It’s hard not to head-bang along to the first authorised documentary about the heavy rock legends, but stopping the story in 1969 ignores the band’s more colourful years

Time to get your head in the speaker bin of pop-cultural history for this enjoyable if truncated film about the early days of heavy rock legends Led Zeppelin – the cheerfully ridiculous joke name invented for them by Keith Moon, a play on words that is now almost invisible, like the Beatles. It’s an authorised guide that stops at the release of their second album, Led Zeppelin II, in 1969. Fans may be disappointed that the film quits before Stairway to Heaven. But they may also wonder if this arrangement gets us out of some tricky questions about the band’s later years, namely the rumours of their on-tour shenanigans and some of their more distinctive enthusiasms. There is, thankfully, no mention of Aleister Crowley.

No doubt about it, though. Once you hear the colossal opening chords to Whole Lotta Love, no power on earth will stop you nodding along. (The question of how on earth this loftily album-based band allowed that riff to be used as the signature tune for Top of the Pops is not touched upon.) The film is structured around archive clips and good-humoured interviews with the surviving members of the band; drummer John Bonham died in 1980 at the age of 32, following a history of depression and drug and alcohol abuse – another topic that the film’s early-days format avoids. His recorded voice is used, but there is no explicit mention of his heartbreakingly early death and the emotional effect it must have had on the rest of the band.