LED ZEPPELIN - THE FINAL SHOW BERLIN 7-7-80

JULY 7TH 1980

EISSEPORTHALLE, BERLIN, GERMANY

So, after an eventful tour, Led Zeppelin ended the 'Over Europe' campaign in Berlin. Sure, the gigs had been uneven, from the high octane start from Dortmund to Cologne, and on to Brussels and Rotterdam. It sagged in the middle, Bremen and Hannover being uninspiring, and Vienna picking up before the worrying truncated Nuremburg show. The last week had been great, Zurich, Frankfurt and Munich standing out.

So it was to end here. One show in Berlin (the next night had been pencilled additionally in on an earlier itinerary but was pulled) to round it off. As Robert described at the end 'we're just about toured out'. 
Here's how the set ran ;-

Train Kept A-Rollin'/Nobody's Fault But Mine

Black Dog

In The Evening

The Rain Song

Hot Dog

All My Love

Trampled Underfoot

Since I've Been Loving You

White Summer/Black Mountain Side/Kashmir

Stairway To Heaven

Rock And Roll

Whole Lotta Love

The show starts well enough, the openers are powerful and muscular, Nobody's Fault but Mine and Black Dog sounding like the best nights from '77. In The Evening is majestic too, and the set is sounding more and more like one to take the US by storm again. 

But Trampled Underfoot is way too long, despite Jimmy wrestling with the Echoplex (and himself) and Since I've Been Loving You is uninspired and dull.

The show reaches its' low point with White Summer. After strangely dropping Achilles Last Stand we get a long pause, some unorganised retuning and probably the worst Jimmy Page solo of them all. You can hear the restlessness in the crowd - particularly on the various audience recordings out there - and the sense of relief when Kashmir finally kicks in. The sense of drama lifts the band and audience together, and although Stairway To Heaven is very long, it's relaxed and quite beautiful as Jimmy twists and turns his never ending solo.

Encore time is a chaotic Rock And Roll and a brilliant Whole Lotta Love. Fittingly experimental, they put their all in, knowing it's the last song of the last show. If only they knew how final that was to prove. Jonesy is a star here, brilliant top heavy clanking bass lines knit in with Bonzo while above them the white noise call and response soars and flies. Wonderful stuff.

There were several audience recordings of varying quality long before the bootleggers got hold of one, and with Led Zeppelin out of vogue it was Japan that gave us the very rare 3 elpee set 'Bonzo's Last Ever Gig In Berlin', taken from a good but not great tape. I remember seeing it alongside the other early Japanese bootleg 3 elpee set Cologne at a London Record Fair not that long after the tour and only having the money for one plumped for Berlin for obvious historical reasons.

Turns out to be missing Whole Lotta Love, the last song from the last gig! Almost a decade later The Amazing Stork label re-issued ir, adding Whole Lotta Love from a flat (actually as with a lot of the 'stolen' tapes from that time, the fidelity was downgraded, deliberately sabotaged) soundboard source. All the subsequent CD releases I've heard use the soundboard, and now it sounds fabulous. There may be better ones out there but 'Heineken' is good enough for me.

This was the end. No more, no matter how hard it is to accept. Just when the enthusiasm and positivity had returned to Led Zeppelin, the tragic loss of  John Bonham stopped everything. And rightly so,

If the tragic events of September 25th had not happened, who knows what may have been. The mix of stripped down, hard edged arrangements and and unashamedly joyous improvisation almost exclusively within songs showed so much promise. 

As Jimmy pointed out, he'd been discussing with Bonzo how they both felt In Through The Out Door was in places 'a little soft' and they had decided to make the next record harder. Listening to the opening crunch of the best of the 1980 shows it doesn't take much to imagine that.

Listening to this show now, so many years later, is for me a mixture of pride, optimism and contemplation. Led Zeppelin never crossed the line into parody, resting on laurels and pumping out the 'hits' by numbers. There was a genuine sense of optimism, a musical sense of renewal and growth. 


Sadly it was not too be, and just 150 days later the surviving members and Peter issued a statement bringing Led Zeppelin to an end.

The decades have seen Led Zeppelin in a better light than those heady days of 1980, and the Over Europe Tour is a fitting epitaph, a last statement of defiance and relevance. The Dinosaur was dancing one last time.