In 1979, Led Zeppelin began building up a head of steam. After the various complexities that the decade brought, including the tragic death of frontman Robert Plant’s young son Karac in 1977 and the advent of a punk revolution, the group had started to put the past behind them. Led Zep were entering a period of newfound creativity.
In August 1979, Led Zeppelin released what would become their final album, In Through The Out Door, which was such a success that they embarked on a low-key but victorious European tour the following year. In what was another clear indicator that they were getting back to something like their best, a surprise to many given how punk and its ensuing forms had moved the cultural conversation on from classic rock, the quartet then decided to book a North American tour to reassert their prominence fully.
However, these new green pastures would not materialise. In September 1980, Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham tragically passed away, meaning the group almost instantly disbanded. However, according to the quartet’s creative figurehead and lead guitarist Jimmy Page, he and Bonham had started working on the basics of Led Zeppelin’s follow-up to In Through the Out Door at the time of his death. Page said it would have been a “harder and trickier” palette than anything the group had ever done.
“After the sessions for In Through the Out Door, John Bonham and I were discussing how we wanted to do a sort of more riff-based entity, and harder and trickier,” Page said. “And then, of course, I know what sort of drums he liked to play. He liked to play, like, really hard; he liked to play stuff that people heard it, they’d go, ‘Wow, what’s that?’ I like to do that as well with the guitar parts”.
Whilst what they had planned was very embryonic, Page knew that “it was not going to be a keyboard album”. He continued: “We had a bit of an idea of what we might do, but basically, it was not going to be a keyboard album. There would be keyboards on it maybe, but it was going to go more into another vein”.
Maintaining how this record would have stood apart from the rest of the band’s catalogue, Page added: “It would be different to anything that had been there before. We didn’t get a chance to do that, obviously, because we lost John.”
Page also noted that In Through the Out Door had a heavy focus on keyboards due to the prominence of Led Zeppelin bassist and multi-instrumental whizz John Paul Jones. He expressed: “I think the way to put it is like this: Presence was a guitar album. After that record, John Paul Jones had acquired a ‘Dream Machine,’ a Yamaha [synthesiser]. Stevie Wonder also had one. So it had given him a lot of inspiration. He suddenly actually wrote whole numbers, which he hadn’t done before, and I thought the way to go with this is to feature John Paul Jones on the keyboard”.
While he said he liked In Through the Out Door, Page wanted the band to strike a different chord on its follow-up. He concluded: “He’d written some stuff with Robert. I thought, ‘Well, that’s great.’ Obviously, at that time, I thought I knew how this album [In Through the Out Door] is shaping up, but the next album is going to be a departure from the keyboard album”.