ON THE morning of September 24, 1980, Rex King - the general factotum of Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham - picked up his boss and headed for the home of the band's guitarist Jimmy Page in Windsor.
But Bonham, known as Bonzo, was having a crisis of confidence about his musical abilities. While he had kicked his heroin habit and taken up a pill called Motival that was designed to reduce anxiety, he was still drinking heavily.
A home-loving boy, he was not enjoying his fame and would rather have taken a few months off to deal with his demons.
So he ordered King to stop off at a pub for breakfast and there he polished off his ham roll with four quadruple vodkas with orange.
By the time he arrived at the Old Mill House, the property Page had bought from the actor Michael Caine for £900,000 earlier that year, Bonham was still in a state of high anxiety and got through the day by knocking back more and more vodka until it got to the point where he could simply no longer play.
He was put to bed by one of the band's roadies, a man who had performed the task many times before. He carefully placed him on his side and propped him up on pillows.
Next day, when Bonham hadn't emerged for lunch, bassist John Paul Jones and a member of the entourage went to rouse him, only to find him unresponsive - he had choked to death on his own vomit.
The band's backstage life was once described by Page as an alcoholfuelled "stag party". Drinking and drug-taking sessions could go on for days and all too often resulted in trashed hotel rooms.
But possibly the most infamous incident – which earned Led Zep the top slot in the 100 Sleaziest Moments Of Rock in 2000 – took place in the early days, 1969, at the Edgewater Inn in Seattle. It started with Bonham and road manager Richard Cole fishing for sand sharks, which they hung in their hotel bedroom wardrobes.
And then, as tour photographer Robert Zagaris recalled, the orgy began: “Everyone was smoking joints and hash. A blonde groupie was stripped naked.” Next, a party guest tipped a bag of fish entrails all over the girl, who was writhing about with Cole and Bonham.
Then Bonham reportedly grabbed a shark from the wardrobe and used it to perform a sex act on her.
What supporters of the #MeToo movement, or indeed most reasonable human beings, would make of the band's behaviour doesn't bear thinking about. On one occasion Page stripped naked, was covered with whipped cream, put on a room-service trolley and wheeled into a room to be served up to a bunch of teenage girls.
The guitarist, who tried to wean himself off heroin on a Caribbean island by drinking white rum, travelled with a collection of whips to be used, he said, on groupies he found to be "teasing and acting haughty", adding that "if you humiliate them a bit, they tend to come on all right after that".
The rampant misogyny meant at times that no woman was safe. A young female journalist from Life magazine, Ellen Sander, joined their 1969 tour and reported being attacked by two members of the group when she went into a dressing room to say goodbye.
