If you think teenagers and young adults today aren't into Led Zeppelin these days, think again.
All those 25 to 30 million hits in September that crashed the 02 Arena show's ticket-application website weren't just clicked by grey-ponytailed men.
Amazingly, Led Zeppelin has sold 20 million albums since 1990, and it has been reported that 40% of Zeppelin albums sold since 2000 have been bought by people under age 25. You can't even walk the halls of any high school nowadays without spotting at least one kid wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt.
Indeed, in some ways the band is as popular as ever among teenagers.
"I think it's because the music was actually played by four virtuoso performers, if you like, that actually managed to gel," Page told Sun Media in October. "Unlike a lot of other bands from that time with virtuoso musicians in there, here we had four musicians who really did honestly connect. And the music was played superbly well.
"There as so many new musicians, young musicians, who (are using Zeppelin music) as the ultimate textbook, because it touches on so many areas. It's honest music ... and that's what turned me on to playing for the first time as a kid."
Even more young people around the world are being turned on to Zep music because, since October, all of the band's songs and albums finally have been made available for legal download purchase. And in November the band finally, 27 years after disbanding, released a definitive two-disc best-of album, Motherlode. An XM satellite radio station that plays nothing but Zep music 24/7 has even started up, so the band's legend will only keep growing.
"I've always thought that the music we made in the '70s wasn't really of that time anyway," Jones told Sun Media. "It was very unique music. We weren't really part of a movement -- prog rock, or heavy metal, or any of those categories ... We had links to the early electric blues movement in England, and there was a mixture of folk and other world music that we were using, and that was influencing us at the time.
"But I feel that we were not of that time, and therefore we're not of this time either. The music didn't date for those reasons."
For his part, Page seems to have made it his life's work over the past two decades to ensure Zeppelin's rightful place in rock's Pantheon. He personally oversaw the digital remixing of the group's entire catalogue for the CD box sets in the early '90s. He was involved at every stage of reviving, enhancing and choosing the audio and visual material for the band's seminal DVD four years ago. He even grants interviews to the ink-stained press corps every now and then to explain, support or, if needs be, defend Zeppelin -- something he and the band almost never cared to do in the '70s.
Although they might not always agree on matters touching Led Zeppelin, for Plant, Jones and especially Page, it was -- and still very much is -- all about the music.
"Our legacy, for me," Page said, "is if kids can .... be inspired, then my job's done."
