The film Becoming Led Zeppelin opens here this weekend. Amongst the promotional publicity is the news that “it includes that rarest of artefacts: an audio interview with John Bonham [the band’s drummer], discovered in the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra”. The interview has been described as the centrepiece of the film, about the notoriously media resistant band. The archive has explained how the interview came to be found here. While this interview was by a music journalist it sounds as if he delved deeper, as oral historians do, asking about childhood and early life.

The hope that our oral history work will contribute a spoken dimension to future research is one of the biggest motivators for our work, so it’s exciting to see this IRL. Looking forward to the film.