After 27 years, one dead drummer and a broken finger, the band that symbolised rock 'n' roll excess like no other have taken to the stage for a proper show.

The three surviving members of Led Zeppelin have played a handful of songs together a couple of times since drummer John Bonham took a Spinal Tap-style exit from the world with the help of huge amounts of vodka in 1980.

But critics agreed they were largely shambolic. Last night it was the real deal, a 90-minute set at London's O2 arena in front of 20,000 people who counted themselves among the luckiest music fans in the world.

The internet rush to buy £125 tickets to see Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and Bonham's son Jason saw up to 20 million people crashing the website with the winners being drawn by electronic lottery.

Then the scheduled show last month, in memory of former Atlantic records boss Ahmet Ertegun, who signed and sponsored Zeppelin, had to be cancelled when Page broke a finger falling over in his garden. The band's publicists have declined to say which one.

Finally, at 9.04pm, the O2 Arena erupted as the lights came on and Page, Plant and Jones, with a combined age of over 180, burst on to stage with youngster Bonham, 41, and opened with Good Times Bad Times, the first track of their debut album.

Plant, in jeans not quite as famously tight as they were 27 years ago, still had the energy to strut his 59-year-old body across the stage.

Page, 63, and Jones, 61, kept less energetic pace with him.

As the band settled into a series of songs old and new, grown men in the mostly middle-aged and male audience began playing air guitar.

Some of the old Zeppelin remained, during a monumentally long instrumental Plant had time to go off stage as Page continued to play with dry ice fumes swirling about his feet.

Plant interrupted the sequence in a brief explanatory speech to say how they had put the show together from the contents of 10 different albums as well as some new items.

One thing not so new was when in the middle of Dazed and Confused, Page got out his violin bow and started to play his guitar with it, in his once trademark style.

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