When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin by Mick Wall read by Simon Vance [Unabridged]

The first significant fresh reporting on the legendary band in twenty years, built on interviews with all surviving band members and revealing a never-before-seen side of the genius and debauchery that defined their heyday.

Veteran rock journalist Mick Wall unflinchingly tells the story of the band that pushed the envelope on both creativity and excess, even by rock n roll standards. Led Zeppelin was the last great band of the 1960s and the first great band of the 1970s and When Giants Walked the Earth is the full, enthralling story of Zep from the inside, written by a former associate of both Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. Rich and revealing, it bores into not only the disaster, addiction and death that haunted the band but also into the real relationship between Page and Plant, including how it was influenced by Page s interest in the occult. Comprehensive and yet intimately detailed, When Giants Walked the Earth literally gets into the principals heads to bring to life both an unforgettable band and an unrepeatable slice of rock history.

Editorial Reviews
Publishers Weekly
Simon Vance transports the listener back in time to the dawn of heavy metal in rock journalist Wall?COs biography of the legendary Led Zeppelin. Tracing the origins and history of the band and its members?Cofrom the early days with the Yardbirds to the birth and global conquest of the Mighty Zeppelin?CoVance delivers a gritty performance that captures the spirit of both the band and the late 1960s. Although Wall?COs portrait is often unpalatably sycophantic?Coparticularly unfortunate are the melodramatic sections told in the second person?CoVance?COs range of voices and lively, spirited narration enliven the detailed history of the band and the private lives of Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Bonham, and John Paul Jones. A must for die-hard Zeppelin fans only, this audiobook, with its 18 hours of smitten zealotry, may prove too much for the casual listener.

Library Journal
In the days before the Internet, this would have been hailed as the definitive tome on one of rock's most hallowed bands. And it still might be. But with virtually every Zeppelin secret or anecdote posted on some web page, this book is a bit of an anticlimax for hard-core Zepheads craving new info. But this biography, built from research and personal interviews with band members, can be a bible on the band for general music fans who don't fill their closets with Zeppelin concert bootlegs. British music journalist Wall (W.A.R.: The Unauthorized Biography of William Axl Rose) deserves credit for refraining from retreading groupie stories or the drama of premature deaths; instead, he devotes ample space to the idea of Zeppelin's musical plagiarism and explores, in much detail, guitarist Jimmy Page's fascination with the occult. VERDICT Save for some awkward second-person passages "flashing back" to band members' pasts, Wall's thorough book can be as engrossing and epic as a Zeppelin tune. Recommended for rock music fans and anyone with curiosities about pop culture and the occult.

Meet the Author
MICK WALL has written about music since 1977. He is one of England's best known music journalists: his work has appeared in Mojo, the Mail on Sunday and a variety of other publications, and he has written ten rock 'n' roll biographies. He has also served as a trusted on-camera source for a number of BBC-TV music documentaries. He lives in England.