Led Zeppelin duo did not plagiarise

LED Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and Robert Plant did not plagiarise a song by the American band Spirit when they wrote Stairway To Heaven, a jury has found.

The veteran rock stars appeared at a federal court in Los Angeles to deny claims that the guitar intro to the 1971 song was “lifted” from an instrumental track called Taurus. A lawsuit was filed by Michael Skidmore, the trustee of Spirit guitarist Randy Wolfe – known as Randy California – who drowned in 1997 having never taken legal action over the song.

Following a week-long trial, a jury found Taurus and Stairway To Heaven were not “extrinsically similar”.

During the trial, guitarist Page said he owned five Spirit albums but he had never watched the band play live and Taurus was “totally alien” to him. He said he first heard the 1968 song when his son-in-law showed him a comparison with Stairway To Heaven on the internet a few years ago.

Page, 72, said he wrote the music for Stairway To Heaven at Headley Grange Manor House in Hampshire.

The jury was told both songs feature a “descending chromatic chord progression” in A minor. Musicologist Alexander Stewart said the rhythm, chords and harmonies of Taurus, and the introduction to Stairway To Heaven, were “virtually identical”, while professional musician Kevin Hanson said the two songs had a “striking similarity”.

But Lawrence Ferrara, a music professor at New York University, said a descending chromatic chord progression was a “musical building block” for a song and it can be found in music dating back 300 years.

Singer Plant, 67, said he had no memory of watching Spirit in Birmingham in 1970, because he was involved in a car crash that night.

Bassist John Paul Jones gave evidence but was not a defendant. He said he could not recall seeing Spirit live and denied owning any of their albums or singles.