When Led Zeppelin recorded in Mumbai and rocked a Colaba nightclub

More than four decades after Led Zeppelin shook up the music world, the band is still held up as the gold standard for hard rock. Led-Zeppelin-s-Jimmy-Page-R-and-Robert-Plant-at-a-performance-ledzeppelin-com But a relatively lesser known aspect of Led Zeppelin's recording career is a session that Jimmy Page and singer Robert Plant put together with a group of classically trained Indian musicians at the EMI Recording Studios in Mumbai, then known as Bombay, in 1972.Page, whose compositions like Kashmir would display the influence of world music long before that term had even been coined, was the driving force behind the session, which was the outcome of his desire to work with Indian musicians. The first of these visits, with other members of the band, was in early October 1971, right after Led Zeppelin's tour of Japan.When Page and Plant returned to Mumbai in 1996 to promote their album No Quarter, the singer recalled the 1971 visit and spoke about sitting outside a brothel, during an air raid drill, and using a tape recorder to record some street musicians and singers.But it was during two trips in 1972 - one in March and another in October - that things really got interesting. Besides the session with Indian musicians that resulted in reworked versions of the Led Zeppelin songs Friends and Four Sticks, Page and Plant joined an impromptu jam with local musicians during a visit to the discotheque Slip Disc in Colaba.There is some confusion about the date of the recording session with top notch Bollywood session musicians at EMI Recording Studios at Pherozeshah Mehta Road, but most accounts say Page and Plant recorded there in March 1972.Page and Plant travelled to India in March 1972 after a Led Zeppelin tour of Australia and New Zealand when they were denied entry to Singapore because of their long hair!Led Zeppelin road manager Richard Cole, who accompanied Page and Plant to Mumbai during both trips in 1972, wrote in his book Stairway To Heaven: "From Bangkok, we flew to Bombay, where Jimmy and Robert had made arrangements to do some experimental recording. Especially fascinating is a 31-minute run through Friends, during which Page can be heard explaining the bars and scales to Rao, who gamely tries to convey his instructions to the Indian musicians who have clearly never collaborated with rock musicians.At one stage, an apparently bored violin player begins playing snatches from the intro of RD Burman's Dum Maro Dum, which was, to the musician, probably more exciting than the music of Led Zeppelin, which he had never heard.The session produced a polished final take of Friends featuring Plant on vocals, Page on acoustic guitar and the Indian orchestra and a version of Four Sticks without vocals.