Old rare footage of Led Zeppelin found

Old Led Zeppelin New Zealand concert footage is found

It was the 25th February in 1972 and Led Zeppelin played their third show of their six-date Australasian tour. The venue they played on that night was Western Springs Stadium in Auckland, New Zealand.

In the front of that show stood 20-year-old photographer Lloyd Godman with an 8mm movie camera. Lloyd managed to capture some of the songs performed. The footage then laid dormant in his shed for about 50 years until recently rediscovered.

Around 25,000 people attended the show and back then ticket prices were just under $5. In the grainy footage Jimmy Page is seen playing his ‘number one’ guitar – The 1959 Les Paul Standard.

Lloyd Godman is now an ecological artist in Melbourne, Australia. He was cataloguing his work over the years and recently came across the footage gathering dust in his shed.

“I knew I had this roll of film in the shed so I sent it off to get digitised. I knew there was band stuff on it but I didn’t know what it was,” he said.

“It came back and there was the Zeppelin film.”

The footage is a little grainy and wobbly but it’s pretty dam close to the band, Lloyd was right up the frontoes!

“[My reaction was] really one of joy because, of the still photographs I took, I only ended up with six shots, which were really the rejects because the promoter had picked through the best of them and they just disappeared. So finding this was like finding gold really.”

After Lloyd put some screenshots online they were soon spotted by a Led Zeppelin film archivist from the USA who got in touch.

“He said, ‘Look, if this is from a film, we’ve tracked down a copy of the soundtrack of that concert’. And he said ‘Can we have a go at syncing it?'”

Being a fan of Led Zeppelin, Lloyd wouldn’t let this go and he agreed they did a great job with syncing the visuals to the audio.

Check out the footage below: