Watch: Led Zeppelin Play Final Full Concert in 2007, Perform “Ramble On” and “For Your Life” for the First Time, and End With Encore of “Rock and Roll”

The Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert at the O2 Arena in London, a benefit concert honoring the late songwriter and Atlantic Records founder, was originally scheduled to take place on November 26, 2007, but when Jimmy Page injured his finger, the event was rescheduled for several weeks later in December.

Then, on December 10, 2007, Page, Robert Plant, and John Paul Jones reunited Led Zeppelin and played one final show in tribute to their friend.

Before their one-off show in 2007, the three surviving members of Led Zeppelin rehearsed for a year along with late drummer John Bonham‘s son Jason on drums. The last time the three core band members performed together was in 1995, with a five-song set during their Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction and before that on July 7, 1980, at the Eissporthalle in Berlin, Germany, months before Bonham’s death.

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Zeppelin Crash Ticket Site

For the concert, which benefitted the Ahmet Ertegun Education Fund, which covers university scholarships for students in Ertgun’s native Turkey, the U.S., and the UK, tickets were distributed through a lottery system at £125 and $250 apiece with a max 20,000 tickets available.

When tickets became available at a designated URL for the concert on September 14, 2007, the website immediately crashed after a million people registered and exceeded its bandwidth making it the largest demand for one show in history.

The concert broke the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest demand for tickets for a single music concert.

[RELATED: 5 Fascinating Facts About Atlantic Records Co-Founder Ahmet Ertegun]

“Good Times Bad Times”

In attendance to see Zeppelin’s last concert were Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, David Gilmour, Jeff Beck, Brian May, The Edge, Peter Gabriel, Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott, Dave Grohl, Bernard Summer, Dave Mustaine, Marilyn Manson, Neil Finn, the Arctic Monkeys, Oasis’ Noel and Liam Gallagher, and Lulu, among other special guests.

Before Zeppelin took the stage, the night opened with performances by Paul Rodgers, Foreigner, Bill Wyman, and Ronnie Wood. Then, the lights went down and a short video played, highlighting the successes of Led Zeppelin, including their record-breaking attendance in Tampa, Florida in 1973, before the opening guitar and drum slap of “Good Times Bad Times.”

Next up, Zeppelin played one of two songs they had never played live, “Ramble On,” followed by their 1976 Presence track “For Your Life,” five songs into the set.

“This is a first adventure with this song, in public,” said Plant to the crowd before going into “For Your Life.”

[RELATED: The Song Led Zeppelin Barely Played Live Because It Was Too Difficult]

Throughout the set, Page, Plant, and Jones remained close to one another on stage and not spread out within their own bubbles at separate corners. “Black Dog,” “Dazed and Confused,” “The Song Remains the Same,” and “Stairway to Heaven” all slipped into the 16-song set, along with “Misty Mountain Hop,” “In My Time of Dying,” ‘Trampled Under Foot,” “No Quarter,” and more before they closed on “Kashmir.”

The show wasn’t over yet. The band came out for two encores, first with a rousing “Whole Lotta Love” and again, playing their last song together, “Rock and Roll.”

“This was going to be a critical show,” Page said of the show in a 2012 interview with Page and Jones. “We only had one shot at it, so we needed to go out there and do it really well. There was a lot of listening to be done, there was a lot of communication – nods and winks, and you can see this generate through the course of the evening to the point where we’re really communicating through the music.”

Of the band’s one-off show, Plant said “Time is a funny thing when you’re onstage. It did leave me occasionally a little bit adrift. But I’m a Jimmy Page fan, so I like to hear where he goes.”

Plant added, “Because we haven’t gone out and flogged it [Led Zeppelin’s music], there’s an anticipation and a memory of it being clean and pure and not part of some sort of threshing middle-aged circus, which I think is very much to our credit. If we’d been part of the merry-go-round year after year, or every two years, I think it might have damaged everything.”

Jones said there was a “Zeppelin swagger,” to their show. “We knew we were good,” he said. “At our best, we thought we could be a match for any band on the planet. And at our worst, we were better than most of them.”

Celebration Day, a concert film of the performance was released in 2012.

Setlist: Led Zeppelin at the O2 Arena, London, December 10, 2007

  1. Good Times Bad Times
  2. Ramble On
  3. Black Dog
  4. In My Time of Dying
  5. For Your Life
  6. Trampled Under Foot
  7. Nobody’s Fault But Mine
  8. No Quarter
  9. Since I’ve Been Loving You
  10. Dazed and Confused
  11. Stairway to Heaven
  12. The Song Remains the Same
  13. Misty Mountain Hop
  14. Kashmir

    Encore
  15. Whole Lotta Love

    Encore
  16. Rock and Roll

Photo: Led Zeppelin (l-r) John Paul Jones Robert Plant and Jimmy Page Arrive for the launch of ‘Celebration Day’ in London Britain 21 September 2012 Celebration Day (Andy Rain/EPA/Shutterstock)