#led zeppelin article

Happy Birthday Robert!!

Part 5

An interview for Uncut by Allan Jones, November 2007.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 1

The first interview is for Melody Maker by Carol Clerk, January 1988.

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

January 2011

"In October, Robert Plant‘s Band of Joy played a show in Birmingham, England. The theater is not far from the suburban roads where he and his friend John Bonham once siphoned gas from parked cars so they could get to gigs. About halfway through the set, a young woman jumped onto the stage. She brushed past his guitar player and kissed Plant on the lips. Plant smiled – this is not the first time this has happened – and continued singing. After the show, Joan Bonham, John’s 81-year-old mom, made her way backstage. She pinched Plant’s cheeks and smiled. “I see you’re still up to the same tricks,” she said. Sitting in a Primrose Hill pub, Robert Plant tells the story with a laugh and almost a tear. He moves in and speaks in a conspiratorial whisper: “You know, she’s right.”"

***

"Besides dodging the odd woman looking for a kiss, band members Buddy Miller and Patty Griffin know firsthand the joyous and stomach-churning task of following Plant’s unpredictable shifts. “You have to watch his every movement – he’s very subtle,” says Miller. “When he dips his right shoulder, that means he wants the level or dynamic to drop down so he can caress the next line. If you’re not watching, you’re going to miss something.”"

"...There was clamor for a follow-up, but Plant says the 2009 sessions didn’t feel right.

“The sound just wasn’t there,” he says. “Alison is the best. She’s one of my favorite people. We’ll come back to it.”"

***

"The group met in late 2009 in Nashville. Miller, who co-produced Band of Joy, brought vintage R&B numbers, and Plant arrived with some of his own, including songs by Los Lobos and Richard Thompson. While the first days went well, something was missing. “This needs to rock more,” Plant told Miller. Plant came to the second session with two new songs: “Monkey” and “Silver Rider,” both by Low, a Minnesota indie-rock trio."

"Plant is a naturally antsy guy, and after 90 minutes at the pub, he checks the time. He suggests we head to a nearby record store so he can shop for some country bootlegs. “I’ve got about an hour, then I’ve got to go to the osteopath,” he says. “Nothing major, just maintenance.”"

***

"The older Plant gets, the more he seems obsessed with songwriters. He raves about legendary Texas songwriter Townes Van Zandt, who is represented on the LP by “Harm’s Swift Way,” the last song he ever wrote.

“Every one of his songs is a landscape for a book,” says Plant. “It could be the first line of a novel. What goes with that is a short time span, by the looks of it.”

I ask him what he means.

“You get too close to the sun,” says Plant. “Maybe that’s the courageous way. Songwriters sometimes get old and spend too much time in the supermarket buying health-food stuff.”

Plant has a specific songwriter in mind: himself.

“I’ve kind of given up writing,” he says. “All my writing is sort of meandering. The last time I lifted a pen was when Tony Blair became a Roman Catholic. We were supposedly going into the Gulf, determined to sort the world out in the name of tyranny. Then, once he had to lease the throne, he became a Roman Catholic and became a peace envoy in the Middle East. That’s when I knew the world was completely upside down.”

Photo by Youssef Boudlal, 2014

Not long ago, Plant flew to Morocco and drove down the coast, retracing a journey he took with Page in 1978. The duo brought tape recorders to capture local sound, but the trip was most noteworthy for run-ins with border guards and because Morocco is where Plant started writing “Kashmir.”

“I wanted to go back and take that road,” he says. “It just heads all the way down the coast. It was fucking amazing.”

Reprising road trips aside, Plant’s relationship with his old band is conflicted."

***

"We walk for a few minutes in the London rain, passing a slightly decrepit mansion. It’s the Cecil Sharp House, a repository for British folk music and dance. Plant grabs my arm. “I’ve never been here. I always wanted to go. This is much better than a record store.”

He points at a mural on the wall that represents scenes of traditional British folk music and dance. “What I didn’t know was so many of those Appalachian songs in America come from these islands,” he says. “At its root. ‘Callows Pole’ is an Elizabethan ballad.” We roam toward the library. One of the theater kids snaps out of his reverie.

“Are you . . . ?”

“Yes, I am,” Plant says to the teen. “What do you think? Acting? Is it too late?”

In the library, the scholars barely look up from their books. A curator comes over and they talk about the building’s namesake, particularly his trip in 1918 to Appalachia. Cecil Sharp returned with notebooks filled with British folk songs that had died out back home but were still vibrant an ocean away. Plant picks up a book devoted to Appalachian compositions and flips through the pages. He lets out a small gasp. “Look at this: ‘The Cuckoo,’ that’s an old [folk musician] Clarence Ashley song. Alison introduced me to it.”

He quietly sings the first two lines: “The cuckoo is a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies/She brings us glad tidings, and she tells us no lies.” He excitedly thumbs through the pages. “Wow, can you believe what we found? Absolutely spectacular.”"

Robert Plant among other people also had a word :)

Here's his almost full interview with Steven Rosen:

"...Plant’s second solo album titled Principle Of Moments was the time slot during which this interview took place [1983]. His love for Page was obvious by the reverential tones he used in describing the guitarist’s work. A love which he maintains still exists.

Reeling in the Years It’s a very emotional thing to suddenly find that you’re actually confiding ideas which come from absolutely nowhere. It’s a very embarrassing situation initially to open up because a lot of the ideas are tentative. They come out in that space and time and they could be ridiculous. I don’t know if I consciously learned anything from Jimmy. But everything subconsciously. And unconsciously. But it was my intention to try and maintain some intensity on my solo records. Without collecting personnel who were going to sound like clones of Zeppelin and not turning out a record that sounded like ‘Immigrant Song’ and ‘Whole Lotta Love’.

...I don’t really think Zeppelin was ever complacent about the material. By the time we got to Houses Of The Holy and in fact, Physical Graffiti, all the way down there was a conscientious air about Jimmy’s work. And Jimmy’s catalystic efforts to get everybody moving one way or the other.

It’s remarkable that we kept it going for as many records as we did. Really, there wasn’t one record that had anything to do with the one before it. And that’s a great credit when there are so many artists who will unconsciously rest on their laurels and say, “This is it, this is the way it must be.” Complacent? No. We probably grew up together and as we grew up things like ‘All My Love’ and ‘Darlene’ and ‘Ozone Baby’ happened. We did the track ‘Wearing And Tearing’ in 1979 but it ended up on Coda. And we wanted to put it out on a different label under the name of a different artist alongside The Damned and The Sex Pistols because it was so vicious and so emphatically fresh. And if you hadn’t known it was us it could have been anybody at all who was young and virile and all the things that we were then not supposed to be.

"I've got an old friend here who's unused, as he is, to public speaking – Jimmy Page," Plant said to an ovation that interrupted him in mid-sentence."

Robert Plant's band gig at Hammersmith Odeon, December 13, 1983.

Photo by Michael Putland

The first Zeppelin album was pretty vicious. It was people just coming together. In the same way that Pictures At Eleven is a lot smoother and a lot more sophisticated, the qualities of Led Zeppelin I can never be touched, never be matched. Never be equaled and it cannot be anymore. Nevertheless, it was a great gelling of all that talent. It was really just a jam. It was that sort of thing basically. Things like ‘How Many More Times’ and ‘Dazed And Confused’ were really just extensions of how well we actually fitted together. And the crescendos in ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ were off-the-wall but brought in so that they made sense. It’s a long time ago and I’m never gonna touch that point again. You can’t possibly do that.

Wholly Other Houses Jimmy was the first one to do anything after Zeppelin broke up [the soundtrack to Death Wish II]. He said emphatically that he didn’t want that to be considered a solo album. But nevertheless it had great moments. Jimmy was proud of and pleased with my records. It was very emotional between the two of us – always will be. Jonesy thought I could have done a lot better with the first record. He said, “Well, ah, I thought you could have done something a little bit better than that, old chap.” So I said “Well, thank you.” And yet again I’m just the singer of the songs.

I guess it’s a lot harder for a guitarist, for Jimmy, to say, “This is it, this is the right combination” and go out and do an album. Because he’s already done it once and he lived for it and he was really the master of Led Zeppelin. I was just chief whip. I just kind of brought it all together when people faded here and there. It was really a catalystic situation for me. I was just trying to make everybody gel because as such I’m not a musician. So I can see it from another angle."

The Old Racoon, London, December, 1983.

From MOJO The Collection's Series, Early Days 1968-1973 Led Zeppelin

January 2022

“Plant is a folk freak, so perhaps you might expect him to tackle Anne Briggs’s “Go Your Way”, but it’s still strange to hear Robert Plant of all people singing from the perspective of a woman left at home, mending clothes, cooking food and pondering if her man has gone to war. The austerity of Briggs’ original is transformed into something with more jangle, and Plant’s delivery is from the heart; he might be the most unlikely homemaker in the history of rock, but when he creaks “I want to die” you can well believe it. It’s Plant’s best single moment on the record.”

***

[About the cover of Ola Belle Reed – You Led Me To The Wrong] “…That restrain is what makes it work, allowing the song to escape blues rock clichés and focus on the ambiguous lyrics, which – like almost every song on the record – is about love gone bad. The narrator is awaiting execution after shooting his best friend over a love affair – “a man has to fight, for what he thinks is right, even if it puts him in the ground”. One of the small pleasures on Raise The Roof is the way Plant and Krauss frequently swap gender roles; this one is slightly more complicated as Reed was a woman singing from the perspective of a man, and Plant now restores the male gaze.”

***

“Tell me about the two British folk songs on the record…

RP: I’ve been singing “Go Your Way” for years, it’s such a poignant piece. I knew Bert [Jansch] to some degree and after he passed we played a memorial in Scotland and I met Anne Briggs and a few people from that scene, and it’s a lovely place these people – Davey Graham, Robin Williamson – came from. So it doesn’t matter whether something radically strange has happened to me sexually, I’m just going to sing the song because it is a beautiful song. It’s from another time, that Scottish subterranean.”

November 26, 2021

Finally a textual interview for a change, more Alison-centered.

“She said, ‘I don’t think I can do this if you don’t sing the same thing twice.’ It was an absolute revelation. It was very funny, because we didn’t really know each other. We didn’t realise how much fun we were going to have together. I kind of met my match.”

November 27, 2021

Around 22:35.

November 28, 2021

Just enter any UK postcode to listen to this interview if you're from other countries. Robert begins to speak around 2:09:00 and 2:28:38.

Also about Robert's Christmas plans: