October 14, 2005
The Guardian
By Sylvie Simmons
Robert Plant has a new band, an acclaimed album and a bright future. But it's not enough to banish the ghost of Led Zeppelin...
We've arranged to meet on Santa Monica Pier, under the roller- coaster. It's a blazing hot Sunday morning; the air smells of fried food and ozone. Robert Plant - dressed for the occasion in sunglasses, shorts and a Bob Dylan T-shirt - looks remarkably perky for a 56-year-old who last night played one of the most powerful rock shows I've seen this year, with his band Strange Sensation.
He grins. "The energy was unbelievable. You can't do that with a greatest hits band, you can't do that with a tuxedo on. You have to be stirred to do a show like that. But I feel quite fit and strong right now - and it's mostly because I'm happy. If I'm happy everything falls into place. I might even," he adds, "get a tattoo."
Plant is in the right place for it. The pier was his idea - chosen not, as far as I can tell, for its Baywatch associations, but for its relative normalcy compared with the utter weirdness of the rest of celebrity-obsessed LA. After a quick detour via the amusement arcade for a skee-ball contest (Plant won every game and gave his prize tokens to a bemused kid at a nearby machine), we head below deck to a burger and taco stand and sit at a plastic table with an umbrella. It's 45 minutes before any passer-by clocks who he is.
It's an odd business, rock stardom - and rock stardom doesn't come much bigger than being the singer of Led Zeppelin. In the 25 years since the band was laid to rest, Plant has tried all manner of ways of dealing with his past: from outlawing the "Z" word, to writing and recording with Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page (on 1994's No Quarter and on 1998's Walking Into Clarksdale); from playing in a low-key pub band (Priory of Brion) with an old pre-Zeppelin pal, to making a covers album (2002's Dreamland) with his own band, Strange Sensation, which includes five multi-instrumentalist musicians, all younger than he is.
Now, finally, Plant seems to have got the whole thing figured out. He ignores it. Not the music: Zeppelin songs make up around half the set, although often in markedly different form, reflecting his new bandmates' backgrounds in, among other things, world music and trip hop. But all the other stuff - the fawning assistants, the musical complacency - he wants nothing to do with. The opening number at last night's show was Tin Pan Valley, a new song that takes his rock-star contemporaries to task. "My peers may flirt with cabaret/ Some fake the rebel yell/ I'm moving up to higher ground," he sings. "I must escape their hell."
Taking a swig of iced tea, Plant says: "Isn't that the great trap? You become successful and then you have to emulate your success for the people who've put you there, and it becomes the same-old, same-old. There's so much playing by numbers, so many people who compromise or coast.
"Some of it's an addiction to success: I mean, there's nothing like hearing a crowd roar. But then there's also the problem that no matter what you do, there are people who are still waiting for the return of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. You only have to have a tiny, weeny bit of common sense to see that that's been and gone, the times are different now, and this combination of people is very present tense."
Which was one reason why he failed to join ex-bandmates Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, plus Jason Bonham (son of John, the band's drummer, who died in 1980) at the Grammys when Led Zeppelin won their recent lifetime achievement award. Page, apparently hurt, commented: "It wouldn't have taken much to just pop over, would it?"
But Plant was too busy with his new band. Speaking passionately about their musical prowess, attitude, energy and enthusiasm, he gives them credit for intensifying his own. Their second album, Mighty Rearranger - all new material this time, and hailed as Plant's best since Zeppelin - launched a deluge of activity. When the US tour is finished, there are more UK dates and talk of playing Latin America. He is curating the upcoming Womex festival in Gateshead and looking into recording with country singer Alison Krauss.
Plant recently collaborated with Jeff Beck on a cover of the Buzzcocks' Ever Fallen in Love for a John Peel tribute album. He was friends with Peel in the old days - "I had such a good time with John: very stimulating conversation, great sense of humour, very dry" - until the stratospheric success of Led Zeppelin. "With Peel moving on as well, that meant that when we got back we didn't really see each other any more or have bets on the phone on whether Wolves were going to beat Liverpool. But it was a gas seeing Jeff. I seldom see too many people who have been around as long as me or longer."
Even more recently, Plant worked with Pearl Jam on a benefit concert at the Chicago House of Blues, which raised over $1m for victims of Hurricane Katrina. Clarksdale, he says - the small town immortalised in his 1998 album with Page - "survived and is being used for refugees". He waxes nostalgic about the pilgrimage to the delta that inspired Walking Into Clarksdale, how he would walk round, knocking on doors, trying to track down an old friend of blues legend Robert Johnson. "I've never been so ridiculous in my life," he laughs, mocking his own obsessiveness. "When I was at school I had a paper round to earn money and I bought the Robert Johnson release that came out on Philips, the original first album with the gatefold sleeve with a picture of a sharecropper's shack on the front. When I heard Preaching Blues and Last Fair Deal Gone Down - I was probably a year or two behind Keith (Richards) and Mick (Jagger) - but I went, 'This is it.'"
'My parents cut the plug off the record player - I had a little Dansette. I think it was after they heard I Like It Like That by Chris Kenner 17 times in one hour." His father, an engineer who played in a local brass band, liked music, but "he really didn't get much bluer than Johnny Mathis. I think he found Robert Johnson too dark."
What did he make of the not entirely sunny Led Zeppelin?
"It was a rocky journey, really, with my parents. They just didn't understand it at all. Any of it. In the beginning they thought that it would pass. When I was in Band of Joy with Bonzo (John Bonham, who later joined Plant in Zeppelin), they said, 'You take your choice' - and I didn't go back." They became reconciled to his career a few years later - but, Plant says, "by the time they understood it, I think they only understood because I was successful."
The making of Mighty Rearranger coincided with Plant Sr's death. Between takes, Plant would spend time with his dad, even if half the time the old man "didn't even realise I was there". If the event had any effect on the content of the album, Plant says, it was to add a sense of urgency: "There's no time to waste time."
For a few years he suffered from writer's block, much of it brought on by worrying about doing "anything false". But now, he says, he has loads of ideas. "We've been writing bits and pieces as we go along, but at this point we have to think quite hard whether to stay in the same vein or take it into something very minimal, very beautiful and stark. The more I do that goes left or right of centre, the more I get an audience where there's nobody in the crowd any more shouting for anything other than 'Give it to me.'"
As opposed to shouting out for Stairway to Heaven? It's testament to Plant's newfound musical contentment that, at the name of his least favourite Zeppelin song, he doesn't so much as flinch.
"Well, you know, you do a phone interview on the road and it's, 'How are the guys?' 'They're great, they're in the dressing room behind me.' And they say, 'No, no, the guys' - meaning Zeppelin. After all the work that the guys have put into this and that I've put into this - I mean, if you weren't a music critic and you just walked through that door last night with an open mind and forgot about who I was, you would have to say, 'What the hell is this? It's so compulsive.' It was not a demure show. And the crowd last night was wild.
"So it's not about nostalgia. Even when we play a Zep song, it's not nostalgic because we've opened it up." He cites Black Dog as an example. "Where we put that Hungarian Yiddish bit in the middle, and I went into that kind of rap moment, then into a Mose Allison type of thing, hit the high note, then dipped it and turned it around and took it somewhere else. It's good for some people to go, 'What was all that about?'"
Plant cites Bob Dylan's approach to his old material as an inspiration. "He changes the whole thing. That's what I do, because if I have to mimic something I've already done, it would be untrue to everything." During the gig he praised Scorsese's new Dylan documentary, performing in tribute a mind-boggling version of Girl From the North Country that took in Tinariwen, Erroll Gardner, freak folk, Moroccan religious music and roots Americana.
A young couple passing the fast-food stand stop and look over. The man comes over shyly and asks if he is Robert Plant. Removing his sunglasses to shake his hand, Plant chats amiably, even posing for a picture. If rock stardom corrupts and Zeppelinesque absolute rock stardom corrupts absolutely, Plant appears to have come out remarkably unsoiled.
He smiles. "I'm at home with everything. I mean, look at my life, it's amazing, so how can I downgrade anything? And my life would be not half so generous and broad and charming if I didn't sing.
"I'm having such a good time right now, it would be ridiculous to start philosophising about it. I've got my own place to be and it's a great place, full of action, energy and humour. I think it's a great celebration, this period of my life."
Mighty Rearranger is out now on Sanctuary.
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