Led Zeppelin: Music and Drama in Performance, analyses the musical content of representative performances from Led Zeppelin's career, highlighting the group's consistent use of contrast and diversity of material in the creation of musical and dramatic shape within performances of both individual songs, and of entire concerts. Through these analyses, this book argues that attention to musical and dramatic shape, particularly across the length of whole performances, was a fundamental aspect of Led Zeppelin's performance approach, and one that represents a previously unrecognized contribution of the group to rock practice of the 1970s.

This study of Led Zeppelin's music as performed in concert draws together and develops existing discourses in the performance of rock, the analysis of popular music, and aspects of dramatic theory and performance studies, and in so doing proposes a new means of considering the musical content of popular music performances. In laying out this analytical approach, this book expands available tools for the analysis of rock and popular music, and bridges the gap between existing discourses of music analysis and the performance of popular music.