“TO BE COMPLETELY FREE TO FAIL? THAT WAS A TOTALLY DIFFERENT MINDSET ALTOGETHER…”
“BEING in a band like Led Zep was magnificent and also quite frustrating,” begins Robert Plant. “Because you were in it and it was a democracy, it worked when it worked, and it didn’t work when it didn’t work. But to suddenly be completely free to fail? That was a totally different mindset altogether. And magnificent because of it.”
It is late 2019 and Robert Plant is at home in the remote, wild English-Welsh borders contemplating his past. He is not long back from a north American tour with the Sensational Space Shifters; the disparate collection of musicians who have accompanied Plant on his fantastical musical adventures, on and off, across the past three decades. The tour, Plant reveals, was the last hurrah for his most recent album, 2017’s Carry Fire.
For now, though, future plans are on hold. For an artist as forward-looking as Plant, today he is making a rare detour in the other direction, to the years after Led Zeppelin ended.
The trigger for Plant’s current bout of reflection is a podcast, Digging Deep, which began last May [see panel], in which he discusses one song from his storied career in each episode. The podcast – which finished its second series in December – has subsequently led to a 7” boxset – also called Digging Deep – which gathers together two tracks each from Plant’s first eight solo albums, beginning with his 1982 solo debut, Pictures At Eleven.
“I don’t really need much of a prompt to get excited about stuff,” explains Plant. “I’ve always spent so much time going forward, going from a present tense to a future tense, I’d completely forgotten about the structure and various other aspects of those early songs. I was encouraged by some friends who said, ‘Why don’t you play some of that shit when you’re actually doing gigs with the Space Shifters?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. Why don’t I?’ I suppose it’s because I’m always concentrating on today and tomorrow. So it seemed like a good adventure.”
Adventures, of course, are an integral part of Plant’s ongoing mythology: musical or otherwise. Among its many qualities, Digging Deep traces Plant’s evolution as a solo artist. But as much as Plant’s career is defined by a thirst for change, it also contains an intriguing tension with Zeppelin as well as his friendship with Jimmy Page. It is a complex business, as Plant himself would agree. At the start of his solo career, profoundly affected by the death of John Bonham and the subsequent break-up of Zeppelin, Plant actively distanced himself from his old band. There were occasional recouplings with Page – live and on record – interspaced by largely disappointing Zep reunions. Finally, though, Plant reached a point where enough time had elapsed for him to find pleasure in publicly reconnecting again with his legacy.
But which Robert Plant are we talking about here anyway? The erudite scholar of the blues, perhaps? The tireless advocate of ’60s psychedelia? The well-travelled explorer investigating the congruence between North African rhythms and
Celtic folk? Or maybe the technocrat, eager to embrace emerging studio hardware? As the boxset makes clear, each project has demanded new tactics – new collaborators, too – and Plant has adjusted to match the temperature and shape of the music.
“It’s different processes, different personalities playing the music,” says Plant. “Maybe a different motive behind it. Some of it being from a while back, it had a whole different lyrical or vocal personality. I’m not asking anybody to get into the groove of what I do. I just do it. I’m never gonna be everybody’s favourite. I don’t do it in the way that everybody would probably like it.”
“I’d been in this magnificent fortress – Fortress Zeppelin!”
paper, Robert Plant’s solo career began on December 4, 1980 – the date Led Zeppelin publicly disbanded. The truth is a little more complicated than that. As befitting a band of such magnitude, Zeppelin exerted a gravitational pull from which it was difficult to escape. The loss
