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00:20 It had been said that at this house, which is in Hampshire,
00:37 that Fleetwood Mac had rehearsed there.
00:41 Not recorded, but they'd rehearsed there.
00:45 So that ticked box number one for me,
00:49 that you weren't gonna get neighbor problems.
00:54 You can make sort of noise and not have that sort of restriction to mess it all up.
00:59 So you could sort of get a flow of music going.
01:01 The second thing was that you could actually stay there.
01:07 I don't know what other groups would stay there.
01:09 I don't think too many, but it did have accommodation within the main house.
01:13 So that sort of ticked another box, that we could actually sort of stay there.
01:18 So basically, in effect, it seemed to become like a candidate to be able to do
01:25 this idea, or fulfill this idea, whereby the group would all stay in the same premises.
01:34 Eat there, sleep there, make music there, and
01:37 then you could just bring in an auxiliary truck, a mobile recording studio,
01:44 which actually at the time happened to be the Rolling Stones one.
01:48 And then sort of just get on with it, get on with the job.
01:51 [MUSIC]
02:01 I think it is a fusion of all manner of ideas.
02:11 But the fact of having everybody living in the same place,
02:17 and sleeping there, etc., and just being able to evolve
02:23 all of these musical sort of concepts and deliveries.
02:29 And you get something which is so extreme from, say,
02:35 Levee Breaks, which is so, it's the intensity of it,
02:41 the menace of it, the threat of it.
02:44 And the density and the darkness of it is to sort of turn the coin and
02:51 then have something which is really caressing like the Going to California.
02:58 And it's a really, really intimate close-up picture.
03:02 So these whole things were able to be accomplished within this working
03:08 atmosphere.
03:09 [MUSIC]
03:16 Rock and Roll more or less came out of thin air, and so did the Battle of
03:21 Evermore, from my side of it anyway, the mandolin,
03:25 cuz it was written on the mandolin.
03:28 There were various things that happened like that.
03:31 The fact that we were routining Stairway to Heaven there.
03:36 And it was tricky going through it without having any sort of sung
03:40 verses to it.
03:41 And while we were going through it and everyone was learning it,
03:47 Robert was writing the lyrics in the same room.
03:51 He was sitting down there and writing, and then he eventually came to the microphone,
03:55 started singing, and it was like, wow, we're really onto something here,
04:00 cuz his lyrics were superb on it.
04:03 But it was a place that really inspired, and
04:08 that whole approach of having gone there to live the music,
04:13 to work the music, to create the music,
04:15 was the right thing to do for Led Zeppelin at that point in time.
04:19 [MUSIC]
04:31 Well, it was complex, and this idea of having the fragile
04:36 acoustic guitar opening up, and then as it comes,
04:41 and you've got the electric pianos and the electric 12 strings in stereo.
04:48 And the whole thing starts to unravel, and
04:51 the layers start to unravel as it goes on.
04:56 And there's a momentum to Stairway as well.
04:59 It's all really intentional to have this, and
05:03 actually from the first point of the opening guitar,
05:09 to what's going on at the end of it, in the last verse,
05:13 although it says, you have Robert singing at the end after the solo,
05:19 all that section.
05:21 Well, there's an increase of tempo, it's got fast.
05:25 And the whole object of the exercise to have this thing that would almost be like
05:29 an orgasm, really.
05:30 [MUSIC]
05:40 Well, there were times where you might start a number and
05:51 might just jettison it.
05:52 But no, everyone really seemed to understand that this was
05:57 really breaking some ground, and it was tricky and it was hard work.
06:00 Well, if it was tricky and hard work, that's why we should be on it and do it.
06:05 But what happened was, the residential situation
06:11 of Headley was really, really good.
06:16 But I wanted to be able to take it into a traditional
06:20 studio setup rather than the truck, which was outside.
06:24 It was sitting in the drive, and you'd have to keep going backwards and
06:27 forwards into the truck.
06:29 I wanted something where, just like this, you've got the control room and
06:33 a more traditional way of doing things.
06:35 Cuz everything had worked admirably for
06:38 everything else that was being done from Headley.
06:41 But I wanted to have the facility whereby you could have close contact and
06:48 in a large room, that's it.
06:50 [MUSIC]
07:00 Each and every one of us in the band instinctively knew you couldn't
07:17 fail to know that the work that we've done, cuz we were such fine musicians,
07:23 all of us in the band, it was substantial work.
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