PLANT's ROOTS
Robert Plant talks to Guitarist about the origins and evolution of rock guitar and why he recruited his current players...
How did the new songs on the album come together?
“It’s all different processes because everybody [in the band] is playing all the time. People create little ideas and vignettes and bring them along. We sometimes marry up two totally different styles into one piece and modulate it a little bit. Mostly, everything that we do is based on groove – sitting just behind the beat and getting that really otherworldly thing going on.”
How would you describe Justin and Skin’s guitar playing styles?
“Stylistically and individually they’re from another place. They’ve developed this great empathy and there’s never any sort of musical tension. It’s a very amorphous and beautiful thing.
"I mean both of them are pretty noisy, but stylistically they’re radically different. Skin has really got more in common with Jefferson Airplane and that kind of trippy stuff – brilliant! I couldn’t have found a better place to be with respect to [guitar players].”
What drew your attention to Justin Adams’ playing?
“When I was looking to find a guitar player who didn’t lean backwards I was speaking to Hamid from Transglobal Underground. I said, ‘You guys never play with a rock guitarist,’ – y’know, someone who’s got all those licks that T-Bone Walker’s turning in his grave about – and that’s when Justin came into the picture. He’s brilliant – you couldn’t do better. Quite often he’s disappearing off to Rabat or Essaouira or somewhere like that. I wouldn’t say [Justin’s] style is ‘world music’, but I mean he’s very conversant with the styles and musicians and scales of North Africa and West Africa. He produced the first and third Tinariwen albums [The Radio
Tisdas Sessions and Aman Iman: Water is Life respectively].”
Their playing doesn’t seem to be the traditional Western system...
“Definitely not. I’d had enough of playing with it. I think the rock condition is basically now not so much coming out of the Hubert Sumlin or Otis Rush style of blues-based electric guitar. That music was unsurpassable at the time; all of the stuff that Otis Rush did on Cobra Records (Double
Trouble and that kind of thing) was fantastic. But, who knows what’s happened to rock guitar playing – did it just become hysterical? Did people take too many chemicals? If rock came from the country, Western swing, Delta and Chicago blues genres, surely it ran its course by a certain time.
“It’s gone into powerful, melodic pop masquerading as something else. There’s no such thing as giving hallmarks and titles to any kind of music, but would Slash be doing a Bert Jansch tribute? Probably he could but, y’know, he’s got his place where he lives in his musical world. It became melodic, hard, tough music which gives us today’s batch of [musicians]. Which is fine, but where’s it going and what does it mean?”