Read in full: Peter Whitehead's 1999 witness statement

The filmmaker who oversaw the filming of Led Zeppelin in 1970 produced this 2,700-word account of his career in May 1999.

When Led Zeppelin wanted footage of the band’s January 9, 1970 Royal Albert Hall show and then the June 28, 1970 Bath Festival performance, filmmaker Peter Whitehead was hired to document the shows.

It would take 52 years for the majority of Whitehead’s footage to emerge, first with the Royal Albert Hall film on Led Zeppelin’s 2003 DVD and then through the surprise release of his Bath Festival footage on YouTube last year.

Yesterday, we published the longest ever LedZepNews article here which uses papers from Whitehead’s archive and exclusive interviews with key players to tell the saga of the filming and the decades of negotiations that followed.

One of the key documents we relied on for that article was a previously unseen witness statement made by Whitehead in May 1999 for a scheduled High Court trial.

Premium subscribers to the LedZepNews Substack can read Whitehead’s full, 2,700-word witness statement below which contains his account of his career and filming Led Zeppelin in his own words.

The document is reproduced here with permission from The Peter Whitehead Archive at the Cinema and Television History Institute at De Montfort University. We have added notes, corrections and clarifications in square brackets to provide extra context when required.