Plant keeps the blues at heart
Ex-Zeppelin singer on tour with new band
“The other day, my ex-wife presented me with a wallet that had been lost since 1967,” Robert Plant says.
“I pulled out my student bus pass, ripped into shreds almost, and found all these references to where I was when it was last seen, at the age of 19.”
At 65, skin-creased, ponytailed and grey-bearded, the former Led Zeppelin singer contemplates the contents with wonder. “Crumbled bits of newspaper, adverts for the Band Of Joy at Midnight City in Birmingham, pictures of Lead Belly and Sonny Boy Williamson in a striped suit with a velvet collar. There was a set list from my first band, the Black Snake Moan, written on a little card. … When I found that wallet, I found a map of my life. Unbelievable.”
Plant, on tour in England with his latest ensemble, the Sensational Space Shifters, says the blues were a “a formative thing” for him.
“It’s a very commodious condition because everybody feels it from time to time,” Plant says. “It’s still in the way I sing, just throwing it on a different canvas, I think.”
For a rock superstar, Plant is easy company, full of energy, laughter, and informal friendliness. He wanders into a pub close to his London residence without airs, in slacks, T-shirt and hooded all-weather jacket. He grumbles, with much humour, about having “an IT nightmare” because his laptop has crashed with files of his band jamming that he intended to use to write new songs. “It’s skull-crushing,” he said of days spent backing files up, and you wonder why he doesn’t have minions for this sort of thing, but it’s not his style. He’s very hands-on.
Discussing his lifelong pursuit of the blues, Plant says: “I wanted to find America, in all its different colours and horizons, that’s been my trip. I never inhaled a chemical after 1977, but I’m still inhaling America.”
He is incredibly knowledgeable about the blues, its African source and subsequent American tributaries and European tangents, and its near cosmic power when first heard in Britain.
“Robert Johnson stole my heart when I was 14. I tuned into a subculture running
“I NEVER INHALED A CHEMICAL AFTER 1977, BUT I’M STILL INHALING AMERICA.”
ROBERT PLANT
parallel to my shiny grammar-school life,” Plant says.
“It’s ridiculous that British musicians should have been able to get anywhere near it, because it’s based in African scales that don’t have any grounding on these islands, I don’t think.
“We just were moved by the colour of the music, the sound was so evocative and poignant and something that we were probably needing in our composite makeup, filling up a hole, an emotional outlet.”
Plant has contributed songs to a new album from 77-year-old blues guitarist Buddy Guy, whom Plant first saw perform in 1964.
“I’ve been really lucky just to sit in the corner and let him tell me all the stuff about coming up from Louisiana to Chicago through Mississippi,” Plant says.
“He did all that Chitlin’ Circuit, and it got more and more smooth, cause the blacks didn’t want to be dealing with the country blues of Robert Johnson or Charlie Patton; they were waiting for Johnny (Guitar) Watson or Sly Stone. So B.B. King was riding high and it morphed into this kind of Memphis soul thing, and then the game really flipped over, moving through Al Green, all these great singers from the church. Everybody was waiting for the next move that put the past further behind them. We didn’t see it as a cultural rebirth from the manacles to P. Diddy, God help us, but they did.”
The electric blues found a new home in Britain.
“There was a great line from Sonny Boy Williamson who had been touring with the Yardbirds (featuring Jimmy Page), and he said: ‘Yeah, they play a little blues, but only a little!’” Plant says. “Ha ha! Sorry guys! You’ve gotta have a rhythm section that can actually get down in that place!”
British blues, he says, “became a bit psychedelic” through Eastern and hippy influences, “a kind of Indoblues mess. Zeppelin were way more flamboyant. I listen to my performances back then and I don’t know how it went on tape.”