Led Zeppelin are variously credited as pioneers of heavy metal, on-stage technical wizardry, album-oriented music and stadium rock. Philip Norman, The Times ’ music critic, is impressed

Led Zeppelin were due to begin their Friday concert at 8 pm. To anyone familiar with the habits of rock superstars, this could be interpreted as a laggardly and reluctant 9.30. I myself entered the precincts of Earls Court at three minutes to eight, just as a thunder began in the arena and hundreds of people dashed towards it as if they were missing a train.

Those acquainted with the writings of Mr Tony Palmer will be conscious already that Led Zeppelin are the greatest band in the world, if not the entire solar system. With Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull and a few others, they share the massive emotional legacy from the years of acid and heavy rock. Where they diverge from their contemporaries is in their uncharacteristic modesty; a diffident asceticism which only goads their millions of admirers to infatuation even more extravagant.

In a concert lasting three hours, that modesty was demonstrated in strange contrasts with the richness of Zeppelin’s material resources. Their playing was transmitted from a colour videotape screen suspended from the roof, while, far to the front, an occasional spasm of Robert Plant’s flying hair, or Jimmy Page’s hair communing with his guitar, or the tinsel of the drums, revealed the edited illusion to be based on continuous events. Beams of coloured light through the upper echelons swept and changed to a mysterious formula, while the darkness below seethed with stumbling figures.

There can no longer be any doubt of Zeppelin’s colossal virtuosity. There was smoke and artificial lightning, and three laser beams uniting upon a screeching uproar like a colony of bats. Dinosaurs coexisted somehow with madrigals in one large vessel of noise.