I‘ve never been a big Led Zeppelin fan – nor even a medium-sized one – but I know their work, and I have a soft spot for their softer spots. Such as this folky little number from their second album.

With its filigree acoustic guitar picking by Jimmy Page, this song doesn’t really fit among all the bombastic bluster of the rest of the album; nor, thankfully, does it live up to its title by doing what too many of their songs do and rambling on and on.

What really makes it for me is the bass playing of John Paul Jones, which first intrudes on that guitar intro with a beautiful ascending motif in the instrument’s upper register. Then there’s a three-note lick after the first line of the chorus leading into a section where the bass is pretty much the main instrument behind Plant’s wailing vocal.

The less said about the Tolkien-inspired lyrics, one of my biggest problems with the band – besides the thunderous riffing, the bull-in-a-china-shop drumming and banshee wailing in tight trousers – the better.

I was only 11 when it came out, but it was still hugely popular a few years later at my school, where ‘Led Zep’ were regarded as rock gods beyond compare in a league that spanned the metal of Deep Purple and Black Sabbath and the prog of Yes, Genesis and ELP.

Led Zeppelin II was regarded, I recall, as being the band’s best – and heaviest – album. I also remember its cover, with that looming zeppelin behind a vintage photograph with the band members superimposed amid a group of German pilots from World War I, including ‘The Red Baron’ – and, for reasons I cannot begin to guess, the French actress Delphine Seyrig.

It’s got Whole Lotta Love on it, a song that I discovered as the Top of the Pops theme music and which has slipped into the same “now-completely-unlistenable-through-overexposure” category as the dreaded Stairway To Heaven (though Dolly Parton‘s bluegrass interpretation of the latter makes it more palatable).