Twenty Flight Rock

Birmingham has never been pretty. In the late sixties they were pulling down their slums and erecting shiny new skyscrapers. And it wasn't just Birmingham, it was happening in every other major city in the UK. But no matter how hard you tried to polish it, Birmingham never sparkled.

There was a cross over period when they hadn't quite finished knocking down the old and they hadn't yet finished building the new. John Bonham would have been able to tell you all about it if he was still with us: in 1968 when Wimpey built Butterfield Court in Dudley, he was one of the first to move in.
In fact a lot of Led Zeppelin fans think it was the drummer's tower block that appears on the inside sleeve of Led Zep 4. It is in fact Salisbury Tower in the Ladywood district of Birmingham; both equally ugly. They've knocked a lot of these eye sores down now. People, it would appear, given the choice, prefer not to live up in the air.

Let's Get Physical

In the summer of 1974 the rock behemoth that was Led Zeppelin retreated to the country and recorded a selection of tunes that would come to define them. The resulting album would be their Exile on Main Street, their White Album, if you will. That's right, an album so big in every sense of the word it would have to be released as a double album and housed in an all singing, all dancing, gatefold sleeve. Physical Graffiti, when it came out in February of the following year, would, at a stroke, put every rock album that had ever been released before it in the shade.

The sleeve depicts a pair of tenement blocks in New York and as men of a certain age (and women for that matter) will tell you, in the seventies you saw an album long before you ever heard it: the artwork was as crucial to the success of an album as the strength of its songs, the dexterity of the guitar solos or the dark art skills of the knob twiddlers.

And Physical Graffiti was no exception. From taking it out of the rack in the record shop, paying for it at the counter and bringing it home on the bus, you couldn't take your eyes off the cover. Where was the photograph taken? Who was that sat on the steps? What does it remind me of?
And, of course, the question we all asked ourselves: will it be as good as Houses of the Holy?

The answers I came up with: 96-98 St Mark's Place, Greenwich Village - where the basement is now home to Physical Graffitea. John Bonham. Jose Feliciano's Compartments (pictured above right) and, oh yes, it was as good as anything they would ever release.