In rock’n’roll history, the Danish town of Gladsaxe’s name is rarely writ large. Indeed, this suburban borough just outside the nation’s capital, Copenhagen, is probably better known for having sired former international footballer Peter Schmeichel than for its contribution to the global music scene. Nonetheless, on the evening of 7 September 1968, Gladsaxe had a direct run-in with the zeitgeist when future rock legends Led Zeppelin played their debut gig, at the town’s Teen Club.
Listen to the best of Led Zeppelin here.
Who were The New Yardbirds? “It was only Jimmy Page from The Yardbirds who played that night”
With hindsight, it sounds like a truly seismic event, yet the reality was all rather low key. Indeed, the group weren’t even officially known as Led Zeppelin when they touched down in Denmark for the first time in September 1968. Advance publicity had informed local music fans that revered English rock outfit The Yardbirds would be playing, yet that evening’s audience – which reputedly totalled around 1,200 people – only got to see one former member of that band.
“It was sometime in the evening that I heard a band called The New Yardbirds would perform,” local photographer and audience member Jorgen Angel later told Rave magazine. “I thought maybe that has nothing to do with The Yardbirds. Maybe there’s just one person left from The Yardbirds, which turned out to be right, it was only Jimmy Page from The Yardbirds who played that night. The others I had never seen or heard of.”
Angel – whose photos of that night’s gig are widely believed to be the earliest shots of Led Zeppelin in performance – came to exactly the right conclusion. The Yardbirds’ other three members, Keith Relf, Jim McCarty and Chris Dreja, had quit the group barely two months earlier, leaving guitarist Page and manager Peter Grant with the rights to The Yardbirds’ name and a series of scheduled gigs in Scandinavia.
Forming Led Zeppelin: “We only had about 15 hours to practice”
Quickly recruiting three new musicians over the next few weeks, Page was determined to fulfil his obligation to play the shows, which began in Gladsaxe on 7 September. Bearing in mind his new group had barely coalesced, the guitarist was winging it, yet encouraging early rehearsals suggested that Page had made exactly the right call in hand-picking vocalist Robert Plant, drummer John Bonham and bassist John Paul Jones as his new bandmates.
The Gladsaxe gig thus offered The New Yardbirds their first opportunity to prove their mettle on the boards, though it was hardly in a standard rock-club setting. The venue was actually a gymnasium at the local Egegård Skole, which was converted into the Teen Club on Saturday nights. However, the band were determined to give their first ever gig their all and – after just a few days in rehearsal – they’d worked up an impressive set of songs.
Led Zeppelin’s debut gig: “Their performance and their music were absolutely flawless”
No recordings of the Gladsaxe show are believed to exist, though the surviving setlist shows that Page, Plant, Jones and Bonham were already putting together music of depth and quality. They opened with the first song they’d rehearsed together, Johnny Burnette’s The Train Kept A-Rollin’, and followed up with several of the songs that would shortly grace Led Zeppelin’s self-titled debut album – I Can’t Quit You Baby, the psych-blues workout How Many More Times and the proto-punk of Communication Breakdown – along with an already epic-sounding Dazed And Confused, for which Page was already using a violin bow to play the spectacular guitar parts that would define one of the best Led Zeppelin songs of all time.
