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Thu 29 January 2026 18:32, UK
At the end of the day, music is a business and business often gets taken out of our hands. No matter how big the artist is, things end up happening without their say or without them wanting them to, and Led Zeppelin is no stranger to that.
There are countless tales of it, ranging from the irritating to the completely tragic. From artists being forced to go with a lead single they didn’t love, to stories like The Beatles’ back-catalogue being sold to Michael Jackson and being taken out of the band’s hands.
The business of music also definitely has blood on its hands as the prioritising of fulfilling contracts and agreements has led to so many artists burning out or crashing, collapsing under the weight of the pressure and either quitting music totally, or even dying as they fall further into drug addiction or bad habits formed at first to handle it all.
At the end of the day, all of this is supposed to be for the love of it. It’s supposed to be for the art and for the craft, for the fun of playing with your friends in a band or connecting with audiences. But eventually, if you get successful enough, it inevitably hits a point where that comes second, no matter how much you wish it didn’t. Robert Plant had to face up to that when Led Zeppelin basically had to grin and bear it through an album release they didn’t want to happen. In 1982, Coda was released, collating live tracks and old demos from throughout their years, but in terms of the band’s timeline, it didn’t really make any sense.
Coda makes no sense because the band were no longer a band, and they’d made that very clear, drawing a line after the death of their drummer, John Bonham. While other bands would simply replace a lost member and keep it moving, given their success and status, they refused to. It was a beautiful gesture, really, one that truly honoured the impact Bonham had rather than acting like their friend could just be switched out by someone else.
It also honoured the immense emotional impact losing him had not just on the band, but on their entire time, especially their manager, Peter Grant. To have watched their friend struggle more and more with substance abuse, only to succumb to an overdose at Jimmy Page’s home, the trauma and devastation of that is immeasurable.
“We wish it to be known that the loss of our dear friend, and the deep sense of undivided harmony felt by ourselves and our manager, have led us to decide that we could not continue as we were,” the band’s statement read after his death, and, to them, that was that, but not for the business behind them.
Atlantic Records demanded the band fulfil their contract and wanted to make good on tax demands from previous releases, so they made the band put out one last record. “If it was up to me, I wouldn’t even have put Coda out,” Plant was saying in 1988, barely getting a few years out from the release, before he was speaking out against it.
“I didn’t have anything to do with it. Then again, I didn’t have anything to do with any Zeppelin stuff at all for a long time, really from when Bonzo died,” the singer continued as he’d fully clocked out of band stuff, focusing instead on grieving and picking himself back up. However, Page, ever the businessman, stayed involved. “We thought, ‘Well, if there’s that much interest, then we may as well put the rest of our studio stuff out’,” Page said, but really, it sounds more like the ‘we’ was an ‘I’.
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