All roads lead to Croydon on Friday as we come out of our dens to celebrate 40 glorious years of Led Zeppelin. The TBL crew will be in attendance, and I’ll be conducting an interview with author Mick Wall. I’m 150 pages into his mammoth new Zep biography and it’s already shaping up as the best book I’ve read on the band in years – maybe ever. Graeme Hutchinson is conducting a special charity auction for the ABC and Boot Led Zeppelin are headlining – all in all it’s a great way to celebrate this Zep milestone. I look forward to seeing all that can make it and toasting these 40 glorious years.

An aside: That same Croydon venue is celebrated in one of my all time fave singles namely Mott The Hoople’s Saturday Gigs which has the chorus ‘’But then went to Croydon…do you remember the Saturday gigs….we do,we do’’

Talking of Saturday gigs, ended what has been a rather bizarre week last night with the good lady and myself out on the town celebrating my good friend Max’s 50^th birthday.

It culminated in three of the original Bedford Earl’s Court 6 – that’s myself, Max’s brother Phil and Tom Locke finding ourselves out on a pub dance floor strutting our stuff to the likes of The Detroit Spinners It’s A Shame and Candi Staton’s seminal Young Hearts Run Free (oh yes I’m a soul man when the mood takes!). We also got on down to the fantastic new Tom Jones track If He Should Ever Leave You – in which the welsh wizard retraces his soul and r and b roots – might have been the champagne we’d soaked up but right then it sounded like the best record I’ve heard in ages.

The pub hosts a Northern Soul and Motown disco occasionally and that’s where we all ended up until 1.30 this morning. Too old to dance…not us mate!

Yes the hangover’s biting now, even for the good lady who is not known to have one over the one too often.

The aforementioned Phil was rather pleased as my recent loft life laundry has resulted in me finding the three Sony HF high quality cassettes he loaned me way back. These are the three cassettes he recorded of the May 24 1975 Zep Earl’s Court show. Yes that’s right a new source as recorded in row B seat 9 block AA on that memorable night. Just a shame it’s accompanied at regular intervals by the excited squeals of the guy sitting in seat 8.

Yup that was me.

It’s also of course been a whirlwind week of Zep rumour and counter rumour. Had a call from the producer of BBC Breakfast TV late Tuesday wanting me to appear on the next morning’s show waxing lyrical about the latest Zep situation. Couldn’t fit that one what with work and everything, so you won’t be seeing me as a replacement for Jonathan Ross in the near future.

I’ll save my thoughts on it all and more for Croydon.

Hope to see you there.