, "and I think their presentation musically is not quite as challenging maybe as it was way back. I think as you get older, you can't keep grabbing a young virile audience forever and ever, but for the general listener, there's a threshold age-wise where the music is lost to a lot of people. There's a certain age-group which has lost the passion and importance of music in their lives, but hey, not us."
Page and Plant's new album, Walking Into Clarksdale, is out on Mercury Records on Monday. They hope to confirm their Irish dates for the summer within the month.