"IT WAS SPECTACULAR IT WAS MAGNIFICENT"

ROBERT PLANT RECALLS "THE HUMOUR AND MADNESS" OF A TIME WHEN ROCK 'N' ROLL WAS STILL FERAL. "JESUS CHRIST, WHERE'S THE FUCKING TROUBADOUR GONE?" HE ASK ANDREW FERRY.

With How The West Was Won, The Song Remains The Same, and this photographic book, it feels like there’s some momentum towards a collective celebration from you surviving band members.

There’s been several books before, and none of them tell the truth, but this is a photographic book, put together by Dave Brolan, who’s very capable. My only thing was, “Can you find anything that nobody’s seen before, apart from all the other wives?”

When you talk about Zeppelin, it always feels like your energy drains a little. Why is that?

I just think about John Bonham. Because we were spars. The West Indians used to use that term for a friend, but we were spars in every respect. We were edgy, and we had shoulders out here. He was very, very important, all the way through my time, from The Crawling Kingsnakes, through the Band Of Joy – all the humour and madness and stuff.

Did listening back to the performances from the LA Forum and the Long Beach Arena on How The West Was Won bring back any fond memories?

It’s not the Bonzo’s birthday party one, is it? When Keith Moon was playing with us? [That show at the LA Forum was on June 23, 1977 – the album documents shows from June 1972.] That night, Moonie came and they set up his drums so we couldn’t see what was going on, and suddenly we had two drummers. We’d been there a week before when Jethro Tull was playing, and Bonzo took a fruit selection – a basket of fruit and vegetables to wang at them, some tomatoes and stuff like that – and he turned round and said to me, “Well, I’ve got a title for their live album…” I said, “What’s that, John?” He said, “Bore ’Em At The Forum !”(laughs to the point of tears). So yeah, The New Yardbirds – it’s come a long way, really.

Back at that first gig in Gladsaxe, Denmark on September 7, 1968, what you couldn’t have foreseen was that your band would revolutionise rock touring on a mass scale.

Sure, and you can also say, oblivious to cause and effect. I always think of that Doors album, Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mine – what a great title. I mean, nobody had a clue. There were just more people all the time. And then the streets were jammed with people, and there were roadblocks, and there were people climbing up the stage stark naked. And there was Janis Joplin helping me out with my sore throat by giving me neat vodka with a teaspoon of orange – a half pint of it! All that stuff was fantastic. Going to America, the furore and the insane energies were so overwhelming, you’d be exhausted just by looking at a crowd. Just, “What the fuck – what’s that?”

As a touring operation, did it feel streamlined and well-organised?

It wasn’t. But to the best of everyone’s ability, it was. Because there hadn’t been anything like it on that scale before. So where could it stop? It didn’t stop. It kind of went on and on, and we ended up in the Guinness Book Of Records a few times. We played in Florida to 57,000 people at Tampa Bay Stadium [on May 5, 1973], and we didn’t even have an opening act. There was another big one in Atlanta [the previous day], but in Tampa, we didn’t have an opening act, the stage wasn’t covered, and there was a torrential storm, so the US Air Force were up in the sky. And they were using radar to plot how long the storm would be if it came across, and once the crowd started climbing up the stage, and everything went up in the air, I found myself running as fast as I possibly could, with a kid under each arm, to get out of there. I mean, the furore and chaos – it was just a great excuse for the fascists down there to come in with their see-through shields and truncheons, and they came diagonally across, so as we got into the plane and took off into this storm, popping a Valium on the kids’ sandwiches as we went up. We looked back down and could see all the lights flashing, and this pincer action of the authorities.

It sounds like that scene from Apocalypse Now where the female dancers cause a riot and they have to escape by helicopter.

It was like some sort of awful dance competition of organised violence. Nowadays, if it’s raining at Glastonbury… everything’s covered. They have isolation transformers, nobody gets killed from weather. It’s all planned, there’s people with laptops everywhere tap-tapping away. (Laughs) What a fucking mess! Jesus Christ, where’s the fucking troubadour gone? Or the griot in the Tuareg world who just comes through and tells a story about his family.

So you remember those crazy mega-gigs in the early ’70s fondly, because they were a leap into the unknown?

But isn’t it amazing, because we played the Bath Blues Festival with the [Jefferson] Airplane, and then Michael [Eavis] came along and said, “I’ve got a farm nearby…”, and from those glorious days… That was the great thing about those times, that nobody really had a map – a literal map, or any kind of idea or theory of what the fuck was going on. We came to America in 1969 or ’70, maybe three, four, five times, I think – so much so, that Carmen, my daughter, thought somebody else was her dad. And I really hope that isn’t true! The Beatles and the Stones stopped playing in the mid-’60s, because they couldn’t hear themselves. Did you find the actual playing satisfying?

Oh no, it was spectacular. It was magnificent, because we’d just shout out songs as we were going along. Like Jack White does now, to his credit. He’s one of the real people on the scene – proper job! But no – it was amazing. Who knew what was gonna happen next? “Wow, look at that, look at that !I am the golden god!” There couldn’t be anything more absurd than that, really, and so I said it. But I was standing in a palm tree at Bonzo’s birthday party. I couldn’t see anything more ridiculous, and so funny, at those times. And you know, there were no automatic tuners: we used to tune up with a harmonica and a guitar backstage and hope for the best. It was stone age.

Fast forward to December 10, 2007, and Led Zeppelin’s reunion concert at O2 Arena. In the aftermath, you said you’d felt a discomfort during the longer instrumental passages, that you didn’t know what to do with yourself.

I thought the O2 was a triumph. (Pause) Triumph is the wrong word. That’s how it would be construed. Rather, it was a lot of concentration and focus, turning out to be great on the night. We’ve had a few reunions apart from that – Live Aid [in Philadelphia in 1985] and so on, which were a shambles – my voice was fucked, or there were tuning issues – whatever it was. So those were a tragedy. But what could I do when they were playing? I could enjoy them. Because I was no longer in it, I was a voyeur. So I didn’t have a responsibility to make it work with my hips, or my chest, or my shoulders, or do some kind of strange marionette job. I was just enjoying it, and it was really good.

But you skipped the formal aftershow at the O2, and made your own fun at the Marathon Bar – a kebab shop/after-hours boozer in Chalk Farm. What can we read into that?

Yeah, and the French guy with the bolero jacket was playing rock’n’roll guitar in there. They’ve since changed it in there – it’s fancy. But anyway, for what it was, O2 was great, and you know what was really good? Bonzo’s mum, Joan – she was holding court. Jason [John Bonham’s son, who stood in for his late father as Zeppelin’s drummer at O2] had his dressing room, and in there, he had his grandma, and Deborah Bonham [Bonzo’s sister], and Pat, John’s wife. And it was just really funny, because Joan always was quite glib, and she’d been more or less a second mum to me when I was 16, 17, because Bonzo and Pat lived in a trailer behind their shop. So, Joan’s sitting in state with her kind of chiffon and silk around her shoulders, and she looks at me and says, “You haven’t changed a bit, Robert – still got all those girls screaming!” I said, “It’s mostly blokes now, Joan!”

The Zeppelin songs you revisit with your current band are the folkier ones, Led Zeppelin III tracks like Gallows Pole and That’s The Way. Is that the stuff you’re most proud of, or still feel in tune with?

That one’s such a beautiful beast. All artists talk about the difficult third album. When Jimmy and I went up to Snowdonia, to Bron Yr Aur, That’s The Way was one of the triumphs of that time, and what the fuck did we know about anything? We just knew that we were able to write songs together, and share silent company, and really try to go somewhere.

A few years ago, you told me a story about how you met Joe Strummer for the first time in autumn 2002 – a month or so before he passed away. The way you told it, you both pulled up in the car park at Rockfield studio in South Wales at the same moment. You each got out of your respective cars, and at a certain point on the walk to the entrance, you recognised each other, tried to speed up and slow down to avoid talking, but eventually you had to shake hands and say hello, and you ended up spending the whole day chatting and having a whale of a time. As well as two icons of differing rock generations, you were also two staunch reunion refuseniks, turning down the biggest pay-outs in live music. Did you talk about that stuff? I don’t really remember. The thing is, when the deal goes down, Strummer and so many of us can trace a part of our DNA back to Jerry Lee Lewis, and the rockin’ times – Jack Scott coming out of Detroit on Carlton Records singing Leroy, that sort of thing. There was a little bit of that in him. When you’re with someone that’s part of the great network of the histories of rock’n’roll, I don’t think, “Oh, the snare drum was shit on London’s Burning,” or anything like that, and he doesn’t have to think that some of my machinations back then were a bit absurd, because they were both just what they were, so once you’re one-on-one with somebody, everything else disappears, unless either of you have a problem.

You even had that attitude at the height of punk, when you and Jimmy Page turned up to see The Damned play at the Roxy club in January 1977. How did that conversation go, when you chatted afterwards?

Well, they’re troupers, aren’t they? Rat Scabies tried to get a job in my band when he was at Rockfield. I can’t remember who was drumming with us at that time – I think it was Phil Collins! – but whatever it was, it was just great. Because that album that Nick Lowe produced [1977’s Damned Damned Damned], with Fan Club, New Rose and all that, it was just exactly what everybody needed. When you ask me what was I thinking about, what would I do with myself during a 10-minute solo, I was probably wishing I was in The Damned! (Sings) “For my fan club!’ For a minute. And then happy to come back in when it’s my turn.