I was a 13-year-old boy in Kidderminster when I heard Little Richard for the first time,’ says Robert Plant. ‘My parents shielded me from anything that was worldly. I spent my time searching feverishly through my stamp collection or working on my Meccano, and then someone played me Good Golly, Miss Molly. The sound! It was fantastic, indescribable.’
We’re in his changing room at a West Country rock festival and Plant, guitar in hand, is telling me about his remarkable life and career. For a while in the Seventies Led Zeppelin ran the world and Plant was the president, filling stadiums and selling over 300 million albums.
We’re in his changing room at a West Country rock festival and Plant, guitar in hand, is telling me about his remarkable life and career. Above, Plant at the Americana Music Festival
The blond curls are greying now and the washboard stomach no longer quite so taut, and yet now, having just turned 70, he’s still mad about the blues, music that first emerged in the cotton plantations of America’s Deep South. ‘You can hear it in that poignant, plaintive delivery in Laughing Stock by Talk Talk, or in Radiohead’s most grandiose moments of misery, which can be beautiful. Stunning. To me, that’s just as blues-worthy as The Thrill Is Gone by BB King. The blues has so many forms.’
In October, Plant will play alongside Van Morrison at BluesFest in London. ‘I used to open the show for Van in Stourbridge Town Hall in the Sixties, when Here Comes The Night came out,’ says Plant. ‘He was tremendous. He still is. The last time I saw him he was a revelation. As an entertainer, a performer and as a mind.’
Both men owe their careers to the blues. After hearing Little Richard’s motorised rock ’n’ roll version on the radio as a teenager, Plant then discovered Sonny Boy Williamson, Jimmy Reed and Blind Lemon Jefferson, ‘who sold a million records and then froze to death in the back of his limousine’. Across the country in the early Sixties, hundreds of other teenagers were making the same discoveries. ‘All these kids,’ says Plant, ‘trying to get their head around blues chords and notes. It was amazing.’
For a while in the Seventies Led Zeppelin ran the world and Plant was the president, filling stadiums and selling over 300 million albums
The result was an explosion of blues-based bands like Van Morrison’s Them and then, in 1968, Led Zeppelin arrived, injecting mysticism, power and sex into a tiring rock scene. Plant’s personal wealth is estimated at £100 million and he gets a little angry when I ask how he feels about white men becoming millionaires on the back of black men’s ideas. ‘No, you’ve got it absolutely wrong,’ he says. ‘It was all about revelation. These guys were janitors and bus drivers and stuff, and we brought them back into light again. We all played black songs, and the guys came over to the UK. Sonny Boy Williamson was actually in the charts, as was Jimmy Reed.
‘It’s coming up to 50 years since we began,’ says Plant. ‘And the only thing we knew when we got together was it was incredible, from the very first notes.’ Jimmy Page’s ominous, riffing guitar and Plant’s promiscuous wail of desire on songs like 1969’s Whole Lotta Love sounded like nothing that had come before and, possibly, would not be allowed again in the age of #MeToo. Does he look back and regret some of his lewd lyrics? ‘No, they’re fine,’ he says. ‘I was just 20, I was a guy being driven by the excitement of the moment. Anyway, it’s not as saucy as Prince.’
Prince paid his own tribute to Led Zeppelin, playing Whole Lotta Love in his live set, and he wasn’t the only high-profile worshipper at the altar of Zep. In 2015 the three surviving members of the band were offered £500 million to reform and tour. But Plant has no interest in gigging on forever with the same material, like the Rolling Stones. ‘The big boys,’ says Plant with just a touch of disrespect. ‘I don’t think I’ve met them more than about four times in my life. But they continue to blaze on. I heard Mick did a single about Brexit not long ago. Fair play, but perhaps he should have written a white paper.’
Jagger has just turned 75 but others didn’t make it. Drugs and drink took a toll on many of Plant’s contemporaries. In 1980 Led Zeppelin’s drummer John Bonham died in his sleep after a drinking binge.
What does Plant put his own survival down to? ‘I don’t put it down to anything,’ he says. ‘There’s a myth that surrounds artists and writers who don’t spend their time refuting, denying things. I don’t care whether I did or didn’t do too much stuff. Some of the greatest work that’s ever been created, the greatest projection and delivery of music, has come from stoners, but I had nothing to do with all that s***, not since I lost my boy.’
In 1977 Karac, Plant’s five-year-old son with his first wife Maureen Wilson, died of a stomach virus while Plant was on tour in the US. ‘I’ve written four songs about my boy who passed away,’ he says. ‘It lets me cry. You know, with pain like that, it’s never gone.’
Plant is an unusual rock star. Rather than Los Angeles he lives near the Welsh Marches since splitting with girlfriend, and Band Of Joy singer, Patty Griffin in 2014. He’s close at hand to his beloved football team, Wolverhampton Wanderers, recently promoted to the Premier League. Excited about the new season, Robert? ‘Oh yeah!’
He did try living in the US once. ‘I was in Texas and around Nashville,’ he says. ‘It was great but there was too much of that potential sycophancy. You don’t get that in Wolverhampton. I go to the game and it’s, “All right, Rob! Still doing a bit?”’
Even at the height of Zep’s fame Plant claims he was relatively unmoved by the attention. ‘If Rolling Stone magazine said, “What are they doing?” it didn’t matter to me,’ he says. ‘My thinking was, I could always go and study Romano -British history.’
Other rock bands became bloated and self-indulgent. The Rolling Stones long ago became a caricatured greatest hits review, but Plant has continued to innovate. Raising Sand, his album with country singer Alison Krauss, won a Grammy for album of the year in 2009 and last year’s solo album Carry Fire was widely acclaimed.
At 70 Plant considers old age with magnanimity, as long as he can continue to work. ‘Jimmy did an interview for the NME in the early Nineties, and the title was Help The Aged,’ he says. ‘But people don’t clock off at 65 if they’re doing what they love to do.’ Plant picks up the guitar and shapes a chord. ‘Maybe in the end,’ he says. ‘None of it’s worth a dime, but you can have a great time in the middle of it all. If you don’t think it’s magnificent to do this, then you really need to change the cassette and get off the bus quick.’
Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters perform at The O2 alongside Van Morrison on October 26 as part of this year’s BluesFest, bluesfest.co.uk