A rare vinyl copy of Led Zeppelin‘s unreleased 1969 single Whole Lotta Love was valued during an episode of BBC television show Antiques Roadshow, broadcast on October 4.
“This single was never released in the UK, it shouldn’t really exist,” commented antiques expert Marc Allum when handed the seven-inch single during filming of the long-running TV show at Caerphilly Castle in Wales.
The single was brought along to the show by a man who DJ-ed at discos in the area in the 1970s.
“It was given to me by a rep in a record shop in early 1970,” the man explained. “I was looking for records to start up a disco, and out of his bag came a couple of records, and he said, ‘You can have those’. One of them was that.”
He went on to reveal that he had only played the record “eight to ten times” and that “people weren’t interested”.
“There are a lot of myths that build up around these kind of things, and stories, and I heard that 500 were pressed, and they went out,” Marc Allum tells viewers. “And this came about apparently because there was a kind of disparity between the relationship between the management, the band, and the record company, and Led Zeppelin the band hadn’t agreed to have any singles released.”
“They were immediately recalled, but human nature being what it is, some people didn’t return them all.”
“They’re really difficult things to put a value on,” Allum continued, “At auction, this would sell for a thousand pounds.”
When he heard the expert’s valuation, the owner of the record joked, “Can we keep it a secret?”
Famously, Led Zeppelin never wanted their songs released as singles in the UK by their record company, believing that they were best heard within the context of an album. This didn’t initially please their label, Atlantic.
“With Whole Lotta Love, that was clearly going to be the track that everybody was going to go to, because that riff was so fresh and it still is,” Jimmy Page once told Chris Bird, editor of Total Guitar magazine. “But I knew with Whole Lotta Love that there weren’t going to be any edits.
“I insisted that they kept the middle section in it, which of course they didn’t like, but they had to do it. So I thought, well, if you just keep making the numbers longer and longer… [Laughs] They’re not going to make them singles! I did think that in a mischievous way.”
Despite Jimmy Page’s aversion to singles, Led Zeppelin did release Whole Lotta Love in many other territories, including the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France and Japan.