Away from the tour, I didn’t live that far from where Jimmy lived in those days, in Sussex, and a lot of time we would go to each other’s houses for lunch on a Sunday, that sort of thing. But it was a different Jimmy Page once you got on tour. That’s true of any artist, but magnified in Jimmy’s case because of the vastness of what Led Zeppelin had become by then [1973]. All of them were normal types when they were at home. John Paul Jones is still with the same wife now he had then. It was probably more difficult for Jimmy, though, to build a solid foundation of real friends, because he is by nature a little reclusive. Then becoming as big as they got, that sealed his fate, in a way.
—Phil Carson, former Atlantic Records Senior Vice President, Classic Rock Special: Led Zeppelin, 9th Edition, 2025
"I have a funny story about Jimmy. It was the one and only time I ever met him. I went over to this Guitar Center thing honoring Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap. In fact, I ended up producing four tracks on their next record because of that night."
"I showed up with Eddie [Van Halen] and my boys. Hey, we're going to meet Jimmy Page, a big deal, right? Jimmy's standing there greeting everyone. He points at me."
He added: "I think he's pointing at Ed, of course, but it's me, and he motions for me to come over. He said, 'You have something that these other guys here don't.' And I go, 'What's that, Jimmy?' He said, 'You understand and I understand, but those other guitarists don't. We were studio players. They don't know what that means.'"
According to the Toto guitarist, Page said that he had previously read somewhere that Lukather felt like he wasn't being taken seriously due to his focus on session work. Encouraging his colleague, Page disagreed with that notion strongly:
"'That's the opposite of the absolute truth. That sets you above these other guys,' Jimmy said. I asked if I could give him a hug, and tell people he had said that. He laughed, gave me a hug and said, 'Sure.' That meant the world to me."
Interview with Steve Lukather, Ultimate Guitar, 3 December 2025, originally from Forbes
Terry Reid is sanguine about being forever known as the man who turned down Led Zeppelin. But he’d rather be known as the man who put together Led Zeppelin. “Jimmy [Page] asked me what he should do with the band,” explains Reid, Zooming in from his home in Indio, California. “He needed a singer who could sing around those guitar licks, and not everybody could do that. I’d seen Robert with John Bonham, so I said to him, ‘Not only is Robert perfect, you’ve got to get the drummer – he’s an animal!’”
You’re probably sick of talking about missing out on the chance to front Led Zeppelin. But how do you think you’d have fared amid the subsequent madness surrounding them?
TR: There’s a lot of different bands we all could’ve been involved in. And, you know, [Led Zeppelin] did well! Five billion people can’t be wrong. So I figured that we actually did a real good job putting it together. I would still be interested in working with Jimmy [Page], because he’s got a lot more to offer guitar-wise than Zeppelin licks, and he works really well with people. Maybe we could get a piano player. He’s been to a couple of my gigs, so you never know what’ll happen next.
An Audience With Terry Reid, Uncut, October 2023
In 1968, fast-rising soul singer Aretha Franklin famously declared: "There are only three things happening in England: the Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Terry Reid".
TR: I actually got to be friends with Aretha, which I could never quite get over. On the inside she was very warm and tender, but you didn't mess with that woman. The lady was a force. She drove [label head] Ahmet Ertegun crazy at Atlantic. Obviously she's the greatest singer I ever heard in my life. So when I finally got to meet her I'm thinking: "Do I tell her how much I love her voice?" We were talking one day, and she suddenly just stopped, gave me a funny look and went: "I never figured you loved me as much as you do. But you really do, don't you?" And I burst into tears.
Given that this is an interview for Classic Rock, I have to mention the whole Led Zeppelin thing…
I'm not interested in that. There's nothing more to say about it, y'know.
Okay, I understand. But if you'll indulge me, I just wondered whether the chemistry between Robert Plant and John Bonham was immediately obvious to you?
They were frigging perfect. Nobody looks at it like a group concept. If Robert Plant hadn't have joined the group, then you wouldn't have had John Bonham. For me, there's only been two or three drummers that could even stand in the same room with Bonham. If you want a rock'n'roll drummer, don't fuck around. Get one that's heavy-duty. Not only that, John Bonham had the most incredible timing. Robert could sing all those phrases that Jimmy Page played on guitar, which makes it very musical, but John Bonham really gave the group its meat. My whole comment now on Led Zeppelin is God bless them. It was a magic thing that happened. And ten billion people can't be wrong.
And you helped make it happen.
Yeah. Put it this way, I was part of the team that made it happen.
Classic Rock, October 2025
Robert Plant and other stars pay tribute to Terry Reid—also extracted from the October '25 issue of Classic Rock
This is in his boat house by the Thames—in a garden swing he had in the front room. The 'trews' are spectacular. Musicians didn't seem to have a problem back then inviting you into their homes. We spent a whole day at Eric Clapton's place, Hurtwood, and I swear George Harrison was hiding upstairs. Chris Welch spotted him looking out of an upstairs window!
—Barrie Wentzell, excerpt from his interview promoting his new book Should've Been There, MOJO, November 2025
Halford’s mention-in-passing of Page and Plant – specifically not Led Zeppelin – is unintentionally revealing. Long-overlooked is the fact that when they were introduced on stage at the JFK that evening by Phil Collins, it would not be as Led Zeppelin but individually: “Mister Robert Plant, Mister Jimmy Page and Mister John Paul Jones…” In that order.
The backdrop to Zeppelin’s unofficial reunion was besmirched by more ‘personal issues’ even than Sabbath’s.
Plant was 37 and intent on putting as many miles between his solo career and his past in Zeppelin as possible. He’d even cut his hair – a bit. Buttoned up his shirt – a bit. Still wiggled his ass, but don’t you dare mistake him for one of those clichéd oldsters like Whitesnake. Robert was an artist from a far higher musical order, you see. A sort of Peter Gabriel intellectualism seasoned with white Ray Charles classiness and black Robert Johnson filthiness. Not heavy metal.
His first two solo albums had gone gold and platinum in Britain and America and several other key territories. But his third, Shaken N’ Stirred, was a mess; one minute poor man’s Steve Winwood, the next poor man’s Bowie, the next… Released just weeks before Live Aid, it barely scraped the Top 20 in the UK or US.
Fortunately for Plant, he had an ace up his rolled-up Miami Vice sleeve. The unexpectedly huge success of his mini-album The Honeydrippers: Volume One, an almost throwaway idea of Atlantic Records supremo Ahmet Ertegun’s to record some of his personal R&B standards from the 1950s. Ertegun took the idea to Plant after being double-wowed by his backing band, named the Honeydrippers, complimented in the studio by Chic’s Nile Rodgers, David Letterman’s musical director Paul Shaffer, and a couple of old-school session cats named Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. The public’s indifference to Plant’s vain attempts to become 80s-relevant was matched only by the ecstasy it expressed at Plant wailing on Rockin’ At Midnight, or Jimmy Page rockabilly soloing on I Get A Thrill.
Plant said it was his favourite-ever non-Zep project. It was also his most successful: Top 5 in the US and Australia, No.1 in Canada, plus a top-three US single. When ticket sales for the Shaken ‘N’ Stirred US tour that summer dragged, Plant started doing more Honeydrippers material and suddenly new life was injected into the tour.
By coincidence, Page’s first post-Zep project, teaming up with former Free and Bad Company singer Paul Rodgers in The Firm, had also taken off in the US that year. Their album had gone gold and their tour dates were selling out.
Phil Carson, then managing both Page and Plant, says the initial approach from the Live Aid team had been for The Honeydrippers, and on that basis Plant had readily agreed. “Then as soon as it got out that Robert was doing it everyone kept asking: ‘Is Jimmy doing it too?’”
As Page had played on the Honeydrippers record, Carson suggested he and Robert do Live Aid as The Honeydrippers. But when Carson called Page, “He said he’d only do it as Led Zeppelin. Robert was a bit lairy about it. But because it was for a good cause, he agreed.”
All obstacles seemingly surmounted, the whole thing nearly came crashing down again when one of the American TV bigwigs told Carson: “Well, you know, Led Zeppelin’s over, who cares?”
Wait… did he say ‘famine’ or…?
John Paul Jones was not actually invited to Philadelphia. “I had to barge my way into Live Aid,” he recalled bitterly. Paul Martinez, the bassist from Plant’s band, was already there, meaning Jones had to play keyboards. “Plant went: [adopts Brum accent] ‘Ooh, bloody ’ell!’ But I elbowed my way in.”
Augmented by former Chic drummer Tony Thompson, thrown off course by the bull-in-china-shop arrival of Phil Collins, Led Zeppelin’s performance at the Philadelphia Live Aid was ridiculed ever after as a total shambles, to the point where they refused to let the footage be included on the official Live Aid DVD. From where I was standing, side-stage, Led Zeppelin at Live Aid in Philadelphia remains one of the most singular, otherworldly spectacles I’ve witnessed in more than 40 years in the music business.
Zeppelin in America still exuded some sort of mystical superpower, and you could feel it everywhere that day. Zeppelin were the only act that everyone backstage – from roadies to superstars – stopped what they were doing to stand in awe and pay witness. Rock as godless religion. Only in America, baby-baby-baby.
“My main memories,” Page told me, “were of total panic.”
Plant had even been moved enough to consider the previously thought impossible. “I’d forgotten what it was like… people crying all over the place… something far more powerful than words can convey.”
However, Phil Carson recalls that when Page joined Plant on stage at a show in New Jersey a week after Live Aid, “as soon as Jimmy came on it was like the fucking roof came off the place!” Afterwards, “Plant was absolutely fuming. He says: ‘Is it always like that when Jimmy Page gets on stage?’ I said: ‘No, but it’s always gonna be like that when Jimmy Page gets on stage with you.”
The result was the first of several failed attempts over the coming years to try to put the led back into zeppelin. Rehearsing in Bath with drummer Tony Thompson, “the first day was all right’, reckoned Jones. Then cracks began to appear. Robert moaning about Jimmy – who was off heroin but still drinking heavily – being slow.
Then Thompson was in a car crash, which Plant saw as an omen. Jones recalls he and Plant drunk “and Robert saying nobody wants to hear that old stuff again. I said: ‘But Robert, everybody is waiting for it to happen!’”
An interview with Robert Plant. By Keith Cameron, MOJO, October 2025
"I'll never write a book." He smiles and offers his hand. "What did Donovan say?" 'What's been did's been hid.'"
Robert Plant Talks Album, U.S. Tour With New Band Saving Grace: ‘They’ve Saved My Sanity’
By Andy Greene, Rolling Stone, 16 July 2025
In February 2019, Robert Plant booked a trio of shows at tiny, off-the-radar theaters across England with a new band he dubbed Saving Grace. Each night they played an eclectic mix of covers like Donovan’s “Season of the Witch,” Townes Van Zandt’s “Nothin,'” Patty Griffin’s “Standing,” and even a couple of Led Zeppelin songs largely utilizing acoustic instruments, including banjo and accordion.
“I did this basically to keep me away from the tedium between projects,” Plant tells Rolling Stone while chilling in a hotel room between shows in Lucca, Italy, and Juan-les-Pins, France. “I just liked the idea of getting out and playing these tiny weenie little shows, and just showing up with no expectations, nothing at all. It was a totally different way of enjoying myself without having any kind of professional ambition beyond just enjoying the evening.”
It didn’t take long for Plant to discover an undeniable musical chemistry among himself, drummer Oli Jefferson, guitarist Tony Kelsey, banjo and string player Matt Worley, cellist Barney Morse-Brown, and vocalist Suzi Dian. When space cleared up in all their schedules, more Saving Grace shows were booked with very little advance notice. They also started laying the groundwork for a studio album, though progress was slow due to the pandemic, the second Plant/Krauss album, 2021’s Raise the Roof, and a tour that kept the duo on the road for three years.
When the Plant/Krauss tour wrapped up in the fall of 2024, Plant was finally able to focus all of his energy on the Saving Grace studio LP they started back in 2019. The self-titled album is coming out Sept. 26, and leadoff single “Everybody’s Song” can be heard right now. A U.S. tour kicks off Oct. 30 in Wheeling, West Virginia.
We phoned up Plant to discuss the formation of Saving Grace, recording the album, tour plans, his time on the Outlaw Tour last year with Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, and why he’ll never write a memoir or sign off on an official biopic.
Go back a few years and tell me how you met Suzi Dian and formed Saving Grace.
Well, it’s a little bit more profound than that. I reside and live in the same area that I have been most of my life, with a few sojourns in Morocco, and I spent some time enjoying the wonders of Austin, Texas. But I always come back to the Welsh Borders and to the Shire as I call it, the beautiful green. That’s always been a very important part of my being. But I always found it really difficult to transfer my enthusiasm and lock into the music of the area where I came from.
Around 1980 or 1981, after the passing of my dear friend, John Bonham, I retreated back again to the Shire and started to rebuild and look around for musicians who were nearer to me so that I could just push musical ideas around without any great shapes or ambition or promise.
The first three solo albums that I made following the demise of Led Zep were in the company of local people. And then I never moved back again into that throng of people. And in truth, I don’t think I was ever around long enough to find, if you like, the lost chord.
More recently, I did strike up a relationship with Matt Worley. He had been raised on some of the similar idioms and great nuances of English and Irish folk music. We had an affinity and we had common ground, and that’s really how the whole thing began. I found somebody who I could connect with where I didn’t get a vague blank expression if I started enthusing about the artists that really inspired me. And through my adventures with Matt and Tony Kelsey, we started amassing a bunch of songs.
Tell me about singing with Suzi Dian.
In recent years, I’ve worked with both Alison Krauss and Patty Griffin. It was such a departure for me to come out of [my band] Strange Sensation into this world of sharing vocals and working around another singer, adapting to someone else’s vocal style. And so I wanted to try and see whether or not there was another voice for me.
I was introduced to Suzi and to her husband, the drummer, Oli Jefferson, and I just really enjoyed her plaintive style and the freshness of her and enthusiasm of her approach to the songs I presented. It was almost like something I couldn’t have even imagined for such a long time. There it was. And there it is. And there you have it.
Tell me more about what impressed you about her.
I know that sounds a bit inane, but she was coming from a different angle. She’s a contemporary singer in a world of song that I’ve not experienced. So she obviously had to modify what she was doing, and I had to take in some of her nuance. It just worked. It feels like it’s another one of those combinations that feels really natural.
The shows started very gradually in early 2019. How did they evolve from there?
We do a show here, a show there. Now currently we’re playing 10 shows in Europe, but in very pleasing circumstances without putting any onus on anything at all, except for just enjoying the evening.
Did the pandemic blunt some of the group’s momentum?
Well, I didn’t even see that way. It wasn’t momentum. It was just like, “Shall we do this? Are you free? Are you available to do this show?” Or, “How do you fancy going down to South Wales and doing this?” There was no sort of trajectory. It’s similar now to how it was pre-Covid. It’s just a very charming and quite exciting combination of personality and musicianship. It’s lovely. I do view this band as my saving grace. They saved my sanity, really.
You took off several years to create your second record with Alison Krauss. Did you always know in the back of your head that you’d go back to Saving Grace when that was done?
My work with Alison has been an absolute rebirth for me in the whole idea of what I can be and do and share as a performer. So I didn’t see myself jumping from pillar to post. I just see it as a continuum of just enjoying what I can do. My adventures with Alison were just a dream, really a dream. And Alison had her plans with Union Station, and I thought, “Well, I’m singing, I’m in good voice. I’m just going to keep doing things, and hopefully our paths will cross when we’re both playing maybe the same town or the same festival or whatever it might be.”
How did this Saving Grace album start?
Well, we began with one microphone on a mic stand in a field adjacent to Matt Worley’s place. We had a little desk set up. And we would get nowhere nearer than about four yards away from each other, and one by one go up to the microphone, and spray the microphone. On the last track on the record, you can hear some birds singing because we’d individually play a part and come away from the mic.
It was an experiment that took me back to Physical Graffiti with Led Zeppelin when I did quite a few vocals outside. I really enjoyed the whole idea of being out there rather than in the constraints of a studio. It began with “Higher Rock,” I believe, and maybe even “Chevrolet.” That was probably about 2019 or ’20. And then I’d go off somewhere else, and then we’d come back to it.
A friend of Steve Winwood’s got an old farm down in Gloucestershire, and he used to be quite involved with the very early days of Traffic. And so as the conditions changed and the world started to open up, occasionally we’d go down to his barn and see what we would do there. It’s really great, very pastoral.
I think maybe we made one sojourn to Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios to try and see how we would get on with a different drum sound or whatever it was. But it’s been pretty organic all the way through. I know that’s a very overused word, but that’s how it is. Nothing was riding on it, nobody was thinking beyond maybe putting this record out. Some shows in the U.S. later in the year might be about the zenith of anything that anybody ever imagined really. There’s never any sort of aspiration.
Whereas when I came back after the demise of Led Zeppelin, I was in a different place, a different headspace, a different time in my life. I was really quite determined to take my music with a lot more drive, whereas this seems to be, it seems pretty pastoral really.
In Saving Grace, I don’t think any of us live more on about eight miles apart. It’s a very familiar combination of people in every respect, because I guess we’ve come out of the same area completely. There’s a coherence even in our humor. We’ve got a good thing going on without where there’s no huge imperatives. It’s just really nice.
Let’s talk about some of the songs on the record. You cover Moby Grape’s “It’s a Beautiful Day Today.” What drew you to that song?
Oh, 1967 drew me there. I used to live in a house full of very wayward New Age guys from the urban spore in the middle of England. And we were just transfixed by Moby Grape. They just had so many things going on in that group, so many voices, and with Jerry [Miller] and Skip [Spence], the great guitar player, it was like a clarion.
That whole era to me was just … there was so many new avenues of how youth culture, guys in their early twenties … It was the [Jefferson] Airplane and it was just a whole sort of a new wave coming over from the West Coast. It was almost like it kind of bludgeoned the bubblegum pop, moved it completely out of the way, and asked a lot of important questions of the listener.
“It’s a Beautiful Day Today” is such a very beautiful and sweet piece, which comes from Bob Mosley, a guy whose life was to take so many twists and turns and curves and beautiful great stuff.
You introduced Memphis Minnie to quite a few people when you covered “When the Levee Breaks” in Led Zeppelin. What drew you back to her for “Chevrolet”?
Well, I heard “Chevrolet” initially when it came out of Como, Mississippi. It was a drum five piece, which I think Alan Lomax had recorded in ’59 when Shirley Collins was traveling with him. Someone called the song “Chevrolet.” They’d taken the Memphis Mini song and moved it into a very great rhythmic hypnotic piece, which I knew.
And then of course, a dear friend, Donovan, moved it along again. Hey gave it another title, a very typical Donovan title, of “Hey Gyp (Dig the Slowness).” I love it. It’s always been one of those things like “Bald Headed Woman” that were coming out of the Delta. I mean, the music of Memphis Minnie is all over the world right now.
You also cover some new artists, and some of them are relatively unknown. Where did you come across “Higher Rock” by Martha Scanlan?
I have no idea. I cannot, even for the life of me, remember. I think when me and Alison and others were looking for songs … we were not alone in that adventure because the magnificent Henry [T-Bone] Burnett was never far out of the picture. It may have been Buddy Miller, it could have been T-Bone, it could have been me. I can’t remember.
How about “Ticket Taker” by Low Anthem?
Oh man, what a record that was. I mean, that whole album [Oh My God Charlie Darwin] is mesmerizing, just absolutely mesmerizing. And it’s a song that had been carried around. I’ve got a book here in this hotel room, which is loaded with the titles and with the little vignettes and cutlets of ideas that come from everywhere. Quite a lot of them actually come from between my ears, mysteriously. But that record was such an inspiration to me. I think Low Anthem had a really great effect on me.
“Everybody’s Song” by Low is amazing.
That’s the third track that I’ve borrowed from [their album] The Great Destroyer. I find them absolutely spellbinding. I saw them live a couple of times in London, and they were always so impressive and beautiful.
You’ve never toured outside of Europe with Saving Grace. Are you looking forward to the upcoming U.S. shows?
Of course I am. It’s just that sometimes we play in South Wales in a theater for 200 people, and sometimes we go and do this. And it would seem appropriate because a lot of the songs are really inspired by the American song itself.
It’s going to be wonderful to see and feel how it turns out for these people because it’s not something they ever imagined. I think they were always waiting for me to just say, “OK, well that’s it now. I’m going to form a Link Wray tribute band.” I think it would be good to enjoy it through their eyes as well.
How was your experience on the Outlaw Tour last summer? I’m sure there were some people in the audience every night not super familiar with your work.
I never even thought about it like that, really. I just thought of what Alison and I had to offer with the musicality, with the players that I was very fortunate to be in the company of. I thought it was appropriate that we weren’t going to be playing too many pieces that perhaps were super well known. Although the two records that we have made so far have got a little bit of recognition.
I just warmed to the whole idea of that Outlaw deal. I always wanted to be a sort of Grateful Dead cavalcade. I loved the whole idea of musicians traveling together from town to town, the whole romance of it all. And of course, I guess really it’s anything but romantic really when you think about how the years have gone, and how they leave us all.
But I do remember in about 1971, Jimmy Page and I had this idea. We’d been writing Zeppelin III, and we’d really got into the whole idea of a cooperative of music. We knew that it would be feasible, probably disastrous … I think Ronnie Lane tried later on to actually move through towns in an old converted bus, and really just pull up in small towns with a little generator, and just play. So I guess really you think about Rolling Thunder Revue, and you think about that train [the Festival Express] that ran across Canada with Janis [Joplin] and was it Joni [Mitchell] too?
I believe it was the Grateful Dad, Janis Joplin, the Band, and the Flying Burrito Brothers.
It must have been pandemonium, thinking about it the way that we do things now. I guess at the time I found that romance something really great. And they say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But I really enjoyed [the Outlaw tour], and I enjoyed Willie [Nelson]. I loved his family. And the master there, sort of moving through the spheres … Dylan, he was just otherworldly and every foible, every twist and turn, he’s on something else. I just love it.
Did you watch Bob’s set many nights?
Yes, I did. And I saw him in Wolverhampton [in November 2024], out of all places, too. He told me he was going to England, and he said he was playing in Wolverhampton. I mean, it’s the industrial heartland. It’s where the Industrial Revolution began more or less, and the aftermath of it all. I said, “That’s going to be amazing, you doing that.” I think he was doing two nights in Wolverhampton. I was flabbergasted. So I went to see him, and it was better for me because it was a closed space. It was a 3,000 capacity room, and I just felt that it was like spoken word. I was really moved. It was a great inspiration. I thought it was magnificent.
The two of you obviously come from very different worlds. But you’re both the singers of very, very famous songs you hear every day on the radio. The easy path is to just go onstage every night and sing those songs just like they sound on the radio. But you’ve both always resisted that easy path.
I take your point. We opted out from what we might’ve been, and where we might’ve gone in a life path because we had some expressionism. We had something to say, something to offer, some nuance. Look at the prolific nature of his work, like “False Prophet” from Rough and Rowdy Ways. You know that guy’s got the whole thing down, and that’s not an easy place to be.
My world was a different world, but I escaped from the tedium of revisiting past successes. And repeating the chimes of great choruses in the same style would be more or less doing exactly what I tried to avoid in the first place. You have to keep it fresh.
Not that long ago, I went to see Dion DiMucci. His voice was immaculate. And he has such a groove when he sings, but of course, I was exactly how people are towards me. I was waiting for the particular songs. And of course, he actually had progressed into giving us these songs in a different fashion. You have to stimulate yourself. You cannot become part of that great … The jukebox is a jukebox. That’s fine. I get that. Times come and go. I’ve had a great time as a singer getting through it, getting away with it, getting beyond it, getting in front of it, and that’s where I belong. Somewhere in the middle of all that.
Speaking of past success, the Led Zeppelin documentary was pretty great. It wrapped up around the time of the second album, though. Fans are hoping for a second one that finishes the story. Would you have any interest in that?
I think the fact that it ended before we needed to take a shave in the morning was probably the most appropriate. I think that kind of shook up the joyous instance of everything, and then we had to go out and buy a razor, and that was it.
Do you ever think about writing your memoir?
Not a chance.
Why?
I’m going down with the ship, and so is my memory.
There’s been a glut of rock & roll biopics recently, and a lot more are coming. Do you think the day will ever come where you’ll sign off on a biopic about your life?
No chance. I’m back on the ship, and I’m going down with it.
The three surviving members of Led Zeppelin were interviewed about the making of Physical Graffiti for Uncut magazine's 50th anniversary special celebrating the album. By Michael Bonner, April 2025
Robert Plant: 'I've so much more to learn, to steal from, to be'
By Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, Financial Times, 19 September 2025
"You'll be pleased to know", Robert Plant says on meeting the FT, "that I was an articled clerk at a chartered accountant in Worcestershire."
The rock legend's brush with double-entry bookkeeping occurred in 1965, the year he met his future Led Zeppelin bandmate John Bonham. It ensued from his civil-engineer father's insistence that he get a proper job instead of frittering his life away caterwauling with loud bands in disreputable Midlands clubs. Filial piety impelled Plant to obey — at least for a fortnight.
"All I could see", he recalls, "was a small manual adding machine and the worksheets of the comings and goings of a local ironmonger. I jotted down the pluses and minuses and looked out of the window at some lady going by with a beehive hairdo, like another Dusty Springfield, and I knew I couldn't hack it."
Accountancy's loss was Led Zeppelin's gain. Plant and drummer Bonham, a fellow Midlander, formed the group in 1968 with guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones. He was soon apotheosised as one of rock's most celebrated voices, his electric wail rebounding the length and breadth of the globe. Zeppelin went on to rack up more than 300mn record sales, generating enough money to fill every ledger book in Worcestershire. It seems the accountancy profession ended up profiting from his labours after all. "They certainly have," he says.
We meet on a warm summer's day in the upstairs room of a pub. The location is Primrose Hill in London, a picturesque neighbourhood with a faint trace of former bohemianism amid the fancy boutiques and expensive property. One such vestige is Plant himself, who has a house nearby.
The singer, who turned 77 in August, enters the room walking rather stiffly with a stick, but otherwise radiates vivacity. The "golden god" as he once dubbed himself — tongue-in-cheek, but the nickname stuck — still has his empyrean mane of hair. It corkscrews in profusion to his shoulders, amber and brown with streaks of grey. He has twinkling blue eyes, a white goatee and a puckish air of amusement. The lines on his face are accentuated when he smiles and laughs. "Well," he remarks at one point, "if I'm not going to be absurd, why am I here?"
His noonday tipple is nothing stronger than a cappuccino and glass of water. But Plant is as free-spirited today as he was 60 years ago when he fled bean-counting for the buccaneering life of rock and roll. Led Zeppelin were the route out. Then, after their split in 1980, his former band became a millstone.
His efforts to cut himself loose from Zeppelin's legacy have been inconsistent. He took part in a disastrous reunion at Live Aid in 1985 and a triumphant one at London's O2 Arena in 2007. He also participated in this year's documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin. But Plant is determined not to be defined solely by his past. Infuriating to a certain cadre of Zeppelin fans, his refusal to "jump back on the antiquarian bandwagon”, in his description, has fuelled an impressive run of solo and collaborative albums. Few other stars of his generation can match it.
Plant's latest project is a group called Saving Grace. Its members were recruited from the countryside around the English-Welsh borders, where the singer also has a house. They assembled in 2019 as a below-the-radar outfit, playing folk, rock, blues and Americana covers in small venues across Britain. "Bit by bit, it came together, the band became a band, just by messing about," Plant says. "No website. Tuppence to get in."
Saving Grace's self-titled album has reworked versions of songs by acts ranging from blues woman Memphis Minnie to indie band Low. Plant's voice has lost the untamed energy of youth, but gained tenderness, patience and warmth: the wild man now sounds like a wise man. He shares the singing on the album with Suzi Dian, the most recent in a series of female foils dating back to Sandy Denny in Led Zeppelin's "The Battle of Evermore".
The project emerges from a region that has gripped Plant's imagination since childhood trips by car from the family home in the West Midlands. "Before my parents banished me to the hard road ahead," he says, "I spent a lot of time in the back of an old Standard Flying 10 with mum and dad, going into the Welsh borders from the Black Country. Peering out of the window, and winding it down and smelling history and another culture."
Other musical cultures are to Plant as the far horizon is to an inveterate wanderer. As a boy, each record was a window open to a world beyond. On the school bus, he would sit with a copy of jazzman Roland Kirk's We Free Kings or a Bob Dylan LP facing outwards for classmates to note approvingly. "Those first two Dylan albums were basically the catechism for my life before the very tight Landlubber jeans," he says. "I was just moved by somebody who had…” — he pauses, his customary eloquence momentarily halted — "that."
Moby Grape's song "It's a Beautiful Day Today" is among the tracks covered by Saving Grace. It's a memento of a late-1960s San Francisco hippy culture that lay far from Plant's Midlands background. "Hanging out around the paraffin stove in West Bromwich listening to songs like that at night with a piece of bashish was magnificent," he says. "But we could have no idea what their context was."
His vocal style was adapted from the Chicago blues musicians who struck a transatlantic chord with young British acolytes in the 1960s. Led Zeppelin were accused of ripping off their blues forebears, although they gave a songwriting credit to Memphis Minnie for their version of "When the Levee Breaks" reversing the wrong committed when she wasn't credited for co-writing the 1929 original.* "I'm surprised nobody picked up on that," Plant comments drily.
He and Page went to Morocco in 1972 where he learnt to incorporate Arab and Berber vocal mannerisms into his style. The great Egyptian star Umm Kulthum was another influence. An earlier trip with Page to a remote cottage near Snowdonia, north Wales, brought a folksier timbre to 1970's Led Zeppelin III. In those days, the Welsh hills were dotted with reclusive countercultural communes.
"When Jimmy and I were writing some of the embryos of the songs that became Zeppelin III, we took time off and went looking for some of these guys up in the hills. Very interesting," he says. They would go up a track in an old army Austin Champ Jeep, "and the two of us would bounce along and you'd get close to an almost ruined farmhouse with perspex flapping, no window, and blow the horn. Nobody would come out…
He has a euphemistic way of referring to the sybaritic superstardom of his Led Zeppelin days. "I'm really pleased at the fact that I managed to grab the life raft and get the hell out of the other stuff, with all of its connotations, its reflexes, its reflux,” he says.
This doesn't quite rank as a disavowal of the band's notorious reputation for libertinage. But Plant experienced some very bleak times amid the bacchanalia. In 1977, his five-year-old son Karac died of a viral infection back home in Britain while Led Zeppelin were touring the US. Their 1980 break-up followed Bonham's death after a drinking binge.
"I resented it all because I'd lost John, my mate, earlier than anyone would ever have planned," Plant says. He teamed up with Page for two successful albums, 1994's No Quarter and 1998's Walking into Clarksdale. But a more significant post-Zeppelin collaborator was waiting in the wings — the Nashville-based bluegrass and country singer Alison Krauss.
Plant and Krauss first collaborated on 2007's Raising Sand, which sold more than 2mn copies and won five Grammy awards. "I kept walking past Coldplay, who were dressed as the Sgt Pepper's album cover," Plant says of his victory strut at the awards ceremony, "and I kept turning round to say, 'Sit down! It's my turn in the bath'."
He credits Krauss and their producer T Bone Burnett with introducing him to a different kind of Americana, a subculture of folk, country and blues, both past and present. (He tells me to check out Washington duo West of Roan.) "The electric blues that western Europe got hold of, and did some damage to perhaps, had nothing to do with this other world that I found once I teamed up with Alison and T Bone," he says. "Its dark corners are the places I've found now, which I'd never have found if I'd stayed in the hot, heavy zone."
The personnel are different, but Saving Grace continues the exploration. "Does anybody ever know when to get out?" Plant says. "I mean that's the thing. So instead of getting out, I've gone on. I've got so much more to learn, to steal from, to plagiarise, to be." He beams. "That's a great place to be."
*Memphis Minnie did not co-write When the Levee Breaks. She did play lead guitar on the song, though.
