Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin. Jimmy page once said "is a stag party that never ends. If ever a band a band was born to party until one or all of its participants keeled over it was Zeppelin - a rocking, rolling, careering orgy spiced with stories of black magic rituals, shotgun weddings and wakes.

Page was the frail former child prodigy guitarist who put Led Zeppelin together after his band, the Yardbirds, fell apart in 1968. Linking up with sessions bassist John Paul Jones and a brace of midland neanderthals, Robert Plant on vocals and drummer John "Bonzo" Bonham, he set about re-interpreting the delta blues in a hard rocking context. Zeppelin played at deafening volumes to record breaking audiences. For a while in the seventies they were outselling the Rolling Stones at the radio of three albums to one.

Through all this success they made merry, causing all sorts of astonishing rumors of backstage perversions to reverberate round Europe and America. Tales of massive orgies with willing female participants abounded.

The two stories that began to circulate like dogs on acid during their first American tour in 1969 (the Brits had rejected them as blues pilferers without talent of finesse) were sordid and thrilling, respectively.

The first was that never in the history of human conflict had so much semen been implanted in so many by few.