Michael Lee was one of several drummers who played with former members of Led Zeppelin and attempted to fill the considerable shoes of the band’s original drummer, John Bonham.

The band broke up after the drummer’s death in 1980 and when they re-formed in 2007 for a one-off reunion concert, it was Bonham’s son Jason who took the drum stool. But Lee played drums on record and on tour with the band’s frontmen, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, in the 1990s. With his unusually loud and driving style, he reproduced many of Bonham’s best-known drum solos from tracks such as Whole Lotta Love and Rock’n’Roll.

He was born Michael Gary Pearson in 1969. He came to prominence in his late teens when he joined the Yorkshire-based hard rockers Little Angel in 1988. He appeared on their albums Don’t Prey for Me (1989) and Young Gods (1991) but was sacked when his bandmates discovered he had auditioned for the Cult without telling them.

In the event his dismissal was irrelevant for he passed the audition and landed the gig with the Cult, joining the heavy metal band for its Ceremonial Stomp tour of Europe and North America in 1991-92. He left when Plant invited him to drum on his 1993 album, Fate of Nations.

He also backed the former Led Zeppelin singer on a world tour of the same name, taking particular pleasure in re-creating Bonham’s legendary crash-and-bash on the old Zeppelin numbers which Plant was forced, somewhat against his better judgement, to include in his set as crowd-pleasers.

With rumours growing of a Led Zeppelin reunion, in 1994 fans finally got at least part of what they had long been demanding. It was not quite the full band reformation they had hoped, because the former bassist John Paul Jones was not invited to the party. But for the first time since Led Zeppelin’s demise 14 years earlier, Plant and the guitarist Jimmy Page worked together on a full-time project.

Lee was invited to back them on the Page and Plant album No Quarter, a collection of radically rearranged versions of old Led Zeppelin songs, which they also performed and filmed for MTV’s Unplugged series. Lee also joined the former Zeppelin duo on a 115-date world tour which took up much of 1995, visiting 19 countries, with a set list that contained no fewer than 34 Led Zeppelin songs.

The reunion went well enough for Page and Plant — still without John Paul Jones — to record the 1997 album Walking into Clarksdale, their first full collection of new songs together since 1980. Lee remained a core member of the band, so much so that he was credited as a co-writer on all 13 songs. The album won a Grammy for best hard rock performance of the year — ironically, it was an award that Led Zeppelin had never won.

Lee spent much of 1998 playing with them on the Walking into Everywhere world tour but by the end of the year Plant had tired of reliving former glories and pulled out of further collaborations with Page.

For a while Lee continued to play with Page until the guitarist, frustrated at being unceremoniously abandoned by Plant, took off in 1999 on a tour of America backed by the Black Crowes.

Lee returned to playing sessions with such outfits as Echo & the Bunnymen and the re-formed Thin Lizzy, but was passed over when Led Zeppelin emotionally re-formed to play the O2 in London in December 2007.

Michael Lee, drummer, was born on November 19, 1969. He died of unknown causes on November 25, 2008, aged 39