"I didn't realise that the sheet music was for beginner guitar. Naylor recalls being 11 and taping Led Zeppelin songs off the radio, before eventually buying Led Zeppelin IV on cassette, followed by the sheet music for Stairway to Heaven. It was on AM radio in Australia that a young Ash Naylor first heard Stairway to Heaven, long before he became frontman for Melbourne band Even and go-to-guitarist for the likes of Paul Kelly, The Church and various Beatles and Led Zeppelin tributes, among others. It's all the more remarkable when you consider the song's contents - it has no conventional chorus, it opens with a medieval-sounding combination of recorders and acoustic guitar, the vocals don't start until almost one minute into the song, the drums don't join in until more than four minutes in, and the last two and a half minutes feel like a completely different song.īut radio DJs loved it, and so did the listeners. The ploy worked and Led Zeppelin IV became one of the biggest selling albums ever - in America it's one of only six albums to sell more than 20 million copies, and worldwide certified sales put it as the fifth biggest-selling record of all time.Ītlantic Records sent promo copies of Stairway to Heaven to American radio stations, which lapped up the track despite its monumental length. ( Andrew Smith Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license) Jimmy Page during the final solo of 'Stairway to Heaven' at a Led Zeppelin concert in Oakland, California. The song was recorded over the winter of 1970/'71 as part of the sessions for the band's technically untitled fourth album - better known as Led Zeppelin IV. However, under oath during the song's recent copyright tussles (more on that later), Page revealed it was actually written at the less romantic Headley Grange, a former workhouse-turned-recording studio south-west of London - a disclosure that no doubt disappointed the thousands of Led Zeppelin fans who made the pilgrimage to western Wales to visit "the birthplace of Stairway to Heaven". The story of this song being written in the Welsh hills in a cottage with no running water or electricity or toilet has become part of the Led Zeppelin legend. The song was believed to have been written in a Welsh cottage named Bron-Y-Aur, where Led Zeppelin members Robert Plant and Jimmy Page (along with their partners and a couple of roadies) retreated after gruelling back-to-back European and North American tours in early 1970. Robert Plant and Jimmy Page in action at the Musikhalle, Hamburg in 1973 ( Wikimedia / Heinrich Klaffs)
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