Rare records don’t crop up very often on BBC1’s Antiques Roadshow, but one did the other night – a rarer-than-hen’s-teeth Led Zeppelin single from the early 1970s.
‘But hang on’, we can hear you cry, ‘Led Zeppelin, famously, didn’t ever release singles!’ Well, that’s not strictly true. After the release of Led Zeppelin II in autumn 1969, a single of Whole Lotta Love was released in several territories, including the US, where an edited version was issued to radio stations and made Number Four on the Billboard charts.
In response to this, the UK wing of Atlantic Records pressed up 500 copies of the track. Unhappy at this, Zep’s manager Peter Grant ordered them to be destroyed. However, a few, though, escaped intact.
One of them was the copy that turned up on the BBC show, which was this week hosted by Caerphilly Castle in Wales. One fellow brought along the single and told the show’s resident expert Marc Allum that it was given (not even sold!) to him at a record shop in the early 1970s. “I was looking for records to start a disco and out of his bag came a couple of records and he went ‘you can have those’,” he said.
Allum inspected the single, which has a finger mark on it and light scratching, and estimated that it would fetch around £1,000 at auction.
The fellow said that he had actually played it at discos back in the day and that punters “weren’t impressed”.
And by the sounds of it, it probably won’t see any turntable action for a while yet. “It's been with me for 55 years, and I will probably give it to my daughters to do what they want to do with it,” the fellow announced. “I don’t think I will play it again as it will devalue it.”
Of course, as any pop scholar knows, there was a supreme irony at Grant’s decision to nix the release of Whole Lotta Love. A year later, Alexis Korner’s group CCS recorded a cover, which reached Number 13 in the UK charts.
That version of the song was chosen as the theme tune to the iconic long-running British TV chart show, Top Of The Pops, which Led Zeppelin – because of their ‘no singles’ policy - never appeared on.
