One sultry evening, 40 years ago, three foreigners walked up to a disco in south Mumbai to check out the scene. They were staying at the Taj Mahal hotel down the road. The Taj had its own members-only disco, Blow Up, that they had been to, but they decided that it wasn’t to their taste. The Slip Disc looked promising except that the guard at the door wouldn’t let them in. The disco had a “no entry for hippies” policy and the three, with their long hair, definitely looked like hippies.

Yusuf Gandhi, an employee of Slip Disc, saw them politely explain that they were musicians just interested in having some fun. “I heard them say they were Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and Richard Cole,” Gandhi recalled. “The names meant nothing to the guard, but I recognised them as being members of Led Zeppelin. I told the bouncer to let them in. I would take the responsibility with the boss.”

Led Zeppelin. The most famous hard rock band in the world. In Bombay, as the city was then called. It was something that young Gandhi found irresistible, as he explained on the telephone from New York where he now lives. Inside the disco, the handful of clubbers wondered who these foreigners could be. Soon enough there was a buzz as the owner of the disco Ramzan Patel was seen talking to them. Word spread fast and many rushed to the payphone to tell their friends to come to Slip Disc as soon as they could.

Gandhi says he told Patel that it would be great if the members of Led Zeppelin played at the disco, but they ought not to be pushed into it. Let the crowd urge them, Gandhi said. By then, Slip Disc was packed. Page and Plant were invited on to the stage and a chant went up. The two did not hesitate. The band playing that night was Velvette Fogg, Gandhi recalled, though another eyewitness claimed the band was called Synthesis. Page took a guitar from Naresh Mansukhani, Plant the mike. Jameel Shaikh continued to sit at the drums and the bass guitar was picked up by Xerxes Gobhai. The bass player, David Ezekiel, “for some reason felt nervous about playing and I was asked to step in”, said Gobhai in an email from Canada. “Not an offer I would refuse.”

It was October 1972. No one remembers the exact date though it is thought to have been October 16. There are conflicting memories about many other things, including the songs they played. But all those who saw the performance remember that it was magical. It was a time when few foreign bands – or even their records – made their way into socialist India. For rock music fans, the only way to hear the latest music was to tune into international short wave radio stations or buy LPs from the black market. But this was the real thing.

The two played for nearly half an hour and left soon after. Word spread that they would come back the next day. Lines snaked around the block. The entrance money went up to a hefty R50 per person, at a time when it cost R3 to buy a pack of 20 cigarettes and a Bush transistor radio cost R110. The air was thick with anticipation. But it was not to be. Way after midnight, the crowds dispersed, disappointed.

As it turned out, this was the third visit by Plant and Page to Mumbai in 12 months. They had first come to the city in October 1971 and returned in February 1972, on their way to or from concert tours, enchanted by the city and excited by the idea of working with Indian musicians. The third time round, they actually made some tracks with Indian classical instrumentalists and the “Bombay Sessions” as they have come to be called have only now found their way into the public domain.

Four decades on, their visit to Slip Disc has passed into legend, though many of the details of the trips are hazy. Even those who saw them up close and personal cannot agree on many things. Not much hard evidence exists – a few photographs here and there, at most – but even about those there are differing opinions. There are rumours of recordings made in the disco that night but Gandhi says if they did exist, they most certainly have been lost. After weeks of tracking down eyewitnesses, Time Out has put together a credible account of the visit and unearthed details of Led Zeppelin’s Bombay sessions. The story of the remarkable impromptu performances in Slip Disc can now be told.

Gandhi recalls Plant and Page telling him that they had found Blow Up, the disco of the Taj Mahal, “very stiff”. But the atmosphere at the Slip Disc was smoky and there was a whiff of hash in the air. “Jimmy Page lay down on the benches and said, ‘Back to sanity at last,’” said Gandhi. Old Mumbai rockers will endorse this. Blow Up was for members – the well-heeled of the city. It was staid and respectable compared to the dishevelled and grungy Slip Disc. (A tangential story, probably apocryphal, maintains that when Page was told that wandering around in the Taj lobby in shorts was not permitted, he offered to take them off.)

Long-time rocker Nandu Bhende has a slightly different version of the proceedings. He remembers getting a call from the owner of Slip Disc “one afternoon in the winter of 1972”. Bhende said, “Ramzan was excited and told me that Plant and Page of Led Zeppelin were in town and he was going to meet them at the Taj and get them over. I was at home in Chembur that day and it took me a long time to get to Colaba. The disco was packed by then.”

Bhende and his friends checked their instruments – “we had really poor stuff” – and waited. Patel was apparently sitting with Page and Plant in the hotel persuading them to come, says Bhende. Four hours later, they walked in and were mobbed by autograph-seekers. Right away, Plant and Page launched into the hit “Rock and Roll” and the crowd went wild. “This was followed by a bluesy number where they talked about their time in Bombay and then came ‘Black Dog’,” Bhende said.

Here again there is a divergence of views. Journalist Khalid Mohammed, then a college student, was in the audience too. He used to loan his new rock LPs to the disco and so he and a friend were allowed in for free. Mohammed claims that the band sang a track that no one had ever heard of at the time: “Kashmir”. This is a song that eventually came out in the 1975 album Physical Graffiti and has nothing to do with Kashmir.

Xerxes Gobhai, the bassist who was playing on a “terrible” Japanese-made guitar, remembers some Chuck Berry kind of jamming and the song “Whole Lotta Love”. An amplifier, not of a particularly good quality, was procured from somewhere. The performance lasted about half an hour and Page and Plant then sat around and had a few beers. Gandhi and Gobhai also insist that Plant and Page did turn up the next day but the moment they realised that the owner of the disco had advertised their possible presence and was exploiting them, they turned around and left.

The day after that, Gobhai and Gandhi went to the Taj, picked up the band members and drove to a friend’s home in Colaba, where they were joined by Suresh Shottam, the lead guitarist of Human Bondage, then one of India’s best-known rock bands. The musicians – two world-famous British ones and two Indians – sat around and discussed music and guitars. “Page showed Shottam a couple of techniques for bending strings without a whammy bar and open tunings,” said Gobhai. Shottam was trained in Carnatic music and was considered one of the best guitarists in the country. He is now a wellness expert and lives in Bangalore. Gandhi says that when Page saw Shottam’s vintage Fender Mustang, he “was bowled over at how beautifully it was maintained”. Page asked to buy it, offering a lot of money; Shottam replied: “I cannot sell it, it is my life.”

Then everyone went out for a drive and had some drinks at Badshah Cold Drinks House near Crawford Market, where Plant wanted pomegranate juice, Gobhai reported. Intrig-uingly, many people have memories of such small details, but no one can pinpoint the dates of the Slip Disc jam. What impressions did the superstar-musicians leave behind? “They were very nice and relaxed as long as you treated them as normal and not celebs,” said Gobhai. “That is why I don’t think there were any recordings or photographs taken by us.”

However, some images appeared in the media and a series of very significant recordings was made. The pictures were printed, along with a small interview in the youth magazine JS in the issue dated November 25, 1972. In an interview to journalist Poky (real name Ridhi Pokharal), the two musicians talked about how they had got attached to Mumbai and wanted to set up shop here. “It’s great to be in India for a visit,” Plant said. “Listen, you know why we came? To see if we could set up a recording studio. But the Customs regulations are tough, man, like it will take us six months to get our equipment out of Bombay Airport. This country is great and we’ll be back.”

Plant and Page first visited Mumbai soon after a Japan tour that ended on September 29, 1971. The next time they came was in February 1972, on their way to Australia. They had initially planned to stop over in Singapore for a couple of days on February 14 but the authorities did not let them in because they had long hair and beards. On the spur of the moment, they decided to come to India and slipped into the country anonymously, along with their manager Richard Cole, looking like any group of hippies. They went around the city in a taxi taking pictures and shooting 8mm movies. The video, without sound, can be viewed on YouTube. (Many Mumbai landmarks can be seen.) Apparently the city charmed them enough to consider a longer trip.

This second trip left quite an impression on Page and Plant. After landing in Adelaide, Plant was asked by a local newspaper why the band came to Australia: “We wanted to go to Italy and Yugoslavia but when we got there I got really upset...cried for days. I did. But one reason we came here was that it would be another return trip to Bombay.”

Q: “Do you like Bombay?”
Plant: “Yes, very much and sometimes I think I’d like to live there. Well the first time that Jimmy, Richard and I went there we were coming back from Japan. We didn’t know anybody at all. We just dropped off the plane and got into a taxi and halfway from the airport to the hotel the guy said, ‘Aaah you change money you change money’ and we said, No, no, no – we just didn’t know what was going on. Then he said, ‘Right, I’ll stop now and transfer you into the other car’ and behind us there was the other car with about five Punjabis armed to the teeth.”

“So Richard sort of floated out of the car and got into the front and put his arms around the guy’s neck and said, ‘hotel, hotel’ and I swear this was the only way we got to the hotel alive. You know if you’ve ever gone from Santa Crusa [sic] to Airport to Marine Drive in Bombay you’ll know what it’s like.”

The Indian press largely ignored the presence of these superstars of rock music. The serious papers did not cover popular culture in those days. However, one picture of the third trip, when they played at Slip Disc did appear in a paper, though nobody can remember which one. The photo shows Plant, Page and Cole along with two other Indians, both bearded and wearing glasses. Some bottles of beer are on the table. The two Led Zeppelin musicians have shaved off their beards though they still have long hair.

There is no clarity on one of the faces in the picture. The person sitting right next to the players is Xerxes Gobhai of Human Bondage, who had jammed with them. But there are disagreements about who the partially hidden figure is. Nandu Bhende says it is his cousin Vijay Rao, also a musician; Rao confirms it. However, Yusuf Gandhi says that the person in the photo is actually him, and that’s an identification that Gobhai and Shottam endorse. The photo also appears on the website of Madhukar Das, the singer with a band called Atomic Forest. Das went on to play Jesus in the production of Jesus Christ Superstar directed by Alyque Padamsee. On his website, Das says that he is the person in the photograph. In the JS interview, Plant talked about music (“music is my friend when I am lonely, when I am blue. You have to feel music to dig it”) and Page spoke about the Beatles (“They were the greatest. We felt sorry when they broke up, because they produced the most fantastic music”) and themselves (“We are simple people who love to play and listen to music. We don’t even feel like pop stars. Except for the very hep crowd no one even recognised us. They thought we were hippies. It’s a lovely feeling when no one recognises you and you can groove and do what you like.”)

Cole, who had accompanied them on their visits, told Time Out in an interview that he liked “the Taj Mahal hotel, the old one, the buses, buildings, snake charmers and scented oils and a visit to Gaylords, but most of all our wonderful friend and driver Mr Razark and his hospitality”.

In his book on his days with the band, called Stairway to Heaven, Cole has written about Razark, the taxi driver, who first helped them exchange some foreign currency in the black market and then took them around the city during their 1972 trip. “From the balcony of my room at the Taj Majal, I could see our designated money exchanger talking to another cabbie, and some currency changing hands,” Cole recalled in his memoirs. “The second driver didn’t look like most of the other cabbies we had seen. Although he was wearing the same khaki uniform, his slacks were immaculately pressed, his shirt was freshly laundered, there wasn’t a hair out of place on his head, and his moustache looked as though it has been transplanted from Clark Gable’s upper lip. ‘This guy should be making movies in Hollywood,’ I said.”

Cole and the gang introduced themselves to the dapper taxi driver and asked him for a tour of the city. “Our Marathi is a little rusty,” Cole told him. ‘We could use a guide if you’re available.”

The driver gave his name as Mr Razark. “For the next three days he became part of our entourage, taking us to Indian brothels, a disco where Jimmy jammed with some startled local musicians who couldn’t believe his prowess on their Japanese-made guitars, and some shops where we bought musical instruments, scented oils, and an ivory chess set,” Cole wrote. Apparently Razark (who probably was Razzaq) also took them to a local eatery where they contracted an extreme case of Bombay belly that lasted them through their flight home.

That October 1972 visit was much more than tourism. Page and Plant wanted to record some songs with Indian musicians. Led Zeppelin had always been interested in trying out new sounds (they later worked on Arabic music) and through Ravi Shankar, who Page had met, they got in touch with Vijay Raghav Rao, the sitar maestro’s student who was the chief musician with Films Division. Rao arranged for a few Indian musicians to come into the studio and the result is “The Bombay Sessions”, a remarkable attempt to bring together two completely different styles of music. The songs they chose were “Friends” and “Four Sticks”. The sessions are heavy with sarangi and tabla and do not always work, though the fusion version of “Friends” is quite enjoyable.  

However, Page and Plant weren’t satisfied. “Robert and I were just really keen to see what it would be like to go into a studio with some musicians from Bombay and see what we would come up with,” Jimmy Page told Guitar World magazine in December 2010. “We tried recording versions of ‘Friends’ and ‘Four Sticks’ with some percussionists, a half-dozen string players and a thing called a Japan banjo, and boy, was that tricky! They were great musicians, but they were used to counting and feeling rhythms in a different way. Moving them from one time signature and retaining the feel that we had in mind was difficult, but it was exciting and a learning experience.” These sessions have now become collectors’ items and are sold by dealers who specialise in Led Zeppelin bootlegs. Fans can listen to a few of them on YouTube.

Four decades on, the minutiae of the Led Zeppelin visit do not matter much, though die-hard devotees are always trying to connect the dots and look for the band’s Indian links. (There is another one: Plant’s first wife Maureen was from east India, most probably from Jamshedpur.) There is also the continuous speculation on whether the band wrote the song “Kashmir” because of their India trip, though there is no evidence of it. Both Page and Plant have visited India since 1972 – in 1996 they came for the Channel [V] awards and are also have said to have come on private trips as tourists. Tours by foreign bands are no longer a rarity in India. Yet there is something captivating about those early impromptu excursions of Led Zeppelin at a time when there was a minuscule but dedicated following of rock music in India. It may be a tiny footnote in the history of the great band, but for those who saw the two musicians, it is a memory that has lasted a lifetime. For those who did not, the newly available east-west recordings of Led Zeppelin are an poignant musical memory of the band’s encounter with India.

Video of Led Zeppelin in Mumbai and sections of “Bombay Sessions” are available on (search under the title “Travelling Leadbellies”.)