Led Zeppelin - 'Celebration Day'

I had a rather strange and disorientating experience recently whilst viewing Led Zeppelin’s ‘Celebration Day’ film of their 2007 reunion gig, at my local Brixton cinema.  Stunning though the spectacle and performance was, it felt profoundly surreal to be seated in the dark comfort of a cinema, gazing raptly at a rock & roll concert blaring from the big screen. 

Somehow it feels fairly perverse, to watch such a visceral live experience – which is what, in essence, the best music concerts are – in such sedate and refined conditions.  If there is any synergy between the customary rock concert abandon – cheering, fist pumping, singing along – and the cinema-house, it strikes me as being both uneasy and far from naturalistic. 

The best rock concerts I’ve attended are the nearest to a spiritual experience as I’m likely to encounter; they are euphoric, rapturous and the perfect vent for a collective out-pouring of joy and emotion, the thrill of people celebrating that rarest of things - mass consensus in an appreciation of those performing.  Cinematic experiences on the other hand, by the very nature of the film medium, are not at home to similar levels of abandonment.  Films may excite, scare, amuse or even move us to tears, but they exist as representations of events carefully designed to inspire particular emotional responses from their audience.  It is the physicality and spontaneity of live music events and the very proximity to the architects of the entertainment (in the same way as theatre), that demands a different level of engagement and often provokes a different level of reaction.  The more I thought about these strange juxtaposing strands being reluctantly entwined, the more even innocent foot-tapping and head-nodding felt faintly ridiculous. 

That was until I noticed something about the filmed audience in attendance at the O2 Arena that skewed my perception.  For the most part the audience were a gleaming constellation of handheld recording devices, each one capturing that precise moment in time as their own unique and personal concert film.  As the opening notes of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ chimed out, so the crowd illumined like the nightly sprawl of a major city.  As Jimmy Page posed with his trademark violin bow during ‘Dazed and Confused’, the allure of this ‘photo opportunity’ was lost on no one, as each clamoured, sprouting a forest of arms, to gain an unobstructed shot.  Indeed I half expected the cinema attendees to whip out their own devices such was the occasionally photogenic splendour of the big screen representation.

This, of course, is the usual run of things for mostly every concert I have attended in person.  It is a very real curse of the technological times, and one I have been as guilty of propagating on occasion.  In Manchester seeing Roger Waters, I was asked to edge to one side in my tiered seat as I was obscuring the carefully-poised camera of a man behind.  Seeing U2 in New York, I noticed one or two people in my vicinity actually watching the concert whilst filming through their mini-screens, hypnotically drawn to the far-more cogent spectacle they were personally capturing.

In actuality then, my cinema viewing of Led Zeppelin’s historic gig, was the perfect arena in which to gain an accurate – or perhaps hyper-real – interpretation of the audience experience.  Instead of the pristine professionalism of the film, the intricacy of the edit, and the slick direction; a better and truer transmutation of the night would have been to produce a spliced-together amalgamation of the audience footage wrenched from the cavernous vaults of YouTube.  A grainy, wobbly, occasionally-obscured hodgepodge of angles and views that might have served as a closer rendering of what it meant to have been part of that legendary night’s audience.