Led Zeppelin is one of the greatest and most influential rock bands of all time. Fronted by singer Robert Plant’s transcendent vocals, backed by Jimmy Page on guitar, John Paul Jones’ groovy bass and John Bonham’s thunderous drumming.

It really was the perfect outfit. There is a simple question you can ask of such a band with an impossible answer – which song is best? Robert Plant and Jimmy Page have given an answer 56 years after their debut album was released. These five and a half decades provide the space for the artists to be a little more objective when grading their legendary work, naturally looking back with perhaps less attachment than when the music was first conceived.

“I wish we were remembered for Kashmir more than Stairway To Heaven,” said Robert Plant to Louder Sound. The song was the last track on side two on their 1975 album Physical Graffiti double album. “It’s so right; there’s nothing overblown, no vocal hysterics. Perfect Zeppelin,” he added.

Today, Kashmir sits as their sixth most popular track on Spotify, with Stairway to Heaven at the top spot.

Jimmy Page had to agree with Plant, saying ”I suppose Kashmir has to be the one,” he told Rolling Stone. He even found composing the rock masterpiece “frightening”. Page added: “The intensity of Kashmir was such that when we had it completed, we knew there was something really hypnotic to it, we couldn’t even describe such a quality.”

The song was born after a trip Plant and Page took to Morocco. It was initially named ‘Driving to Kashmir’ and was inspired after a long, seemingly endless drive through “the waste lands” as Plant called it, of southern Morocco. It does not have anything to do with Kashmir in northern India.

“It was a single-track road which neatly cut through the desert. Two miles to the east and west were ridges of sand rock. It looked like you were driving down a channel, this dilapidated road, and there was seemingly no end to it,” Plant recalled.

The unforgettable riff came out of a recording session between Page and John Bonham in Headley Grange, the haunted east Hampshire manor where they recorded many tracks in the 70s.

“It was just Bonzo and myself,” Page said. “He started the drums, and I did the riff and the overdubs, which in fact get duplicated by an orchestra at the end, which brought it even more to life. It seemed so sort of ominous and had a particular quality to it. It’s nice to go for an actual mood and know that you’ve pulled it off.”

Recording was halted after this when John Paul Jones temporarily left the band after being horrified by off stage antics during their 1973 US tour. It recommenced the next year once a deal was made to appease him, moving away from Headley Grange. Jones was the man behind the orchestral part of Kashmir which was recorded with real strings and horns at Olympic Studios.

Robert Plant was reportedly “petrified” and “virtually in tears” at trying to sing along with Kashmir’s unusual rhythmic pattern, Louder Sound said. “It was an amazing piece of music to write to, and an incredible challenge for me,” he later recalled. “The whole deal of the song is… not grandiose, but powerful: it required some kind of epithet, or abstract lyrical setting about the whole idea of life being an adventure and being a series of illuminated moments.”