As expected, it was announced yesterday that Led Zeppelin will reunite, for one night only, to play at a tribute event at London's The O2 arena in honour of Ahmet Ertegun, the co-founder and former chairman of Atlantic Records, who died at the end of last year. Led Zeppelin were signed to Atlantic.
Former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, Foreigner's Mick Jones, The Who's Pete Townshend and Paolo Nutini will all also participate in the tribute event, which is being staged by Harvey Goldsmith, and profits from which will go to the Ahmet Ertegun Education Fund which provides students with annual scholarships to universities in the UK, USA and Turkey.
Goldsmith ended months of speculation regarding a Led Zepp reunion at a press conference at The O2 yesterday. He confirmed that Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones will all take part in the reunion, with the late John Bonham's son, Jason Bonham, filling in for his dad on drums.
According to Billboard, Goldsmith, when announcing the event, told reporters: "They are the last of the great rock gods that have yet to be seen [reunited]. This is going to be the largest demand for one show in history. I can only tell from the buzz going around now, but it's really just filtering around the world. I feel there's going to be a huge amount of pressure [on tickets]". Goldsmith added that as far as he knew the band, who were not at the press conference, had no plans to perform or record together again after the tribute event.
Tickets to the show, which will sell for £125, will be distributed by a lottery to fans who sign up at a special website - http://www.ahmettribute.com. Confirming Goldsmith's predictions of a high demand for tickets, the company hosting that website, Pipex, reported that 80,000 people a minute had been trying to log on to the registration site, and as a result their servers were struggling to cope with demand. The O2 Arena's website also crashed yesterday as unprecedented traffic hit the site looking for information on the Led Zepp reunion.