Why do you think it took America more than 30 years to give Led Zeppelin a Grammy?
Over the years I’ve tried to say to myself that perhaps we weren’t Grammy material. But quite clearly we were. Yet we never even got nominated in what I call our active career. Maybe there were reasons. I’d come to think we’d been overlooked for good, so the Lifetime Achievement Award was really nice.

But all these years on, is there sometimes a frustration that everybody concentrates so heavily on the dozen years you spent in one band?
Not really, because it was a great life in Zeppelin.

But, as Robert likes to point out, it was only part of your life…
But it’s what Led Zeppelin means across the board – the playing, the writing, and the fact that we made so many groundbreaking statements. To me, Zeppelin is a multi-faceted phenomenon. When I did the CD boxset I had to listen to everything we’d ever done. It was the first time I’d ever done that, really, and I could really feel what a great body of work it was.

Does it surprise you all these years on that there is still such an appetite to put Led Zeppelin on magazine covers?
What you should remember is that we get all this acclaim now, but we used to get bad reviews consistently. Every time we had an album out, it got bad reviews. But with hindsight, I can see how if somebody got Led Zeppelin III, which was so different from what we’d done before, and they only had a short time to review it on the record player in the office, then they missed the content. They were in a rush and they were looking for the new “Whole Lotta Love” and not actually listening to what was there. It was too fresh for them and they didn’t get the plot. So, in retrospect, it doesn’t surprise me that the diversity and breadth of what we were doing was overlooked or under-appreciated at the time. Although it wasn’t overlooked by those who were buying the records. I think Melody Maker dismissed the fourth album in one paragraph. That’s fantastic! But reviews are very transient. It doesn’t matter now what they said, does it?

You’ve become the keeper of the Zeppelin legacy. Why do you think the band’s legend has endured so well?
Forget the myths. Because it was really all about the music. As far as the studio recordings are concerned, they were performed with such class. The input was coming from four people. It was a textbook approach. That’s the way it should be when you’re writing songs and performing them – playing together and everyone relating to each other. But we didn’t have a proper testament of what was going on live, which was why it was important to put the DVD together. It wasn’t only a chronological potted history from the early TV appearances right up to Knebworth. I think it got inside Zeppelin and gave people a chance to see how it was when we were onstage together and firing on pure spontaneity.

In going through all the archive material for the box set, the live album and the DVD, were there favourite or most memorable musical moments that stood out for you?
What struck me most is that it was a period of growth throughout. The first album is really roaring. The four members came together and created this fifth monster [laughs]. The beauty of playing in the band was that when we went onstage we never actually knew what was going to go on within the framework of the songs. They were constantly changing. New parts would come out on the night. The spontaneity was on the level of ESP, which meant it was always exciting. That’s what you can see on the DVD. The Albert Hall in 1970 was a big, big gig for us with all the media there and our families, and you can see we’re all still really listening intently to each other. Then, by the time we get to Madison Square Garden in 1975, you can see how the music has taken us over. It’s become very physical by then and the music is just exploding out of us.

When you were putting the band together and went up to Birmingham to see Robert for the first time, did you already have a vision of the music you wanted to make?
I certainly had a good idea of the sort of direction I wanted us to go in. It goes back to the band I was going to form with Jeff Beck, in which we wanted a Steve Marriott or Steve Winwood-type vocalist. That was the call. And the person we accessed at that point for Zeppelin was Terry Reid. If you’re familiar with his vocal style on an album like River, that’s the way I was thinking. And having a really dynamic drummer was always going to be very important within the framework of it, because it was going to be a trio instrumentally with the fourth member being the singer and using the voice as an instrument. I knew the material I wanted us to do as well. I had a game plan for it. Definitely. But the four musicians that eventually came together as Zeppelin were a gift from on high. You know, you can get four really good musicians but it doesn’t mean they’re going to play as a band. The thing about Zeppelin was that we always played as a band.