Live
Robert Plant and Tricky
Half a century on, Plant returns to the Albert Hall with his hugely impressive backing band
IT has been almost 50 years since Robert Plant first performed at the Royal Albert Hall. The auspicious date was June 29, 1969, when Led Zeppelin played the Pop Proms, on a bill that also included The Liverpool Scene and Mick Abrahams’ Blodwyn Pig. Back then, with Plant not even 21 years old, Zeppelin were – thrillingly – on the ascent. Now, of course, Plant has assumed the role of a sagacious elder statesman, foregrounding experience and reflection over the thundering rock of his former band. But while almost half a century separates the young Plant and the current version, his core principals remain unchanged. Plant, for instance, once described his younger self as “a Black Country hippie full of high ideals and low-cost living”. You might imagine, then, that the stripling Plant would approve of tonight’s psychedelic version of “Misty Mountain Hop”. The song is accompanied by black and white footage projected onto a screen behind the band – we glimpse the 1968 Legalise Pot Rally in Hyde Park (complete with placards reading “Flower Power Now” and “Love Love Love”) that partly inspired the song. If anything, Plant still keeps his freak flag flying: the far out adventures may have begun in the late ’60s, but as he is keen to remind us, they continue in the present day. “Sometimes,” he says as the song ends, “‘Baby I Love You’ just isn’t enough.” At nearly seven minutes, “Misty Mountain Hop” allows each member of Plant’s band, the Sensational Space Shifters, room to showcase their individual talents. Though it is Plant’s two guitarists, Justin Adams and Liam ‘Skin’ Tyson, whose gifts are most evidently on display tonight. Their guitars alternately weave together, scythe across each other or solo independently. Meanwhile, it falls to new boy Seth Lakeman to more closely approximate Jimmy Page’s original riffs on his fiddle. Plant has been playing on and off with this group of musicians since 2002, taking a hiatus for Raising Sand and Band Of Joy before reuniting again in 2012. “It’s all about reforming,” he tells the audience at the Albert Hall, barely keeping a straight face. “So we did.”
This hugely impressive backing band has played a considerable role in Plant’s post-millennium renaissance. Essentially, a disparate group of players drawn from the ranks of Portishead, Cast and east London jazz co-operative the Loop Collective, there’s something almost magical about their ability to fuse contrasting musical influences into something coherent and exhilarating. This is particularly evident on “Little Maggie” and “Carry Fire”, where the seeming rag-tag bag of influences – Desert blues, trip hop, British folk – are persuasively pulled together in a way that is satisfyingly both downhome and mystical. Incidentally, Lakeman is a useful addition, bringing an extra layer to the celebratory atmosphere – though it is possible to miss the ebullient presence of Juldeh Camara, the Gambian ritti virtuoso whose West African polyrhythms were an integral part of Plant’s last few tours.
Later, they play one of the earliest songs they recorded together – “Funny In My Mind (I Believe I’m Fixin’ To Die)” from 2002’s Dreamland album. The song is an update on Bukka White’s “Fixin’ To Die Blues” that Zeppelin sometimes included in live medleys with “Whole Lotta Love”. The music, meanwhile, leans heavily into the West Coast psychedelia of Moby Grape and Love, but as Plant hollers out “I don’t mind dyin’, but I sure hate to leave my children cryin’”, the blues – never far from Plant’s thoughts – asserts itself. Tyson’s diligent but muscular fretwork provides
solid bedding for Adams’ swaggering, rockabilly-infused solo that brings the song to a theatrical conclusion.
The complimentary work of Adams and Tyson is critical to the success of Plant’s latest endeavour. In one of his typically droll references to his early band, he introduces Zeppelin III’s “That’s The Way” with, “Sometime back in 1969, something strange happened. We moved west, sat by a small rivulet and wrote songs…” The song finds Plant occasionally reaching those high-frequency ululations, but the acoustic work done by Adams and Tyson is equally strong: unleashing dextrous flurries across their guitars, devising canny new jams for well-worn themes. “We’re playing to our strengths,” Plant told me in September. “That’s our style. It’s not rock, but it is rock. It’s rock that doesn’t have a title. For the last record
[lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar], the guys from the Grammy committee said to me, ‘We haven’t got a category for this. What is it?’ So I suggested, ‘How about Noisy World Music?’”
The start of the set leans heavily on material from Plant’s last two albums, lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar and Carry Fire – a slow-building run including “New World”, “Turn It Up”, “The May Queen” and “Rainbow”. But Plant remains a consummate interpreter of material. He digs deep into the marrow of Joan Baez’ “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You”, while Lead Belly’s “Gallows Pole” is delivered as a lively ceilidh. Ever the gracious host, Plant pauses during a run of songs that includes “House Of Cards”, “Gallows Pole” and “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” to credit each of the songs’ authors. Later, he brings on Chrissie Hynde for a version of Ersel Hickey’s “Bluebirds Over The Mountain”. It is close to the version they recorded together on Plant’s current album, Carry Fire; a slow-burning rock track carried along by a heavy rhythmic undertow. Hynde stays for The Pretenders’ seasonal hit, “2,000 Miles”. As a song, it is not entirely in Plant’s wheelhouse – he lets Hynde lead, which is perhaps for the best. The band close with a thunderous “Whole Lotta Love”, hooked around Tyson’s heavy, looping riff, groaning and swelling like a brutal piece of blues funk. “The thing we do, most of its about groove,” Plant told me. “It’s important that we get those grooves going. Because everything works on the note. The four on the floor thing, it has to be there.”
There’s something almost magical in the band’s ability to fuse contrasting influences
Above: rocker in the red – Plant live at the Royal Albert Hall, London, December 8, 2017