Music What tour inspired ‘Immigrant Song’ by Led Zeppelin?
It seems weird to say nowadays but at their peak in the early 1970s, Led Zeppelin were about as cool as sepsis. To the critics of the day, especially in their native UK, they were an overwrought, overblown, meaningless cacophony of recycled blues tropes and self-indulgent solos. They also weren’t entirely wrong either; they were just missing the fact that all that made them the most exciting rock band in the world at the time.
As the recent documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin shows, several tours in the US of A turned them from a bunch of session musicians trying to be a rock band to a genuine international phenomenon. This is true for several reasons. For one, their brand of hypercharged blues rock chimed perfectly with the rise of hard rock as a commercial force in the States.
For another, as good as their early records are in hindsight, they had absolutely nothing on their live shows. On stage, the sheer scale and volume of their music made much more sense than on record. At the time, it wasn’t just that they’d toured the US a lot, either. It was also that they hadn’t actually done that many shows in their home country or even their home continent.
When they did announce UK tours, they strategically booked venues that were smaller than normal. Tickets for their gigs would be like gold dust, and then bootlegs from those gigs would drive demand higher and higher, no matter how snotty the critics of the time were about their music. This came to a head with the tour that broke them in the UK, and inspired one of their most exciting and beloved songs.
Which locations inspired Led Zeppelin’s ‘Immigrant Song’?
On the surface, it sounds like a baffling collection of locations: Led Zeppelin’s 1970 tour of Iceland, Germany, and… Bath!? Yet, these shows are some of the most important in the band’s history. The run kicked off in Reykjavík, Iceland, a show that the Icelandic government had invited the band to play as a cultural mission. Jimmy Page elaborated on what happened next in an interview.
He said, “The day before we arrived, all the civil servants went on strike, and the gig was going to be cancelled. The university prepared a concert hall for us, and it was phenomenal. The response from the kids was remarkable, and we had a great time. ‘Immigrant Song’ was about that trip and it was the opening track on the album that was intended to be incredibly different.” Clearly, the band were inspired, as no fewer than six days after that concert, they debuted ‘Immigrant Song’ live at the biggest show they’d ever played up to that point.
Up until then, the biggest venue the band had headlined in the UK had been London’s Royal Albert Hall. A prestigious and iconic venue with a capacity of around 5000. Nothing to be sniffed at, but this was all part of the plan. By 1970, the hype around the band’s live show was such that when they were announced as the headline act for the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music, a reported 200’000 punters turned out to their set. A staggering number to this very day.
The band went on to play a set so blistering in front of a crowd so big that it saved their reputation in their home nation. That many people and that many critics seeing their music in its natural habitat turned them from a critical punching bag to genuine titans. All that remained was to conquer the rest of the world and become arguably the defining band of the whole 1970s. Not bad for a gig in Bath, right?