Led Zeppelin are on the cover of Uncut’s April 2025 issue, as Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones celebrate the 50th anniversary of Physical Graffiti with exclusive new interviews.
In this extract, Page and Plant recall a pivotal trip to Morocco – just after they finished their 1973 tour in support of Houses Of The Holy – and how inspiration from their travels fed into “Kashmir“, when the band reconvened at Headley Grange in October 1973 to begin work on their masterpiece, Physical Graffiti.
PAGE: We went to Morocco more or less straight after Madison Square Garden. Robert was going to Marrakech with Maureen, his wife, and I was going to go over there and join them. We were going to do some traveling and then we were going to do some recording at the tail end sometime in that year. There was a folk festival in Marrakech, with tribes coming from all over Morocco in their traditional dress and playing their local music. When they came off the stage, they’d carry on playing or singing while the next lot are coming on, so you did get this sort of crossfading. That was the first time I heard Joujouka musicians for real. It was spine-tinging stuff, so was a lot of the other music that you heard. Then we started traveling around Morocco. We had a wonderful adventure.
PLANT: We needed space and time to be stimulated. I already knew a couple of people in Guelmim from when I first was in Morocco. The women took Maureen off somewhere in and painted her up with Henna and I ended up playing 11 aside football in 30 degrees Celsius. But it was great. So, to go back there with Jimmy… he and I went way down in the desert past Tantan, where the Green March had gone into Western Sahara. That area by Tarfaya, down in the bottom before you get to Mauritania. You can get there now, of course, that’s where the gods are resting. That’s where it all hangs out, where there’s space. It’s so evocative.
PAGE: On the second day [at Headley Grange], I went through some things with John Bonham. But when we came back the following week, I put more of my own stuff, this adrenaline music I’d worked on at home, to John Bonham, to see what he likes and hope he likes it all. I went through “Sick Again” and “Wanton Song” with John. I play him a little bit of “In My Time Of Dying”. I had this other riff, but I didn’t want to lay it on him straight away. Finally, I thought, ‘Right, this is the opportunity…’ Once we started playing “Kashmir”, I don’t know how long we played it for but he didn’t want to stop and I didn’t want to stop. There’s a bootleg where we’re just playing the riff repeatedly, it just locks in. By now, we had people to assist us. We record “Kashmir” and “Sick Again”. With “Kashmir”, I wanted to record it so that I could try out these other ideas. I had a fanfare that I wanted to lay on top of it. So we start putting the arrangement together. We know that we’re on something, nobody’s ever gone anywhere near this. It was new music, no one had ever heard anything like it.
PLANT: I wasn’t really writing in the 1st person, I was creating this melange of how it felt. “And then all I see turns to brown”. At different times of the day, the cliffs and the mountains would change colour. And so as it developed as a four piece, it grew and grew until everything made sense. All of it, the weave of the whole thing was something. I can hear it now and keep walking, but sometimes I hear it and I just sit down and listen. “Kashmir”, it is what it is. It’s just such an achievement – and it is an achievement even now, all these years later. I think it was the personalities of us that made us say, ‘This is it,’ because it’s just enough, and for people, maybe later, it was too much. But on the record, there were moments where it was like, “Let’s get on with this. Let’s make something that’s going to hit you between the ears.” I’ve got the book at home [with the original lyrics]. It’s got the sticker, magenta on white, of the Zeppelin IV logos. It’s stuck across a notepad with all sorts of meanderings. ‘Driving through Kashmir’. Oh, fancy that. For me, if I’m inspired, I can bring something forward. It’s not Blood On The Tracks, it doesn’t have the same intense, mature overview. This was still before the big crash. Time, joy, camaraderie were all perfectly, beautifully intact.