This track is the “odd one out” from their album Led Zeppelin IV – a rare foray into bucolic folk, featuring fingerpicked acoustic guitar. Which is why I like it.

Being the party pooper I am, I generally find Led Zeppelin to be as lumpen as their name suggests. It’s probably a result of being subjected to their bombastic output throughout my formative years at school.

For my fellow pupils, musical credibility was judged largely by the length of a band’s songs (preferably more than five minutes; hopefully more than ten), and albums (ideally double or triple), and above all their refusal ever to release a single.

Which made Led Zeppelin kings of the pile, along with the likes of Yes, Genesis and ELP.

Their fourth album, released in 1971, was particularly popular, with its centrepiece of the now-completely-intolerable Stairway To Heaven – another of those songs that has become unlistenable through overfamiliarity down the years.

I could probably subliminally hum along to the whole album if I could bear to play it, particularly the banging and clattering of its opening two tunes, Black Dog and Rock And Roll. But lurking within its leaden depths, among the ferocious bull-in-a-china-shop drumming, squealy guitar solos that go on for ever, and screeching tight-trousered hysteria of Plant’s voice, lay this bucolic interlude.

Going To California is everything their other songs aren’t: a light, subtle, bucolic English folk ballad. Page ditches his double-necked electric guitars for finger-picked acoustic in the style of John Fahey, John Paul Jones plays the mandolin, Plant, for once, holds it all back: an early indication that – as his solo career would later demonstrate – less is sometimes more.

I saw Led Zeppelin once, at Knebworth in 1979. They didn’t play this. But they did at Earl’s Court in 1975.