at 12:14 on January 28, 2008, EST.
By Eric Talmadge, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page said Monday he was ready to take the legendary band on a world tour after burning up the stage at last month's reunion concert in London. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS/Koji Sasahara


TOKYO - Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page said Monday he was ready to take the legendary band on a world tour after burning up the stage at last month's reunion concert in London.

"The amount of work we put into O2 was what you would normally put into a world tour anyway," Page, 64, said of the intense rehearsing the band did for the Dec. 10 concert at London's O2 Arena.

The band's three surviving members - Page, singer Robert Plant and bassist-keyboardist John Paul Jones - were joined at the sold-out benefit show by the late John Bonham's son Jason on drums.

Page, who was in Japan to promote the new Zeppelin release, "Mothership," said the two-hour-plus concert, which he called "brilliant," was proof that Led Zeppelin, which formed in 1968, can still perform at its best.

He said the band was ready musically to get back together and take it out on a wider run, but it was not clear when it would go on tour as the singer had other plans.

"Robert Plant has a parallel project and he is busy with that until September," Page said.

Plant and bluegrass star Alison Krauss will begin their world tour with a run of shows in the southern U.S. this spring. The two singers released an album in October called "Raising Sand" that debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard chart in the U.S. The duo will tour Europe in May before returning for North America shows still to be announced for June and July.

Page said the band set their standards very high before agreeing to do the reunion, their first in 20 years. Led Zeppelin broke up in 1980 after the elder Bonham's death.

Page said they rehearsed for weeks, apprehensive that the cohesion they had in the 1970s when they were at their peak might be hard to rediscover.

"We wanted people who might not have even been alive in 1980 when we finished to understand what we were," he said.

Page said all went well until he broke a finger in three places, forcing the band to postpone the show for several weeks.

"But we did the show, and it was great," he said. "It was instant in terms of chemistry."


©The Canadian Press, 2008