Robert Plant: A Life: The Biography

Robert Plant: A Life: The Biography Paul Rees Robert Plant is one of the few genuine living rock legends.Frontman of Led Zeppelin, musical innovator and seller of millions of records, Plant has had a profound influence on music for over four decades. But the full account of his life has barely been told … until now.Robert Plant: A Life is the first complete and comprehensive telling of Plant’s story. From his earliest performances in folk clubs in the early 1960s, to the world’s biggest stages as Led Zeppelin’s self-styled ‘Golden God’, and on to his emergence as an emboldened solo star.The sheer scale of Zeppelin’s success is extraordinary: in the US alone they sold 70 million records, a figure surpassed only by the Beatles. But their success was marred by tragedy.These pages contain first-hand accounts of Plant’s greatest highs and deepest lows: the tragic deaths of his son Karac and his friend, Zeppelin drummer John Bonham.Told in vivid detail, this is the definitive story of a man of great talent, remarkable fortitude and extraordinary conviction. (#uc3fb3d24-a4d5-5111-8b53-3e1f8483f198) This one’s for Denise, the love of my life, and the lights of it, Charlie and Tom. Cover (#ua0e26a98-0c3f-5d65-b3a2-2c9c6c94291f) Title Page (#litres_trial_promo) Dedication (#ulink_72308de9-ed7d-5346-9c73-146da3893e50) Encore (#ulink_859b3358-21fe-5719-978d-61e14e8f46bf) PART ONE: BEGINNINGS (#ulink_60d6dda8-4f4b-5360-9078-6538cabc189b) 1 THE BLACK COUNTRY (#ulink_e8f3e248-ca8c-5d9d-a680-be7e23e59aea) 2 THE DEVIL’S MUSIC (#ulink_305611da-392b-5ea6-bef5-3017fa5e7eac) 3 KING MOD (#ulink_710166b5-a3fd-5c79-977a-0623a3681c20) 4 THE RUBBER MAN (#ulink_86316f84-3afd-53c7-97ce-5a8cdd3371d6) 5 THE REAL DESPERATION SCENE (#ulink_9f6c2ef3-da10-5d7a-b741-41babb7db567) PART TWO: AIRBORNE (#ulink_0a809409-3001-5fe1-8938-2740570f3f4e) 6 BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! (#ulink_6d531d96-6492-5422-841b-92fe7faf5a33) 7 VALHALLA (#litres_trial_promo) 8 BLOND ELVIS (#litres_trial_promo) 9 SODOM AND GOMORRAH (#litres_trial_promo) 10 CRASH (#litres_trial_promo) 11 DARKNESS, DARKNESS (#litres_trial_promo) 12 THE OUT DOOR (#litres_trial_promo) PART THREE: SOLO (#litres_trial_promo) 13 EXORCISM (#litres_trial_promo) 14 SEA OF LOVE (#litres_trial_promo) 15 TALL COOL ONE (#litres_trial_promo) 16 CROSSROADS (#litres_trial_promo) 17 GOOD TIMES, BAD TIMES (#litres_trial_promo) 18 DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAIN (#litres_trial_promo) 19 REBIRTH (#litres_trial_promo) 20 GONE, GONE, GONE (#litres_trial_promo) 21 JOY (#litres_trial_promo) 22 CODA (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) Sources (#litres_trial_promo) List of Searchable Terms (#litres_trial_promo) Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) (#uc3fb3d24-a4d5-5111-8b53-3e1f8483f198) How can you ever tell how it’s going to go? For a moment he was alone. Back in his dressing room, where he had paced the floor little more than two hours before. Then, he had been in the grip of a terror at what was to come. The weight of history pressing down upon him; the burden of all the demons he had come here to put to rest at last. He had felt fear gnawing away at him. The dread of how he might appear to all the thousands out there in the dark. Here he was, a man in his sixtieth year, desiring to roll back time and recapture all the wonders of youth. Did that, would that, make him seem a fool? In those long minutes with himself he had looked in the mirror and asked over and over if he really could be all that he had once been; if it were truly possible for him to take his voice back up to the peaks it had once scaled. He had so many questions but no answers. There would be ghosts in the room, too. Those of his first-born son, of his best friend and of all the others he had lost along the way. For each of them he wanted to be the Golden God this one last time … It was going on midnight on 10 December 2007. Robert Plant was gathering himself in the immediate aftermath of Led Zeppelin’s reunion concert at London’s O2 Arena. The roar of the crowd, which had rolled over him like thunder, had faded. He could hear the chatter of many voices in the corridors backstage; the same corridors that had earlier been silent and still, pregnant with expectation before he and his band had walked tall once more. Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, the other surviving original members of Led Zeppelin, were off in their own corners thinking their own thoughts. Tonight they had come together but there would remain a distance between them. It was one that spoke of all they had built together and then seen turn to ruin; of shared victories and bitter recriminations; of relationships so complex and complicated they were all but impossible to unravel. When at last Plant threw open his door, all of those who came to shake his hand and pound his back told him what he already knew. He, they, had been great. Better than anyone could ever have hoped they might be. His doubts had been stilled. His debt, such as it was, had been honoured. Pat and Joan Bonham, wife and mother of John, the friend and colleague he had buried a lifetime or a heartbeat ago, were among the last he welcomed and he held them especially close. Jason, their son and grandson, had sat in his father’s drum seat that night. He told them how proud John would have been of his only son. And then the ghosts came to him again. He was supposed to go to some featureless hospitality room upstairs to meet with friends. There was a VIP party to attend where he would be feted by Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, Priscilla and Lisa-Marie Presley, and more and more. He instead took one last look around the scene of his triumph, then summoned a car and asked to be driven away from it. He wanted nothing more now than to get as far from everyone and everything as it was possible to be. ‘The rarefied air backstage at the O2 was something you could only savour for moments,’ he told me three years later. On that cold, dark night he drove north, across the River Thames and through city streets aglow with Christmas lights. On to Chalk Farm, a corner of north London a mile from the bustle of Camden Town and a short walk from the more genteel Primrose Hill, where he had a house. The car dropped him off at the Marathon Bar, an inauspicious-looking Turkish restaurant on Chalk Farm Road. Going inside, he walked past two spits of grey meat cooking in the window, past the stainless-steel counter and the garish display board advertising kebabs, burgers and fried chicken. He went into the small, windowless back room. There he sat at a wooden table, and ordered half a bottle of vodka and a plate of hummus. They knew him in this place and let him be. Here, at last, among the Marathon Bar’s usual late-night crowd – the young bucks, the couples and the local gangsters – he felt at peace. Through an open archway he could look out over the restaurant’s main room and onto the street beyond. I first met Plant in 1998 when I was working for the British rock magazine Kerrang! At the time he and Page were about to release their second album together as Page and Plant, Walking into Clarksdale. I interviewed the pair of them in London. During the course of our conversation Plant veered back and forth from being testy and disinterested to disarming and expansive, and I found him hard to read. I was fascinated by him because of this, drawn as much to his contradictions as to his obvious charisma. The quieter and more fragile-seeming Page left a much less enduring impression. Our paths crossed a number of times during the years that followed. We shared a journey on a public ferry in Istanbul, and I bumped into him in the backstage corridors at assorted television and music-awards shows. Discovering I was both a fellow Midlander and a football fan, he appeared to warm to me – although the team I supported, West Bromwich Albion, were local rivals of Wolverhampton Wanderers, the one he had followed from boyhood. One summer he sent me a couple of emails proposing a bet on the outcome of a forthcoming game between the teams. I am still waiting for him to honour this wager – a meal in an Indian restaurant on London’s Brick Lane. I interviewed him again in 2010, this time for Q magazine and when he was basking in the afterglow of the success he had enjoyed with Raising Sand, the album he had recorded with the American bluegrass singer Alison Krauss. He was warmer and friendlier on this occasion, and also appeared more at ease. This was perhaps as a result of how well both Raising Sand and his work subsequent to it had been received, or just as likely because Page was absent. He reflected on his formative years in England’s heartland, on the wild ride he had taken with Zeppelin and on his solo career, through which his fortunes had been as varied as the albums he had made. Two things that struck me most about Plant were his passion for music – which burns as fiercely now as it did when he was captivated by the great American blues singers as a grammar-school boy – and the uniqueness of his story. The best work of the vast majority of his peers is many years behind them but Plant continues to seek new challenges and adventures. This has kept his music fresh and vital, filling it with surprises and delights. Such was the spark for this book, fanned by the knowledge that no one had yet documented the entire span of his life. There was also the challenge of forming a sense of what made Plant tick and drove him on. To the casual observer he might seem garrulous, but beyond this front he is guarded and private, careful never to reveal too much of himself. I wanted to reach the man behind the music, since gaining a better understanding of him would shed new light on the road he has travelled. As he sat in the Marathon Bar collecting his thoughts that December night, the hours running to morning, did he reflect upon how far he had come and how long he had journeyed? Upon the years of struggle, the fights with his parents, when there was no money in his pocket and he had sensed the dream that had driven him slipping from reach. Upon the soaring heights to which Led Zeppelin had taken him, when he had basked in the adulation of millions and felt the heady rush of that band’s power pumping through his veins. And on into the deep, black depths into which he had sunk, when there had been nothing to fill the empty spaces in his heart. Through it all there had been music. It was, then and now, the thing that most lit him up. First it came crackling over the radio waves, then as something wild and primal from within. All the endless possibilities it promised had made his head spin. So often and so much he had been stirred by Elvis Presley and Robert Johnson, by sounds that rushed to him from the American West and the north of Africa. It had, all of it, carried him along. It had given him more than he could have dared to ask for and he had taken every last drop of it. And as he did so it had exacted from him a heavy and terrible price. And in looking back, did he also turn to contemplating his present and on then to what might lie over the horizon? Raising Sand, of which he was so proud, had awoken something new within him, but there was the question of what to do next, of where to roam and with whom. This relentless curiosity at all that could be was something he had never lost. Even on this night, when he had puffed out his chest and swaggered back into the past, what sustained him most was the sensation of forward motion, of new frontiers and the mysteries held within. ‘You can never have a life plan if you’re going to be addicted to music,’ he told me when I had asked him about such things. ‘At this age, when you find you’re still getting goosebumps and a lump in the throat when you hear it, how can you tell how it’s ever going to go?’ (#uc3fb3d24-a4d5-5111-8b53-3e1f8483f198) (#uc3fb3d24-a4d5-5111-8b53-3e1f8483f198) Bloody hell, Rob did a fantastic Elvis impression. Robert Anthony Plant was born on 20 August 1948 in West Bromwich, in the heart of England’s industrial Midlands. His parents were among the first to benefit from the new National Health Service – the grand vision for a system of universal free health care set out by Clement Attlee’s Labour government upon coming to power in 1945 that had been made a reality the month before their son’s birth. Plant’s father was also named Robert, like his father before him. A qualified civil engineer, he had served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. Before the war he had been a keen violinist but the responsibilities of providing for his family took precedence over such things when he returned home. He retained, however, a love of classical music. His other great passion was cycling and he would often compete in local road races. He was by all accounts a decent, straightforward man, no more or less conservative in his outlook than other fathers of the time. Father and son found a shared bond in football. Plant was five years old when his father first took him to see a local professional team, Wolverhampton Wanderers. Sitting on his dad’s knee he watched as the players came out from the dressing rooms and onto the brilliant green pitch, those from Wolves in their gold and black strip, and felt euphoric as the noise of the thousands-strong crowd consumed him. His father told him that Billy Wright, the Wolves and England captain, had waved up to him as he emerged from the tunnel that day. His mother was Annie, although people often called her by her middle name, Celia. Like most households then, it was she who ran the home and put food on the table. Plant would inherit his mother’s laugh, a delighted chuckle. She called him ‘my little scoundrel’. The Plants were Catholics and raised their son within the strictures of their religion. Later on they would have a second child – a daughter, Alison. But Robert was to be their only son, and as such it was he who was the receptacle of all their initial hopes and dreams. From an early age, Plant can remember music being brought into the family home. His grandfather had founded a works brass band in West Bromwich and was accomplished on the trombone, fiddle and piano. ‘My great-grandfather was a brass bandsman, too,’ he told me. ‘So everybody played. My dad could play, but never did. That whole idea of sitting around the hearth and playing together had gone by his generation. He went to war, lost his opportunities, and had to come home and dig deep to get them back, like so many men of the time.’ The town in which the young Plant spent his first years was two miles by road from the sprawling conurbation of Birmingham, England’s second city. Locals called the regions to the north and west of Birmingham the Black Country. This was on account of the choking smoke that had belched out from the thousands of factory chimneys that sprung up there during Britain’s industrial revolution of the 19th century. Writing of these acrid emissions in The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens described how they ‘poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light and made foul the melancholy air’. By 1830 the Black Country’s 130 square miles had been transformed into an almost entirely industrial landscape of mines, foundries and factories, a consequence of sitting upon the thickest coal seam in the country. The rush to heavy industry brought not just bricks and mortar, but also the creation of new canal and rail networks, enabling the Black Country to export its mineral wealth to the far-flung corners of the British Empire. They were still hewing coal out of the Black Country earth in the 1950s, although the glory days of the mines had passed. Iron and steel were worked intensively in local factories until the 1980s, glass to this day. The anchors and chains for the RMS Titanic’s first – and last – voyage of 1912 were forged in the Black Country town of Netherton, and the ship’s glass and crystal stemware was fired and moulded in the glassworks of nearby Stourbridge. In keeping with their austere beginnings the people of the Black Country pride themselves on being hard workers; tough and durable, they tend in general towards a stoical disposition and a droll sense of humour. Their particular dialect, which survives to this day, has its roots in the earliest examples of spoken English and is often impenetrable to outsiders. Habitually spoken in a singsong voice it conveys nothing so much as amusement and bemusement. There is an old saying around these parts: ‘Black Country born, Black Country bred, strong in the arm and thick in the head.’ This was how they went out into the world. Two of the most prolific gunfighters of the Wild West, Wes Hardin and ‘Bad’ Roy Hill, who between them killed seventy men, had their roots in the Black Country town of Lye, their families leaving from there for the promised land of America and their own subsequent infamy. The ancestors of Wyatt Earp, the Wild West’s great lawman who wrote his name into history at the O.K. Corral in 1881, hailed from Walsall, less than four miles from where Plant took his first steps. When the Second World War came the region was inextricably tied to it. Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister at the time of its outbreak who had misguidedly attempted to appease Adolf Hitler, was born into one of Birmingham’s great political dynasties. Although the war was eventually won, its after-effects lingered on into the following decade. The rationing of foodstuffs such as meat and dairy continued in Britain until 1954. At the time of Plant’s childhood, West Bromwich and the Black Country, like so many of the country’s towns and cities, still bore the scars from six years of conflict. As a centre for the manufacture of munitions the area had been a prime target for German bombs. Throughout Birmingham and the Black Country were the shells of buildings and houses blasted into ruin. It was an everyday occurrence to find the tail end of bombs or shards of shrapnel littering the streets. ‘The whole area was still pretty much a bomb site in the early 1950s,’ recalls Trevor Burton, who grew up in Aston to the north-east of Birmingham’s city centre, and who would later cross paths with Plant on the local music scene of the 1960s. ‘The bomb sites, these piles of rubble and blown-out houses, they were our playgrounds.’ The 1950s would bring great change to Britain. At the start of the decade few Britons owned a TV set; those who did had just one channel to watch – in black and white. The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953 led to an upsurge in TV ownership and by the end of the decade 75 per cent of British homes had a set. The ’50s also witnessed the opening of Britain’s first motorways – the M6 in 1958 and the M1 in 1959 – establishing faster, more direct road links between cities such as London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester. Such progress brought the world closer to Britain, making it appear more accessible. Yet at the same time Britain’s role on the global stage was diminishing. The Suez Crisis of 1956, during which Britain tried and failed to seize back control of the Suez Canal from Egypt, hastened the end of Empire. The United States and the Soviet Union were the new superpowers, Britain being relegated to the role of junior partner to the Americans in the decades-long Cold War that was to unfold between those two nations. The national mood in Britain, however, was one of relief at the end of the war in Europe and of hope for better times. This began to be realised from the middle of the decade, by which time the nation’s economy was booming and wages for skilled labour were increasing. A rush by the British to be socially upwardly mobile left a void for unskilled workers that was filled by successive governments with immigrant labour from the Commonwealth. With these workers populating its steel mills and foundries – and now its car plants, too – Birmingham and the Black Country soon ranked among the country’s most multi-cultural areas. To the already healthy Irish population in Birmingham there would be added vibrant communities drawn from the Caribbean, India and Pakistan. In 1957, so pronounced was the collective sense of affluence and aspiration that Harold Macmillan, the Conservative prime minister, predicted an unprecedented age of prosperity for the country. ‘Let us be frank about it,’ he said, ‘most of our people have never had it so good.’ The British people agreed and elected Macmillan to a second term of office in October 1959. The Plant family embodied the rise of the middle classes in Macmillan’s Britain. As a skilled worker, Robert Plant Sr could soon afford to move his wife and son out from West Bromwich to the greener fringes of the Black Country. They came to leafy Hayley Green, a well-heeled suburban enclave located fifteen miles from the centre of Birmingham. Their new home was at 64 Causey Farm Road, on a wide street of sturdy pre-war houses just off the main road between Birmingham and the satellite town of Kidderminster. It was a neighbourhood of traditional values and twitching net curtains, populated by white-collar workers. Unlike West Bromwich, it was surrounded by countryside. Farmland was abundant, the Wyre Forest close by and Hayley Green itself backed onto the Clent Hills. Situated near the end of Causey Farm Road, number 64 was one of the more modest houses on the street. Built of red brick, it had a small drive and a garage, and from its neat back garden there was an uninterrupted view out to the rolling hills. For the young Plant there would have been many places to go off and explore: those hills, or the woods at the end of the road, or over the stiles and across the fields to the town of Stourbridge, with its bustling high street. It was during this period that many of Plant’s lifelong passions were first fired. The Clent Hills and their surrounding towns and villages were the inspiration for the landscape of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the writer of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit having grown up in the area in the 1890s. Plant devoured Tolkien’s books as a child, and time and again in later life would reference the author’s fantastical world in his lyrics. In the summer the Plants, like so many other Black Country families of the time, would drive west for their holidays, crossing the border into Wales. They would head for Snowdonia National Park, 823 square miles of rugged uplands in the far north-west of the country. It was an area rich in Celtic folklore and history, and this, together with the wildness of the terrain, captivated the young Plant. He was entranced by such Welsh myths as those that swirled around the mountain Cadair Idris, a brooding edifice at the southern edge of Snowdonia near the small market town of Machynlleth, which the Plants would often visit. It was said that the mountain was both the seat of King Arthur’s kingdom and that of the giant Idris, who used it as a place of rest from which he would sit and gaze up at the evening stars. According to legend anyone who sleeps the night on the slopes of Cadair Idris is destined to wake the next morning as either a poet or a madman. At Machynlleth Plant learnt of the exploits of the man who would become his great folk hero, the Welsh king Owain Glynd?r. It was in the town that Glynd?r founded the first Welsh parliament in 1404, after leading an armed rebellion against the occupying English forces of King Henry IV. The uprising was crushed five years later, and Glynd?r’s wife and two of his daughters were sent to their deaths in the Tower of London. Glynd?r himself escaped capture, fighting on until his death in 1416. But for Plant there would be nothing to match the impact that rock ’n’ roll was to have upon him as a child. Like every other kid who grew up in post-war Britain he would have been aware of an almost suffocating sense of primness and propriety. Children were taught to respect their elders and betters. In both the way they dressed and were expected to behave they were moulded to be very much like smaller versions of their parents. Authority was not to be questioned and conformity was the norm. The musical landscape of Britain in the ’50s was similarly lacking in generational diversity. Variety shows, the big swing bands and communal dances were popular with old and young alike. As that decade rolled into the next, the country’s clubs heaved to the sounds of trad jazz, making stars of such bandleaders as Chris Barber, Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball, who played music that was as cosy and unthreatening as the social mores of the time. In the United States, however, a cultural firestorm was brewing. Elvis Presley, young and full of spunk, released his first recording on the Memphis label Sun Records in the summer of 1954. It was called ‘That’s All Right’, and it gave birth to a new sound. A bastardisation of the traditional blues songs of black African-Americans and the country music of their white counterparts, rock ’n’ roll was loud, brash and impossibly exciting – and it arrived like an earthquake, the tremors from which reverberated across the Atlantic. Behind Elvis came Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent and others, all young men with fire in their bellies and, often as not, a mad, bad glint in their eyes. In 1956 the mere act of Elvis swivelling his hips on TV’s Ed Sullivan Show was enough to shock America’s moral guardians. It was also instrumental in opening up the first real generational divide on either side of the Atlantic. Elvis’s gyrations acted as a rallying point for both British and American teenagers, and as an affront to their parents’ sense of moral decency. In the English Midlands rock ’n’ roll first arrived in person in the form of Bill Haley. In 1954 Haley, who hailed from Michigan, released one of the first rock ’n’ roll singles, ‘Rock Around the Clock’. He followed it with an even bigger hit, ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’. When, on his first British tour, he arrived at Birmingham Odeon in February 1957 the city’s teenagers queued all around the block for tickets. At the show itself they leapt out of their seats and danced wildly in the aisles. It mattered not one bit that, in the flesh, Haley had none of Elvis’s youthful virility. Laurie Hornsby, a music historian from Birmingham, recalls: ‘The man who was responsible for going down to Southampton docks to meet Haley off the ship was Tony Hall, who was the promotions man for Decca Records in London. He told me that he stood there at the bottom of the ship’s gangplank, and down came this old-age pensioner hanging onto his hair for grim death. Hall thought, “My God, I’ve got to sell this to the British teenager.” But sell it he did.’ By the time Elvis burst onto the scene Plant was a primary-school boy. Tall for his age, he was blessed with good looks and a pile of wavy, blond hair. He might have been too young to grasp the precise nature of Elvis’s raw sex appeal but he was immediately drawn in by the untamed edge to his voice and the jungle beat of his music. From the age of nine he would hide himself behind the sofa in the front room at 64 Causey Farm Road and mime to Elvis’s records on the radio, a hairbrush taking the place of a microphone. He soon progressed to the songs of Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. Each weekend he and his parents would gather around the TV set to watch the variety show Sunday Night at the London Palladium, and it was on this, in the spring of 1958, that the ten-year-old Plant first saw Buddy Holly & the Crickets. That year Holly also came to the Midlands, playing at Wolverhampton’s Gaumont Cinema on 7 March and, three days later, giving an early and later evening performance at Birmingham Town Hall. By then Plant had begun to comb his hair into something that approximated Elvis’s and Cochran’s quiffs, much to the chagrin of his parents. He was also digesting the other sound then sweeping the UK, one that made the act of getting up and making music seem so much more attainable. Its roots lay in the African-American musical culture of the early 20th century – in jazz and blues. In the 1920s jug bands had sprung up in America’s southern states, so called because of their use of jugs and other homemade instruments. This music was revived thirty years later in Britain and given the name ‘skiffle’. Britain’s undisputed King of Skiffle was Lonnie Donegan, a Glaswegian by birth who had begun playing in trad jazz bands in the early ’50s. Having taught himself to play banjo, Donegan formed a skiffle group that used cheap acoustic guitars, a washboard and a tea-chest bass. They performed American folk songs by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. Starting in 1955 with a speeded-up version of Leadbelly’s ‘Rock Island Line’, Donegan would go on to have twenty-four consecutive Top 30 hits in the UK, an unbroken run that stretched into the early ’60s. Donegan’s success, and the simplicity of his set-up, prompted scores of British kids to form their own skiffle groups. One of these, the Quarrymen, was brought together in Liverpool in the spring of 1957 by the sixteen-year-old John Lennon. For his part, Plant was still too young and green to even contemplate forming a band. But in skiffle, as in rock ’n’ roll, he had located a route back to black America’s folk music, the blues. It was one he would soon follow with the tenacity of a pilgrim. The thing that Plant thought about most on the morning of 10 September 1959, however, was not music but how little he liked his new school uniform. There he stood before his admiring mother dressed in short, grey trousers and long, grey socks, a white shirt, a red and green striped tie and green blazer, with a green cap flattening down his sculpted hair. At the age of eleven, and having passed his entrance exams, he was off to grammar school. But not just to any grammar school. Plant had secured a place at King Edward VI Grammar School for Boys in Stourbridge, which had a reputation for being the best in the area. For his parents, his attending such an establishment would incur extra expense but would also impress the neighbours. The school had been founded in 1430 as the Chantry School of Holy Trinity and counted among its alumni the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson. A boys-only school of 750 students, it was so steeped in tradition that first years were introduced in the school newspaper beneath the Latin heading salvete, the word used in ancient Rome to welcome a group of people. On that first morning Plant and ninety or so other new arrivals were lined up outside the staff house in the school playground. Surrounding them were buildings of red brick, including the library with its vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows. The masters in their black gowns and mortarboards came out and assigned each of them to one of three forms. Those boys who had excelled in their entrance exams and were considered to be future university candidates were gathered together in 1C. Plant was placed in the middle form, 1B. The school operated a strict disciplinary code, one that was presided over by the headmaster, Richard Chambers. A tall man who wore horn-rimmed glasses, Chambers had a hooked nose that led students to christen him ‘The Beak’. Behind his back he was also mocked for a speech defect that prevented him from correctly pronouncing the letter ‘r’. But Chambers mostly engendered both respect and fear. ‘He was extremely strict, a sadist really,’ recalls Michael Richards, a fellow student of Plant’s. ‘If you got into trouble, he would call your name out in assembly in front of the whole school. You would have to go and stand outside his office, and eventually would be called in. He would reprimand you for whatever you’d done and then whack you across the backside four times with a cane. Then he’d tell you to come back after school. So you’d have all day to think about it and then you’d get the same again.’ In many respects Plant was, to begin with at least, a typical grammar-school boy. He collected stamps and during the winter months played rugby. Although the school did not play his beloved football – indeed footballs were banned from the playground – he would join groups of other boys in kicking a tennis ball about at break times, using their blazers as makeshift goalposts. In his second year he was nominated as 2B’s form monitor by his tutor, a role that gave him the giddy responsibilities of cleaning the blackboard and trooping along to the staff room to notify the other masters if a tutor failed to arrive for a lesson. What marked him apart was his love of music and the manner in which he carried himself. Going about the school he would typically have a set of vinyl records tucked under his arm – and these, often as not, would be Elvis Presley records. He even took to imitating Elvis’s pigeon-toed walk. ‘Bloody hell, Rob did a fantastic Elvis impression,’ says Gary Tolley, who sat next to Plant in their form. ‘He was Elvis-crazy, but early Elvis, not the Elvis of G.I. Blues, when he’d started to go a bit showbiz. He was very into Eddie Cochran, too. He had the same quiff. When you see all those pictures of Cochran looking out from the side of his eyes at the camera, that was Robert.’ Plant and Tolley, who was learning to play the guitar, soon became part of a clique at school that was based around their shared interest in music. Their number included another classmate, Paul Baggott, and John Dudley, a budding drummer. They prided themselves on being the first to know what the hot new records were and when the likes of Cochran or Gene Vincent would be coming to perform in the area. ‘Not blowing our own trumpets, but we were all popular at school,’ recalls Dudley. ‘The other kids sort of looked up to us, because we knew a little bit that they didn’t. Robert was a nice guy, but a bit full of himself. He was quite cocky. He’s always been like that. The Teddy Boy era had died by then, but he made sure that he’d got the long drape coat and the lot. A lot of people thought he was arrogant because he’d got that sort of body language about him.’ ‘Rob was very good looking and he always seemed to be at the centre of whatever was going on,’ adds Tolley. ‘He had something. Charisma, I suppose. In those days, the Catholics would have a separate morning service to everybody else and then come in to join us for assembly. Robert would walk into the main hall with his quiff and his collar turned up, and you could see all the masters and prefects glaring at him. He wore the school uniform but somehow he never looked quite the same as everybody else.’ Plant and Tolley would become good friends. Outside of school they went to the local youth club to play table tennis or billiards, and Plant would bring along his Elvis and Eddie Cochran singles to put on the club’s turntable. Plant had also picked up his father’s love of cycling, and he and Tolley would go off riding around the Midlands on a couple of stripped-down racing bikes. ‘Robert’s dad knew someone at the local cycling club and I can remember going to a velodrome near Stourbridge with Rob, riding round and round it and thinking we were fantastic,’ says Tolley. ‘He’d come to my house a lot and always turn up at mealtimes. If we were going out cycling for the evening, he’d arrive forty-five minutes before we’d arranged. Inevitably, my mum would say, “There’s a bit of tea spare, Robert. Would you like it?” “Oh, yes please, Mrs Tolley.”’ ‘He’d be round our house for Sunday tea,’ says John Dudley. ‘He was always very polite. He’d ask my mum for jam sandwiches. If you’re going to put people into a class, his mum and dad were a class above mine. My father worked on the railways. I believe Rob’s father by then was an architect. They lived in a better house than we did. Rob was never from anywhere near an impoverished background.’ For as long as their son maintained his academic studies Plant’s parents tolerated his love of rock ’n’ roll, although his father, who mostly listened to Beethoven at home, professed to being mystified by it. In 1960 they bought him his first record player, a red and cream Dansette Conquest Auto. When he opened it he found on the turntable a single, ‘Dreaming’, by the American rockabilly singer Johnny Burnette. With his first record token he bought the Miracles’ effervescent soul standard ‘Shop Around’, which had given Berry Gordy’s nascent Motown label their breakthrough hit in the US. A future was beginning to open out for the eleven-year-old Plant. It was one now free from the spectre of being required to spend two years in the armed forces upon leaving school, Macmillan’s government having abolished compulsory National Service that year. It did, nonetheless, still lie beyond his grasp, as was emphasised when his mother insisted he trim his quiff and he glumly complied. (#uc3fb3d24-a4d5-5111-8b53-3e1f8483f198) There was us, academic whiz kids in total freefall. By the time Plant entered his third year at grammar school in 1962 music had usurped his other interests. To begin with he was to be frustrated in his search to find something else that brought him the same sense of feral abandon he had felt upon first hearing Elvis. It was entirely absent from the TV light-entertainment shows of the time and his radio options were limited to one station, Radio Luxembourg. On that, at least, he came to hear Chris Kenner, a black R&B singer from New Orleans, and this nudged him further down his path. ‘When I was a kid there was nothing to latch onto,’ he told me. ‘In the middle of everything, all these comets would occasionally come flying over the radio. But think about the difference between here and America. In America you just turned that dial five degrees on the circle and you were into black radio. ‘We Brits, we’re monosyllabic when it comes to music. When people say we took the blues back to America, it’s such bollocks. Because John Hammond, Canned Heat, Bob Dylan, Mike Bloomfield, Elvin Bishop … all these people were already playing it. Their vision and awareness of music is so much greater than ours. All this stuff was going on, and being British I was only exposed to tiny bits of it. There wasn’t a great deal of attention being paid to the stuff that lit me up.’ Half a million black American servicemen were drafted overseas during the Second World War and it was they who first brought blues records into Britain. In time these records found their way into specialist shops and were picked up by collectors. Old 45s and 78s, they were by men and women with such evocative names as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Memphis Minnie and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Their songs documented the entire span of the black American experience, from the chains of slavery and grinding poverty to the pleasures of liquor and the love of a good – or bad – woman. This was folk music in its most raw and pure form, the ground zero for the twelve-bar stomp of rock ’n’ roll. For Plant, as for countless other British kids at the time, it was all that he was looking for. Ironically, it would be an Englishman who opened up the floodgates for him. His interest sparked by rock ’n’ roll singles and odd nuggets captured from the radio, he picked up a book titled Blues Fell This Morning, first published in 1960 and written by Paul Oliver, a scholar from Nottingham. Oliver related the history of black American blues in an entirely dry, academic manner, but this did not deter Plant. He had an ordered mind and began noting down each of the records Oliver referenced in his book. He was to have a further Eureka moment when he found out that a shop in Birmingham stocked these records, and more besides. The Diskery record shop, still going strong to this day, was founded in 1952 by a jazz buff named Morris Hunting. By 1962 its home was on Hurst Street, a tucked-away side road a few minutes’ walk from Birmingham’s main railway station. Cramped and poky, the Diskery’s floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with rare and imported vinyl. It became a mecca for the area’s aspirant musicians. One of the guys that worked there, a local black DJ known as Erskin T, specialised in turning these regulars on to the earliest blues, R&B and Tamla Motown sounds. ‘There was a group of about twenty of us from school who were heavily into American artists, Robert no more so than the rest,’ says Gary Tolley. ‘But he was more interested in the original recordings. In that period before the Beatles came along there were lots of British artists doing pathetic covers of American songs. We’d all go up to Birmingham, but Rob, and also Paul Baggott, would go to great lengths to find the original versions.’ To fund these visits, Plant took on a paper round, heading out on his bike each morning before school. With the money he earned he picked up such records as John Lee Hooker’s Folk Blues and Robert Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers. This last record had a profound effect on him. Born in Mississippi in 1911, Robert Johnson, more than any other bluesman, is surrounded by myth and mystery. It was said that his mercurial talents as a guitarist, singer and songwriter came to him overnight. The legend grew that one night he had gone down to the crossroads on Highway 49 and 61, outside the town of Clarksdale, and there made a Faustian pact with the Devil. Johnson’s early death at the age of 27 fuelled such speculation, although he was probably poisoned by the jealous husband of a woman he had been seeing. Decades later Plant would tell the Guardian newspaper: ‘When I first heard “Preaching Blues” and “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” by Robert Johnson, I went, “This is it!”’ He had, he would also add, never heard anything quite so seductive as Johnson’s voice – a wounded howl that spoke of pain and lust all at the same time. Propelled deeper into the blues by Johnson, Plant began expanding his record collection as fast as the money he got from his paper round would allow. Coming home from school he would go up to his room and play these records over and over again. He catalogued and carefully filed each of them, having first pored over the sleeve notes and recording credits. It had become an obsession, one that his parents found increasingly difficult to understand. Staunch Catholics, they began to refer to the songs blasting out from their son’s room as ‘the Devil’s music’. ‘My dad really didn’t get much bluer than Johnny Mathis,’ Plant suggested to the Guardian. ‘I think he found Robert Johnson too dark.’ One evening, when Plant had played a Chris Kenner song, ‘I Like It Like That’, seventeen times in a row, his father came up to his room and cut the plug off his son’s record player. As Plant was embarking upon his journey through the blues a beat-group scene was bubbling up in and around Birmingham. By 1962 scores of suited-and-booted bands had begun playing the local pubs and clubs. Some of these had grown out of schoolboy skiffle groups but all were inspired more by the Shadows. Backing band for the British rocker Cliff Richard, a sort of virginal Eddie Cochran, the Shadows had struck out on their own in 1960 when their tremulous instrumental ‘Apache’ topped the British charts. Their bespectacled lead guitarist, Hank Marvin, was the Eric Clapton of his day, compelling fleets of callow boys to take up the guitar. These were covers bands, their members scouring record shops in the city to find songs from the US they could learn to play. Jimmy Powell was credited with the first recording to emerge from this scene, his cover of Buster Brown’s R&B tune ‘Sugar Babe’ being released as a single on Decca that year. Later it was claimed that an eighteen-year-old named Jimmy Page had played guitar on this session, although in Birmingham it was also said by some that if bullshit were an Olympic sport Powell would have a home filled with gold medals. As 1962 turned to 1963 Britain was in the grip of its coldest winter on record, snow blizzards and freezing temperatures bringing the country to a virtual standstill for two months. 1963 would be the year in which President Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas and a war in Vietnam began to escalate – it was also the year when the Beatles came to Birmingham in the middle of the big freeze. Like so many of the local bands, the Beatles had been born out of a skiffle group that had first been gripped by Elvis and Buddy Holly; they, too, cut their chops re-interpreting songs that had been flown across the Atlantic. The Beatles, however, had their own songs as well. Their second single, ‘Please Please Me’, was one of these and it was released in the UK on 11 January 1963, beginning a month-long run to the top of the British charts. On 13 January the Beatles arrived at the ATV studios in Birmingham to perform ‘Please Please Me’ for that night’s Thank Your Lucky Stars variety show. Police were forced to seal off the streets around the studios as thousands of kids turned out to catch a glimpse of them. Six days later the Beatles returned to play a gig at the Plaza in Old Hill, two miles from Plant’s family home. Promoting this show was Mary Reagan, who would come to play a significant role in Plant’s early musical career. A formidable Irishwoman known to one and all as Ma Reagan, she and her husband Joe, who stood less than five foot tall, had established a dancehall business in the Midlands in 1947. By 1963 the Reagans were running four ballroom-sized venues in the area, the Plaza at Old Hill being seen as the most prestigious on account of its revolving stage. In the wake of the Beatles’ visit the Midlands music scene took off. By the end of that year there would be an estimated 250 groups operating around the city. It was said that half of these still wanted to be the Shadows, the other half the Beatles. These bands were made up of kids in – or just out of – school. They were playing up to twenty shows a week in the hundreds of city pubs and clubs that nightly put on live music, earning more than their fathers did for going to work in the factories. Each of these bands aspired to get on the Reagan circuit, as it came to be known. The local acts that passed an audition for Ma Reagan could expect to perform regularly at all of her venues, often in a single night and for good money. In July 1963 the Shadows’ producer Norrie Paramor pitched up at Birmingham’s Old Moat House Club to audition local bands for EMI, which was by then desperate to unearth another Fab Four, and he subsequently signed six Birmingham acts to the label. Although none came close to being the next Beatles, he did at least give the Midlands scene a name, christening it ‘Brumbeat’, a knowing adaptation of Liverpool’s then reigning Merseybeat sound. One band just then starting out on the Brumbeat scene was to have a direct influence on Plant. The Spencer Davis Group had debuted at a Birmingham University student dance in April 1963, performing a set of blues and R&B covers. The band was a tight one and the undisputed star was their singer, Stevie Winwood, a white schoolboy with the voice of a black soul man. Like Plant, Winwood was then fourteen years old but he was moving faster. In September 1963, at the start of the academic year, King Edward VI’s students were gathered together for a school photograph. In this picture Plant can be seen standing towards the centre of the group, six rows back. He alone among the many hundred students looks as if he is posing for the camera – his curly hair is rustled up into its habitual quiff, a look of practised insouciance on his face. To his right stands Gary Tolley, appearing to be somehow much younger and less worldly-wise. Yet it was Tolley, not Plant, who by then had formed a first band with two more of their friends, Paul Baggott and John Dudley. Tolley played lead guitar, Baggott was on bass and Dudley on drums. A further pair of boys from their school year completed the line-up: Derek Price on guitar and the singer Andy Long. This school group had begun playing in pubs and youth clubs, calling themselves Andy Long and the Jurymen. They performed contemporary pop and rock ’n’ roll covers and dressed up in maroon suits with black velvet collars. Plant would often accompany them to these gigs. ‘He sort of followed us around for a long time,’ says Tolley. ‘He’d come to see us play but he’d carry our gear as well. Derek Price’s dad would drive our van and he lived just up the road from Robert. He’d pick Rob up first and then the rest of us.’ ‘It sounds daft but he was more of a hanger-on than anything at that stage,’ adds Dudley. ‘It only slowly dawned on us that what he wanted to do was sing.’ The Jurymen’s nightly engagements soon brought them to the attention of Headmaster Chambers. He saw a piece on the fledgling band that ran in the local newspaper, the Express & Star, one that made much of the fact that they were playing in places in which they were too young to drink. ‘Because of the way things were for kids then, if you had hair an inch too long and were playing in a band, the figures in authority did look down on you,’ says Dudley. ‘Chambers had us all up before him. He pulled Robert in for that, too, because he knew that he would have been with us. He told us we were nothing more than a rabble – but because he couldn’t pronounce his “r”s, it came out as a “wabble”. That may have been the start of the masters disapproving of Robert.’ For Plant, however, the world was now expanding beyond the gates of his grammar school and 64 Causey Farm Road. Down the road in Stourbridge something was stirring. Blues, jazz and folk clubs had started to spring up around the town; so too coffee bars. The Swiss Caf? became the main meeting place for local teenagers. Later, a local singer named David Yeats opened the Groove record shop, catering for R&B enthusiasts like Plant. In the pubs and clubs one could hear everything from Woody Guthrie songs to Dixieland jazz being performed. It was a movement largely driven by Stourbridge College, a technical and art institution that in the ’60s had begun attracting students from all over the country and across Europe, and it was one into which Plant threw himself. ‘It was a huge, amazing, subterranean moment,’ he told me. ‘There was poetry and jazz, there was unaccompanied Gallic singing. There were off-duty policemen standing up in folk clubs, holding their pints and singing “Santy Anna”. ‘There were hard drugs. There were registered junkies mixing with beautiful art students. And there was us lot at the grammar school down the road, academic whiz kids in total freefall. I was just mincing about with my Dawes Double Blue bike, with my winklepicker shoes in the saddlebag, listening to all this stuff.’ Plant had by now also bought a cheap harmonica that he taught himself to play by blowing along to records on his repaired Dansette turntable. He began to take this harmonica with him wherever he went, delighting in pulling it out from his back pocket and blowing away, to entertain himself more than anyone else. On one occasion at school, Headmaster Chambers, fast becoming Plant’s nemesis, spied him doing as much in the playground. Chambers loudly informed him that he would get nowhere in life messing around with such nonsense. ‘Rob was so much into the kind of music that we weren’t,’ says Dudley. ‘I mean, where on earth he got the knowledge that he had of the blues from I don’t know. He was forever going on about people like Sonny Boy Williamson, and from that age. For God’s sake, in those days you wouldn’t hear anything like that on the radio.’ Plant got to see a physical manifestation of the blues for the first time on 10 October 1963 when his aunt and uncle took him along to the Gaumont cinema in Wolverhampton to see one of the new package tours that had begun travelling around the UK. This one featured the young Rolling Stones, the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, and a Mississippi bluesman, Bo Diddley. It was Diddley who transfixed him. ‘I was sweating with excitement,’ he told Q magazine in 1990, reflecting back on that night. ‘Though the Stones were great, they were really crap in comparison with Diddley. All his rhythms were so sexual – just oozing, even in a twenty-minute slot. Now that’s an evening.’ Before the year was out Plant had also stepped onto the stage himself. His opportunity came when Andy Long was struck down with appendicitis, which at the time required a six-week period of convalescence. Long’s Jurymen were by now playing several nights a week and did not want to turn down the work, so who better to fill in for their singer than their friend Robert Plant, given that he already knew their set inside out? Plant’s d?but live performance came at the Bull’s Head pub in Lye, a regular haunt of the Jurymen since it was run by John Dudley’s grandfather. On this night one might imagine that he would have been stricken with nerves as he looked out from the small, low stage and into the eyes of an audience for the first time. That here, in this smoky bar, he would wilt before such judging looks and when standing next to his then more experienced schoolmates. ‘When he first got up there, he was full of it – absolutely full of confidence,’ says Dudley, laughing at the memory. ‘He played more than half-decent harmonica even then and so he transformed our set into something a lot more bluesy. We had to busk it but we went down okay. I can’t remember how many gigs we eventually did with Rob but people always reacted favourably. Even then he sang in this blues wail. He used to like to take it down to a low rumble and then build back up to a crescendo.’ His stint as the Jurymen’s singer took Plant as far away as the East Midlands city of Leicester, a two-hour drive from home in the band’s old van. It also brought what he wanted to do with his life into clear perspective. Before Andy Long returned Plant began to go to work on his fellow Jurymen, attempting to persuade them that he should now become their permanent singer. He was to be frustrated in his efforts, just as he would be many times during the next few years. ‘We told him Andy was our singer and thanks very much,’ says Tolley. ‘We were all a bit mercenary. To be honest, we all had our stage uniforms and there wasn’t anything that would fit Robert.’ (#uc3fb3d24-a4d5-5111-8b53-3e1f8483f198) He was a cocky little bleeder, I’ll tell you that much. Plant entered his sixteenth year able both to follow the pull of music and all that it offered, and keep up his school work. In November 1963 he won a school prize for finishing top of his form in the end-of-year exams. Yet it was a precarious balance he had struck and one he was not destined to maintain. The scales started to tip from academic achievement almost as soon as 1964 began. At 6.36 pm on New Year’s Day the BBC launched Top of the Pops, a new weekly music TV show. Beaming the pop hits of the day into British households, it brought to the nation’s teenagers the promise of something out there other than the drab and everyday. For his part Plant felt ambivalent about the British beat groups, but even he must have stirred at the sight of the fledgling Rolling Stones opening that first show – the young Mick Jagger pouting and preening through Lennon and McCartney’s ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ as if in celebration of his own beautiful youth. On 28 February Plant hopped onto a bus to Birmingham, his parents allowing him to go off into the city on his own for the first time to see a gig. It was at the Town Hall, with Sonny Boy Williamson topping the bill. Plant snuck backstage afterwards and attempted to introduce himself to the venerable black American bluesman, happening across him in the urinal. Williamson, a bear of a man who stood six foot two, his head crowned by a bowler hat, turned and fixed the young interloper with a cold stare. ‘Fuck off,’ he snarled. Beating a retreat, Plant stopped by Williamson’s dressing room and pilfered a harmonica. This might have been a chastening experience but Plant had also fixated upon three younger acts that played that night. Each was part of the erupting British blues boom, and each sent out a message that all this could be his, too. There were the Yardbirds, powered by the fresh-faced Eric Clapton’s guitar; Long John Baldry and his Hoochie Coochie Men, featuring a cocksure twenty-year-old singer by the name of Rod Stewart (although he was advertised as being ‘Rod Stuart’); and the Spencer Davis Group, with little Stevie Winwood on lead vocals and organ from a couple of miles up the road in Handsworth and in the same school year as Plant, a challenge to him to get a move on if ever there was one. He was back at the Town Hall again the following month, taking his friend John Dudley along with him to see ‘The Killer’, Jerry Lee Lewis. As was the practice then, the show had finished by 9.30 pm, leaving an unsated Plant looking for further adventure. He dragged Dudley along to a city-centre pub, the Golden Eagle, telling him he knew of a crack new blues band playing there. ‘We wangled our way in and went up the stairs to the second floor,’ recalls Dudley. ‘It was a typical dive, full of smoke, a low ceiling. There were four young guys on stage. It was the Spencer Davis Group. The impression they made on us! I can still remember what they were playing: Ampeg amps, Hofner guitars, Premier drums. The whole band was superb but Stevie Winwood was something else. He was a real influence on Rob in those early days.’ Back home in Hayley Green, Plant had acquired a washboard and begun making his own kazoos, empowered by the inspiration of both skiffle and all he was now seeing. He took a keen interest in clothes and fashion, and had started to grow his hair out, having noted how mop-tops and Mick Jagger’s modish mane made the girls scream. He had also found a venue of his own. A blues and folk club had opened at the Seven Stars pub in Stourbridge and Plant became a regular, taking along his washboard and Sonny Boy Williamson’s harmonica. The Seven Stars modelled itself on the great Chicago blues dens and a crowd of aficionados began gathering there to drink, smoke and play. Chief among them was Perry Foster, a local character who had hung out with the Yardbirds in London and chauffeured Sonny Boy Williamson around Birmingham. Foster, who always dressed in a blue suit with a porkpie hat perched on his head, played mean slide on a customised nine-string Hofner guitar. He had also recently put together a half-decent blues combo, the Delta Blues Band. To Plant and his wide-eyed school friends Foster was a man to know, since to them he was a real musician. One night Plant approached him and asked if he could get up and sing with his band. ‘He told me his name was Bob Plant and whipped out a washboard,’ says Foster, remembering that first encounter. ‘I’m nine years older than him but he was a cocky little bleeder, I’ll tell you that much. He had to be educated. Being older, I knew a lot more about the blues. I told him who was who and what was what, showed him how to do the twelve-bar. But then, when you’d told him once, you didn’t need to again.’ With the Delta Blues Band, Plant began performing at the Seven Stars and other local venues. He, Foster and their rhythm guitarist, Peter Groom – soon christened ‘Gobsy’ on account of his unfeasibly large mouth – would also get up as a trio at folk nights such as the weekly one at Stourbridge Conservative Club. Their staple set featured such blues standards as Lightnin’ Hopkins’s ‘Ain’t Nothing Like Whiskey’ and assorted Robert Johnson songs. The band were earning ?16 a night, split five ways between them and with a pound spare for petrol. Often as not, beery audiences greeted the fifteen-year-old grammar-school boy with shouts of ‘Get your hair cut!’ and worse, but these seemed not to ruffle him. ‘Not everyone wanted the blues but he’d got what it took all right,’ says Foster. ‘I was always saying to people, “If that kid ain’t a millionaire by the time he’s twenty-five, my name’s not Perry.” I’d growl at the band if they weren’t doing things right, and I was a bit of a tough nut at times, so as Robert would say I was a terrible man but I got on with him smashing. ‘He was a great big, gawky teenager, all knees and elbows. We used to drive around in a little MG sports car and make him sit in the back. He said to us his father wanted him to be an accountant. Coming to the Seven Stars was seen as taboo – he always used to tell his parents he was going off somewhere else.’ For Plant this was another new world opened up to him. He was playing with older guys but treated as an equal, begging cigarettes off them and drinking beer before he was legally allowed to do so. It did not sit well with his parents or his schoolmasters when he rolled in each morning, often late and usually bleary-eyed. But he could not – and would not – turn back. His path was set. He began to hang out and jam with some of the other ambitious young musicians who had started turning up at the Seven Stars. There was twenty-year-old Chris Wood, quiet, withdrawn and greatly accomplished on multiple instruments, and a bassist named Andy Silvester. Both were in a band called Sounds of Blue, which was led by singer David Yeats and also featured a hotshot guitarist, Stan Webb, and pianist Christine Perfect. Sounds of Blue eventually mutated into blues rockers Chicken Shack, by which time Wood had hooked up with Stevie Winwood in Traffic. Later still, Christine Perfect married Fleetwood Mac’s bassist John McVie and joined that band. ‘It was at the Seven Stars that I met Robert for the first time,’ says Stan Webb. ‘He was with Perry Foster. He didn’t say much but I remember he had a very mod haircut and was wearing a fur coat. From the word go he had that thing about him. I guess you’d call it arrogance or an ego.’ Yet the Delta Blues Band was not to last. With little money being made and no sign of progress beyond a handful of staple gigs their singer upped and left. Says Foster: ‘Robert just suddenly disappeared. Though he did leave me with his washboard.’ As 1964 progressed, so the music coming out of, and passing through, the Midlands began to evolve. A strong R&B movement had taken root in Birmingham, one fired by the release of the Rolling Stones’ cover of Buddy Holly’s ‘Not Fade Away’ that February and with the Spencer Davis Group at its apex. It was this scene that gave rise to the Moody Blues in April 1964. Mod truly arrived in the city at the end of the year. Taking their inspiration from the black American sounds of Stax and Tamla Motown, a glut of bands sprung up on the pub circuit, each as sharp-dressed as the next, practically every one of them having Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Dancing in the Street’ in their repertoire. Earlier in 1964 a compilation album titled Brum Beat had been released (‘Birmingham’s 14 greatest groups’, it erroneously trumpeted), featuring a band called the Senators performing ‘She’s a Mod’. The sixteen-year-old drummer on that track was named John Bonham. Plant was not impervious to such things. He had resolved to get himself onto the local ballroom circuit, albeit still playing his beloved blues. The names of the bands he would flit through during the next year or so spoke for themselves: New Memphis Bluesbreakers, Black Snake Moan, so called after a Blind Lemon Jefferson song, and after a John Lee Hooker track, the Crawling King Snakes. All but the latter were to be short-lived and soon forgotten. ‘I went to see Black Snake Moan play in a pub near Stourbridge,’ says school friend Gary Tolley. ‘We all just thought the stuff he was doing would never catch on. We were very much still in the pop idiom while Robert was off doing something on his own.’ One song Plant had begun performing by now was Robert Johnson’s ‘Travelling Riverside Blues’, more commonly referred to as ‘The Lemon Song’ on account of its suggestive lyrics – Johnson lasciviously leering, ‘You can squeeze my lemon ’til the juice run down my leg.’ Before the decade was out it would become a calling card of Plant’s, although there was no suggestion of that then. ‘That was probably his favourite one to do,’ says Tolley. ‘I’m sure he used to sing it sometimes just to watch the reaction on people’s faces when he got to the bit about squeezing his lemon. The rest of us hadn’t got the nerve to do it, but he had. Because he was different, people in authority reacted quite strongly against him. One or two of the nastier pieces of work at school didn’t like him either, because he never seemed to have any problem picking up girls.’ He was having other troubles at King Edward VI. His studies were coming a distant second in his priorities to rehearsals and gigs. He had often struggled to get to school on time in the morning, but now his late arrival, and a subsequent dressing-down from the prefects who manned the gates, were a daily occurrence. ‘The prefects had their own little room,’ says Tolley. ‘If they didn’t particularly like you, you’d have to go there and be made to stand on a table while they all sat around looking up at you. I suppose it was designed to humiliate and embarrass, but Robert just thought it was stupid. But for all of us who were playing in a band, our academic work suffered. We were rehearsing one night a week, and playing most Wednesdays and Thursdays, and certainly every Friday. You’d get home from school, have your tea and rush through your homework, then the van would pick you up.’ At the end of each term, students filed into the school library to be confronted by Headmaster Chambers, who would summon them up one at a time and pass comment on their grades. Chambers would have told the errant Plant to pull his socks up in no uncertain terms. With external exams looming and the pressures of his father’s expectations upon him Plant suffered a period of anxiety about his falling grades. But this passed and with it any chance he might catch up. Instead he spent the remainder of that school year skipping off the school premises and into Stourbridge town centre with his clique of budding musicians. ‘We would bunk off school and go and sit in the railway station caf?,’ remembers Tolley. ‘Or there was a place called the Chicken Run, which was down a side street next to the town hall. We used to go in there for the bacon rolls, which you could eat down in the cellar and feel more grown up. Robert never seemed to have any money in those days. He was always cadging cigarettes. Four of us would take our school lunch money down to the station caf? and each get a cup of coffee and beans on toast, and we’d all have to share with Rob.’ That summer Plant and his friends sat their O-level exams. Of the Jurymen, Tolley, Dudley and Baggott scraped a handful of passes between them and left school, off to find jobs. Plant managed but a single pass, in history. His parents intended for him to remain at King Edward VI for another year and to re-sit his exams. At least things had taken a turn for the better outside of the school. Plant was singing and blowing harmonica in the Crawling King Snakes, a band that had grown up in Kidderminster, the nearest town immediately south-west of Stourbridge. From messy beginnings at such places as the local YWCA they had gradually improved enough to get themselves on the Ma Reagan circuit, and were playing twenty-minute slots at her venues as a warm-up act. ‘By the time I was capable of stepping in front of a microphone the Midlands scene was full of beat groups and I was a bit late getting on the bandwagon,’ Plant told me. ‘But I’d gotten a really good schooling playing with people quite a bit older than me. I’d already been getting up in the blues clubs for more than a year before I even thought about going to places where women danced.’ In many respects 1965 was to be a pivotal year. The first rumblings of dark and crazy days ahead were felt in the US that summer as Los Angeles burnt during the Watts Riots. In October, with the number of troops being drafted to Vietnam doubling, anti-war protests swept through American cities. That same month in Britain, police in Manchester arrested Ian Brady and his girlfriend Myra Hindley, charging them with the murder of five children, three of whose bodies had been discovered on nearby Saddleworth Moor. This was also to be the year that pop music came of age. The Beatles made Rubber Soul; Bob Dylan went electric and released his first masterpiece, ‘Highway 61 Revisited’; the Byrds emerged on America’s West Coast; and the Who crashed out of London shouting ‘My Generation’. And as rock grew up out of pop, the notion that this was all to be a flash in the pan receded into the distance. In Stourbridge, the town hall became a hub of activity, hosting weekly ‘Big Beat Sessions’ that brought both the Who and the Small Faces to town. Each found an especially enthusiastic supporter in sixteen-year-old Plant, by now a fully fledged mod. He got a taste of this action closer to home, too. Out of Wolverhampton came the N’Betweens, later to change their name to Slade and then cranking out fuzzbox-heavy Tamla Motown covers. There were also the Shakedown Sound, formed – like Crawling King Snakes – in Kidderminster, but steps ahead of Plant’s band, bagging opening spots with the likes of the Who and local heroes the Spencer Davis Group. Plant was especially taken with the Shakedown Sound’s singer, Jess Roden. A year older than him, Roden had, like Stevie Winwood, a freakishly soulful voice. His band were gigging most nights of the week on the Reagan circuit and beyond, performing powerful versions of blues staples such as ‘Smokestack Lightning’ and ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’. The Crawling King Snakes and the Shakedown Sound became close, hanging out and copping songs off each other. ‘I suppose Robert was King Mod,’ says Kevyn Gammond, then guitarist in the Shakedown Sound. ‘He had a good eye for fashion, so he’d always have the latest Ben Sherman shirt on and the right hairstyle. I think the N’Betweens and the Shakedowns had a big influence on him, because we were all little mods, and our band had played with the Who. ‘Rob was really impressed by Jess. They’d both come round to my parents’ house and ask me to work out all the chords to songs like “I Go Crazy” by James Brown. That’s the way you learnt then, by putting the records on. I’d be left to sit there and get on with it while they went off to play pinball at the Flamingo Caf? down the road.’ It was in Kidderminster at this time that Plant first came across a gifted young guitarist named Robbie Blunt. The two would hook up after school, going round to each other’s houses to listen to records and work out songs together. None of this allowed for any appreciable improvement in Plant’s relations with his parents, or with regard to his studies during what would be his final year at King Edward VI. He had grown to like his maths teacher, Mr Colton, but otherwise the state of things between him and the masters had, if anything, deteriorated. Michael Richards, a contemporary of Plant’s at the school, recalls him by then having a reputation as ‘a bit of a hooligan’, although he qualifies this by saying that ‘he was mischievous more than anything’. He continues: ‘The chemistry master was a guy named Featherstone, a nice old bloke who should have retired years ago. I remember that Robert played him up no end. But Robert was very popular, too. He hung around with a lot of people. Everybody wanted to be his friend. ‘You’d hear lots of things about him, and I’m not sure a lot of them were true. There was one story that Robert’s parents had gone off on holiday and left him to stay with someone else, and he’d broken back into his own house and thrown a party.’ In that last year Plant did join the school’s jazz society and ended up sitting on its social committee. In this role he helped oversee three concerts in the school hall by King Edward VI’s resident jazz band, the Cushion Foot Stompers. For a time he also joined a jazz-influenced group called the Banned with another schoolmate, Martin Lickert, who played bass. Lickert would go on to become Ringo Starr’s chauffeur, appearing alongside his employer in Frank Zappa’s surreal 1971 movie 200 Motels. The Banned got as far as opening the bill at the town halls in both Stourbridge and neighbouring Dudley in the spring of 1965, although Plant was forced to miss the latter engagement after having contracted glandular fever. The proprietor of the town’s Groove record shop, David Yeats, who had sung in Sounds of Blue and seen Plant at the Seven Stars, replaced him for that one show. He went round to Plant’s family home the night before the gig for a hastily convened rehearsal. Shown up to his small bedroom, he found Plant lying stricken in bed. ‘He took me through this book of song lyrics he had got together,’ says Yeats. ‘I did the show, and I’d never heard anything before that was that loud. I remember standing in the middle of this fantastic noise. The audience seemed happy enough, but what they must have thought I don’t know, seeing this teenage sex god being replaced by a little bloke like me.’ Whenever things got especially strained at home, as was increasingly the case, Plant would sleep the night in the Banned’s van. The vehicle made quite an impression, since they had used lipstick and nail varnish to graffiti it. That summer, he re-sat his O-levels with a little more success. He gained passes in English, English literature, geography and maths. This was reported in the school’s newspaper, the Stourbridge Edwardian, as was the fact that he would be leaving King Edward VI on 22 July to train in accountancy. Yet his departure appears to have taken place rather earlier than this, and was enforced. ‘I heard that one day he was off playing truant in Birmingham, walking around with a mate of his and smoking, when he bumped into one of the masters who happened to be in town on his day off,’ says Michael Richards. ‘He was still wearing his school uniform so it was seen as a bit of a disgrace. I believe that was the culmination of a long series of problems and Robert was expelled. It did create a bit of a stir around the school. Most people thought he’d had it coming but there was also the sense that he’d had a bit of bad luck.’ There is some doubt about the veracity of this story. Gary Tolley dismisses it, although he had left King Edward VI the previous year, and no record of it happening is kept at the current school. But another of Plant’s fellow pupils during his final year, Colin Roberts, who would later return to the school to teach, supports Richards’s account. ‘I don’t know the circumstances of his being expelled,’ Roberts tells me, ‘but he must have done something bad because very few people got thrown out. The story goes that Headmaster Chambers told him that he’d never make anything of himself. When I came back to the school in the early ’70s, Chambers himself told me that Robert had later turned up at his house in a Rolls-Royce and asked the Headmaster if he remembered him.’ (#uc3fb3d24-a4d5-5111-8b53-3e1f8483f198) He would dance across the stage, like he was floating. The summer of 1965 would be the last time Plant’s parents were able to assert themselves when it came to his future prospects. At their behest he enrolled on a business studies course at Kidderminster College of Further Education, one supposed to equip him for a career in accountancy. Before term started he took a temporary job as a stock boy at Stringers department store on Stourbridge High Street. He made the most of his time there, cracking jokes with the women on the shop floor. And with money in his pocket, the young mod could be seen zipping around town on a scooter, sporting a parka jacket with a Union Jack emblazoned on its back. His second brush with academia, however, was no more diverting for him than the first. He wasn’t at college long, but long enough for his fellow students to remember him. Recording her memories of the era on a local website, one of them later wrote: ‘I was at Kidderminster College at the same time as Robert Plant. He used to strum a guitar in the common room, but unfortunately he didn’t impress most people and was often told to shut up.’ As had become the norm, it was in his other life that Plant was animated. Continuing to sing with the Crawling King Snakes, he had also ingratiated himself with local promoter Ma Reagan. She had him spinning records in between acts at her Old Hill Plaza. He would play Stax and Motown tunes, but also the Small Faces, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. On occasion Ma Reagan would also ask him to take on the MC’s duties at the ballroom. ‘I became the apple of her eye,’ Plant told me. ‘When she made me Master of Ceremonies, I’d arrive at the Plaza on my Lambretta, go into the dressing room and put my suit on, and then go out and introduce people like Little Stevie Wonder. I remember he came out with his hand on his bandleader’s shoulder, and he put him on the microphone. Then he started playing “Fingertips Part 2”. This was in Old Hill in the Black Country! ‘It was unreal to be able to hear such quality – to see that shit and still being at college. Being close to that kind of energy … Man, you can’t ask for a better ticket than that. If that isn’t going to turn your head and make you say, “Is there anything else I can do?”’ There were more mundane matters to attend to first. His father had packed him off to a job interview with a firm of accountants and they took him on. He went to work as a trainee chartered accountant in Stourport, a picturesque town on the banks of the River Severn, sixteen miles from Stourbridge. His wages were ?2 a week, less than he could earn for one gig. This didn’t stop him going out most nights – to perform, to watch other bands or to dance in clubs. He dragged himself into the office for just two weeks before he was politely asked to clear his desk. It was then he decided to turn pro with the Crawling King Snakes, although he had to take on additional work at a local carpet factory to supplement his income. In any event, this latest act of rebellion left his father despairing that his son was throwing his life away. It was at this moment that Plant met John Bonham for the first time. Bonham, known to one and all as ‘Bonzo’, approached him after Crawling King Snakes had completed one of their twenty-minute slots at Old Hill Plaza. He told Plant his band was good but that the drummer was hopeless and he was better. Bonzo joined Crawling King Snakes soon after. Born in the Midlands town of Redditch in the spring of 1948, Bonham was ten when his mother bought him his first set of drums. Her son had been gripped from the moment he saw the great jazz drummer Gene Krupa pummelling out the tribal rhythm of ‘Sing Sing Sing’ in the 1956 film The Benny Goodman Story. Bonham was drumming in bands from the age of fifteen, passing through the likes of the Blue Star Trio, the Senators, and Terry Webb and the Spiders. Bonham was just three months older than Plant but was already married. He and his wife Pat were living in a caravan parked behind his family home. Not only worldlier than his new friend, in terms of ability Bonham was also ahead of anyone Plant had played with to that point. In the Black Country’s pubs and clubs, he was already spoken of as a drummer of prodigious ability, a powerhouse. ‘Bonzo had at one time been in a dance band,’ Plant said to me. ‘So he got all of his chops from being able to play those big band arrangements. I’d never seen anything like it.’ ‘John was a bit odd even in those days,’ adds Tolley, Plant’s school friend. ‘Every time he walked into a room there was a strange aroma – he was definitely smoking a lot of wacky baccy. But he was a great drummer and he had a better kit than anyone else.’ For a short spell the possibilities seemed boundless. With Bonham propelling them, the Crawling King Snakes opened up for the Spencer Davies Group, Gene Vincent, the Walker Brothers and others. Plant was brought closer than he had ever been to the magical centre of things, so close he could taste the glories that were being offered up. He and Bonham stood at the side of the stage at Stourbridge Town Hall and watched the Walker Brothers, listening to teenage girls scream at their singer Scott Walker as if he were a god. Even a band such as Liverpool’s the Merseybeats, for whom fame was fleeting, could pull into town in their blue and white station wagon and appear to Plant as ‘renegade guys who ran off with all our teen queens’. ‘There was no notion of where we were going but no known cure either,’ he told me. ‘I mean to say, I didn’t have any concept of fame as a seventeen-year-old kid. It was just the fact of being able to get away from the clerks desk as a chartered accountant. And then to go back to my parents, who only ever wanted the best for me, and proclaim that I had to go … and forever.’ Plant felt more now than just the pull of singing the blues. He had heard the screams, smelt the sex and sensed the power that could be bestowed upon the man with the microphone. And then, as was his custom in those days, Bonham walked out on the Crawling King Snakes. He had been lured back to his previous band, the Way of Life, by the promise of more money, and this he needed since his wife Pat was now pregnant. With Bonham’s departure the Crawling King Snakes dissolved. Yet Plant would not have to wait long for his next gig. While DJ-ing at the Old Hill Plaza, he spotted a band called the Tennessee Teens. A three-piece, they played blues and Tamla Motown covers, and had recently returned from a resident club gig in the German city of Frankfurt. Plant introduced himself to their guitarist, John Crutchley. ‘He asked me if he could sing with us,’ Crutchley recalls. ‘That’s how it started. We were doing the Plaza three or four times a week; it would always be the last venue of two or three we’d do each night. When we got there, Robert began to get up and do a song with us; some blues stuff, some Chuck Berry, Solomon Burke’s “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love”. I can’t remember who asked whom but we agreed to make it into a band. ‘He stuck out, even then. He liked to wear bomber jackets and he’d got this big, blond, curly hair. We were working-class lads and he came from a completely different background to us. We used to have to go and pick him up on a Saturday night. I remember his mum was quite prim and his dad being an ex-sergeant major type. His dad seemed a nice chap but neither of them was at all supportive of what he was doing. They never came to see him play.’ Watching their son go off with yet another band, Plant’s parents tried one last time to reason with him. The fall-out resulting from this encounter led to him leaving home at seventeen. He went off to live with his new bassist Roger Beamer, whose parents ran a bed and breakfast down the road in Walsall. At the beginning of 1966 the Tennessee Teens changed their name to Listen. The band members had also thought up nicknames for each other, although it seems unlikely this over-extended their imaginations. John Crutchley became ‘Crutch’, drummer Geoff Thompson’s bulk led to him being christened ‘Jumbo’, while the rationale behind making Roger Beamer ‘Chalky’ and Plant becoming ‘Plonky’ is lost to time. In a short press biography they put together at the same time Plant listed his hobbies as motoring and listening to soul records. ‘Mod girls’ and clothes were foremost among his likes, ‘phonies’ his biggest dislike. He soon revealed a flair for publicity, too. Plant fed a story to John Ogden, the pop columnist at local newspaper the Express & Star. He told Ogden he had won a dance competition judged by Cathy McGowan, the alluring host of TV pop show Ready Steady Go! Plant claimed McGowan had accepted an invitation to come and see his new band, and had then asked them to perform on her show. Listen, said Plant, had declined as the proposed date clashed with a gig – ‘And we don’t break bookings like that,’ he nobly added. It was enough to get them into the paper, Ogden’s piece running on 3 March 1966, in the week the Rolling Stones topped the UK charts with ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’. ‘They came into the office and we had a chat in the works canteen,’ Ogden says. ‘It wasn’t at all surprising to me that Cathy McGowan would go for him – she wasn’t alone. He looked great. There was something special about Robert, although not everyone saw it at the time.’ Listen’s beginnings were otherwise decidedly small-scale. Fashioning themselves as a mod group, their first gigs were mostly in pubs such as the Ship and Rainbow and the Woolpack in Wolverhampton, alongside the now-traditional warm-up engagements on the Reagan circuit. Yet Plant had by this stage developed into an impressive performer. He had learnt to better control his voice, although it remained very much a strident blues roar. And he had gained enough confidence to unveil the dance moves he had honed strutting his stuff at mod clubs. ‘Oh, he was great,’ says Crutchley. ‘We’d start off our set with “Hold On I’m Comin’” by Sam & Dave, and Robert would dance across the stage like he was floating. We rehearsed at my parents’ house, which was an old corner shop. My dad would ask me, “Is the Rubber Man coming tonight?” ‘Rob gave us all an extra confidence. He was ambitious, but not so as it was in your face. He was a bit more relaxed off the stage. But once he got on it he would go into a different mode. He had a great stage presence and the voice was very much there from the start. For sure, he was very popular with the ladies, too.’ Bill Bonham, no relation of John’s, was then a fourteen-year-old schoolboy playing keyboards in a covers group called Prim and Proper. They shared a bill with Listen at one of these early shows. ‘I remember going “Whoa” when they started the first song, and the next thing they’d finished and I breathed out again,’ he says. ‘To me, Robert was a star and I was mesmerised by him. He’d already got a big female following. We became friends but you couldn’t trust him with your girlfriend for two seconds, that’s for sure.’ That May, Bob Dylan and his new backing band, the Hawks, played the Birmingham Odeon. On this same tour a member of the audience at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall shouted ‘Judas!’ at Dylan for the perceived crime of plugging in his guitar. Yet Dylan was instrumental in whipping up the storm clouds of cultural change that were billowing across the Atlantic. In all its speed-fuelled wonder, that year’s Blonde on Blonde, a double album no less, cemented the idea of the rock album as an art form. By the summer Dylan had crashed his motorbike in Woodstock and retired from view, but all that he had set in motion had begun to fly. The Beatles made Revolver; Brian Wilson went to the edge and brought back Pet Sounds for the Beach Boys; and the Byrds soared through ‘Eight Miles High’. It was this latter track, and the album upon which it featured, Fifth Dimension, that announced the arrival of the psychedelic movement. It was to be a fitting soundtrack to a decade of social and civil upheaval in the US, one filtered through the new perspective of the hallucinogenic drug LSD. These sounds coming out of America would soon enough have a profound effect on Plant. It would be another year, however, before Britain basked in the Summer of Love. Yet the sands were shifting even in the Midlands, where people are traditionally cautious of such radicalism, as if wanting first to weigh up its substance. The boom in venues opening up to music continued unabated, the classifieds pages of the local newspapers filled each night with adverts for gigs in pubs, clubs and dancehalls. In Birmingham, the Elbow Room and the Cedar Club were the places to be and to be seen. The latter club, it was said, attracted the drinkers, while the clientele at the former preferred to smoke dope and intellectualise about jazz. It was through such sessions at the Elbow Room that Stevie Winwood’s Traffic would come together the following year. Out of the Cedar Club, in the first weeks of 1966, came the Move, who at a stroke raised the bar for the other local acts, Plant’s Listen among them. Bringing together the pick of Birmingham’s musicians, the Move consisted of singer Carl Wayne, guitarists Trevor Burton and Roy Wood, bassist Ace ‘The Face’ Kefford and drummer Bev Bevan, each of whom had served a beat-group apprenticeship. To begin with they covered the same tunes as every other band in town but added songs by the Byrds and other blossoming West Coast acts to the mix. Their own songs came later, although from the start the Move’s multi-part harmonies were one of two things setting them apart. The other was their image. At the insistence of their manager, Tony Secunda, a former merchant seaman, the Move kitted themselves out in gangster-style suits. Securing his band a residency at London’s Marquee Club, Secunda further compelled them to add an element of theatre to their presentation. ‘Tony said to Carl one night, “Be a great idea if you smashed up a television on stage,”’ recalls Trevor Burton. ‘The next day Carl went out and got a TV and an axe. There was outrage. We let off a couple of smoke bombs, too. The third time we did it we had the fire brigade and the police hit the place. It made all the papers, which is what it was all about.’ The impression this made on Listen was instantaneous. The four of them went to a second-hand clothes shop in Aston, Birmingham, and bought double-breasted suits, co-opting the Move’s gangster chic. Their idea for whipping up drama was more prosaic, amounting as it did to Plant and Crutchley staging a mock fight each night. ‘Rob and I used to go at it for about two or three minutes,’ says Crutchley. ‘The bouncers would often intervene and stop us. We really should have mentioned beforehand that it was part of the act.’ Such mishaps seem to have been a common occurrence. Jim Lea, then the bassist with the N’Betweens, recalls frequently seeing Listen. ‘The first time was at the Civic Hall in Wolverhampton,’ he says. ‘Plant had got that testosterone-filled thing about him. He had on plaid trousers and a shirt buttoned up to the neck, and he’d backcombed his hair. He was doing this really exaggerated kind of strut. At one point he got up on the bass cabinet, which was turned on its side. He was standing up there going “Ooh, baby, baby” and got his mike stand trapped under the cabinet. He jumped down, went to strut off and was yanked backwards, almost off his feet. ‘But the girls thought he was wonderful. They used to have these Monday-night dances at the swimming baths in Willenhall, down the road from Wolverhampton. I saw him there, dancing with a neck-coat on, showing off to all the birds.’ By then the N’Betweens had become the biggest band in Wolverhampton and were looking for a singer. Their new guitarist, Neville ‘Noddy’ Holder, had assumed the role but he recommended to Lea and the others that they hire Plant. Like the rest of Listen, Holder hailed from Walsall and had on occasion driven them to gigs in his dad’s window-cleaning van. Says Lea: ‘Nod told us, “Plonk’s a good singer, but all the birds like him – that’s why he’ll be good for us.” At the time I didn’t get what all the fuss was about. By then he’d got a reputation for getting up with all of the B-list bands in town. The thing is, once he was up you couldn’t get him off the stage, so I was adamant we weren’t letting him on with us.’ Lea’s reasoning that retaining Holder as sole singer would mean more money for each of them swung the argument, and Plant was not asked to join the band. Had he been, it’s doubtful he would have remained loyal to Listen. He had gone along to see the Who at Kidderminster Town Hall that May. Pete Townshend had sung lead vocals that night, Roger Daltrey having temporarily walked out following the first of many clashes. After the gig Plant waited outside the stage door for Townshend and offered him his services. If nothing else, he was sure of himself. The English summer of 1966 was a wet one. There was a new Labour government in office and mounting anticipation of football’s World Cup kicking off in the country that July. On a chill, damp night Plant met his future wife at a concert by British R&B singer Georgie Fame. Although she was born in West Bromwich, Maureen Wilson’s family had come to the Black Country from Goa in India. Petite and pretty, she was a keen dancer, and the attraction between her and Plant was immediate. Their relationship would have been frowned upon by many around the Midlands at that time. Less than two years earlier the General Election of October 1964 had exposed the nasty tensions simmering beneath the surface in the area. In a notorious vote in West Bromwich’s neighbouring constituency of Smethwick the sitting Labour MP had been unseated by the Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths, who had fought a campaign protesting at the influx of Asian immigrants into the town. Such was the vitriol stirred up by Griffiths that the victorious Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, suggested he be met at Westminster as a ‘parliamentary leper’ when he took up his seat. Griffiths was ousted in the ensuing election of March 1966 but it would take many years for the raw wounds he had opened up to heal. ‘Robert did everything against the rules then and it was quite brave of him to do so,’ reflects Perry Foster, Plant’s first mentor. ‘Be it leaving his perfectly nice, middle-class home or stepping out with a girl from Goa. I will say this for him, he’d got more balls than I had.’ It was equally true that Maureen had a positive influence on Plant. He became a frequent guest at her family’s home on Trinity Road in West Bromwich, there acquiring a taste for Indian curries and spices, and also hearing new and exotic sounds. ‘A lot of Asian families lived in that part of West Brom,’ he said to me. ‘Those amazing sounds of the Indian singers from the ’50s … It was all around, coming from next door and up the alley from the terraced house where I was staying. I was intrigued by it.’ Says John Crutchley: ‘Maureen was good for Robert, and he couldn’t have wished for a better family because they took him under their wing. He stayed at Trinity Road quite a lot, among all the comings and goings there. I fancied Maureen’s younger sister, Shirley, and the four of us used to go about together. It was a nice, cosy scene.’ Not that Plant’s restless ambitions were stilled. He was mindful of the precedent being set by the Move, who had struck out beyond the Midlands, and he convinced the others that they needed to get off the local circuit, too. Listen’s answer to Tony Secunda would be Mike Dolan, who ran a tailoring business in Birmingham. Dolan approached the band with a view to becoming their manager, telling them he had money to invest. His money did not go far, but Dolan did get Listen taken on by two booking agencies, the London-based Malcolm Rose Agency and Astra in Wolverhampton. They began to get gigs in far-flung places such as the 400 Ballroom in Torquay on the English south coast, and up north at Newcastle’s Club A’GoGo. On 30 July, the day that England won the World Cup at Wembley Stadium, Listen opened for the Troggs, of ‘Wild Thing’ fame, at the Boston Gliderdrome in Lincolnshire. ‘We went all over the place in a van Mrs Reagan had given to us,’ recalls Crutchley. ‘It had belonged to another of her bands, the Redcaps, but they’d split up. A friend of Robert’s from Kidderminster, a lad named Edward, used to drive us. He was a total nutcase, this chubby little guy who used to take loads of substances.’ Carole Williams was then the receptionist at Astra. It was her job to hand out the wages to the agency’s bands each week. ‘The lads would all come and get their money on a Friday morning,’ she says. ‘Robert was living with Roger Beamer and neither of them was very good at getting up. One of my little jobs every Friday was to call them at 10 am to wake them. They were on ?15 a night for two forty-five-minute slots, which was quite good in those days. ‘Robert had an aura about him and stood out from the other guys in his band. He was drop-dead gorgeous, too. One time, a band I liked called the Roulettes were doing a show in Shrewsbury, a couple of hours away. Robert offered to take me. It was on a Friday night and he picked me up after work. He turned up in this really old, black car – a Ford Poplar, I think. ‘We trundled along to Shrewsbury, saw the band and had a lovely night. We got home, and that’s when he told me he didn’t have a driving licence. To him that was a mere technicality. At least it was a straight road.’ For all this roaming, the highest-profile gig Listen played was back in the Black Country on 20 October. That night they and the N’Betweens opened up for Eric Clapton’s heavyweight new blues-rock trio, Cream. It was to be an inauspicious occasion for them. ‘At the end of their set Plant and John Crutchley started their fake fight, and Crutch ended up falling off the stage,’ says Jim Lea. ‘He broke his ankle, as I recall. Plant told me later that they really were fighting. He said they argued a lot, so the fake thing was just an excuse to bash seven shades of shit out of each other.’ Listen’s last roll of the dice was to record a three-track demo tape that Dolan shopped to various London labels. He secured a deal with CBS. Yet unbeknown to the others, the label’s talent scout, Danny Kessler, had been taken in by Plant’s voice, and it was the singer that CBS signed up and not his band. As such, when the time came to record Listen’s first single, a cover of a song called ‘You Better Run’ originally by the American pop-rock band the Rascals, it was Plant alone who was required to travel down to London for the day. ‘CBS said they wanted to have session guys on it to make it more commercial,’ says Crutchley. ‘We were a little bit upset but it was one of those things. We were trying to get a hit record, so we were led.’ Even at this distance the power of Plant’s voice on the track is striking but Kessler’s own over-fussy production smothers it in strings, brass and backing singers, one of whom was future Elton John sidekick, Kiki Dee. By unfortunate coincidence the N’Betweens had also chosen ‘You Better Run’ to be their first single, albeit in a more stripped-down form. Both versions were released on the same day in November 1966. To boost sales, Dolan directed his charges to go into every record shop in the area and order their own song. In the event it crept into the Top 50 for just one week and then vanished. ‘At one point I had Robert on one phone line and Noddy Holder on the other, both of them asking me which version I liked best,’ says Carole Williams. ‘My loyalties were with the N’Betweens, but I told Robert a little white lie.’ ‘After that, things started to peter out for us,’ says Crutchley. ‘A lot of money had gone into publicising the record. We more or less sat down together and admitted it wasn’t working out. We were really broke, too.’ With no band or money coming in, Plant moved in with his girlfriend and her parents. The couple were living off Maureen’s wages from working as a shop assistant at Marks & Spencer, which were ?7 a week. Plant, who had just turned eighteen, made her a promise: if he had not realised his dream by the time he was twenty he would give it up and get a proper job. (#uc3fb3d24-a4d5-5111-8b53-3e1f8483f198) I howled so much that I couldn’t do anything at all. There remained something for Plant to hold on to: he was still signed to CBS Records. He was broke and had again been shoved back to the margins, but so long as he kept his foot in the door his dream would not die. He just had to find a way – any way – to kick that door open. If that meant abandoning himself to the whims of others then so be it. As it happened, CBS did have a vision for their young singer. They had decided to mould him into a crooner. With that voice and those looks of his he could surely make the ladies’ hearts flutter and soar. Their rivals Decca had done just the same with two of their own singers, and with great success. The first was a strapping bloke they had plucked from the Welsh valleys named Tom Jones. Then there was the still more unlikely Gerry Dorsey, an Indian-born club singer the label had re-christened Engelbert Humperdinck. As 1967 began, Humperdinck was enjoying a smash hit on both sides of the Atlantic with ‘Release Me’, a corny ballad Decca had found for him. For their charge CBS had earmarked an Italian ballad, ‘La Musica ? Finita’, which had been a Number One in its country of origin. For Plant the track was re-titled ‘Our Song’ and he was once more paired with CBS’s in-house producer, Danny Kessler, to record it. Kessler was as unstinting in his use of strings and brass as he had been on Listen’s ill-starred ‘You Better Run’, but such a backdrop was better suited to ‘Our Song’ since it was the most saccharine of confections. Not that the same could be said for Plant, who sang it as if straitjacketed. He told his friend Kevyn Gammond that it took him ninety takes to get a finished track, the process reducing him to tears. Plant’s first solo single was released in March 1967, the same month that Pink Floyd’s ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘Purple Haze’ by Jimi Hendrix came out. It was an abject failure, selling fewer than 800 copies. Even one of his first champions, the Express & Star newspaper’s pop columnist John Ogden, dismissed it as ‘a waste of a fine soul singer’. ‘I got a phone call from Robert’s mother soon after,’ says Ogden. ‘She wanted to know if I really thought her son was any good or not. I told her that while you could never guarantee anything, he stood as much of a chance as anyone of making it. She must have been terribly disappointed over the next year or so because it just didn’t happen for him.’ Plant was not yet deterred from throwing himself into this radical transformation. Back in the Midlands, he crimped his hair into a bouffant, bought a dark suit and told anyone who asked that he was going to have a career in cabaret. He reasoned to himself that there was nothing not worth trying. He even had business cards printed up that unveiled a new identity, advertising ‘Robert – The E Is Silent – Lee, now available for bookings’. And he found an unexpected ally in his father. A local big-band leader, Tony Billingham, had hired Robert Plant Sr to design and build an extension to his home. ‘Robert’s father noticed the coming and going of musicians, and one day told me that all his son wanted to do was sing and asked if I could take him on,’ recalls Billingham. ‘I said that I would give him a go. We were called the Tony Billingham Band, and it was a traditional dance band. ‘I couldn’t say how many jobs Robert did with us but I remember one of them being at Kidderminster College. He sang some Beatles songs that night. We usually wore evening dress for functions in those days although we wouldn’t have contemplated doing so for a college date. For that we’d have worn black shirts, something like that. Robert had got his long hair and his shirt open right down to the last button. Dance people didn’t do that kind of thing.’ Five months after ‘Our Song’ had sunk, CBS tried again with a second single, ‘Long Time Coming’. This was better tailored to fit Plant’s voice, being R&B-based, but it was no less aimed at the middle of the road than its predecessor had been. It was also no more successful. But by then Plant had headed off in yet another direction, this one moving closer to the spirit of the time. He had put together a new group, calling it Robert Plant and the Band of Joy. The guitarist, Vernon Pereira, was a relative of his girlfriend Maureen. Although the Band of Joy’s line-up would be fluid for as long as it lasted, Plant’s inspiration remained the same – the new American music he had by now picked up on. The catalyst for this was John Peel, a twenty-seven-year-old DJ born into a well-to-do family in Liverpool and boarding-school educated. Peel’s father was a cotton merchant who in 1961 had packed his son off to the US to work for one of his suppliers. He remained in the country for six years, during which time he got his first job as a DJ – an unpaid stint at a radio station in Dallas – and also acquired a stack of records emanating from America’s West Coast. Returning home in 1967, Peel was taken on by the pirate station Radio London, creating for it a show called The Perfumed Garden. He filled this with the records he had bought back from the US, exposing the bands behind them to a British audience for the first time. Coming out of LA and San Francisco, they included the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. These were rock groups born out of blues, folk, country and jazz traditions, but which pushed further out there through their consumption of the newly available psychedelic drugs and an uncontrolled urge to freak out. ‘We’d never heard any of this music till John started playing it,’ says Peel’s fellow DJ Bob Harris. ‘It changed my perception of things and I’m sure Robert was listening in the same way.’ Plant was indeed enraptured by it, digesting this American music with an appetite the equal of that he had first shown for its black blues. Of the bands then emerging from San Francisco’s psychedelic scene the two that hit him hardest were Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape. The Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow album of that year gave rise to a brace of acid-rock anthems, ‘White Rabbit’ and ‘Somebody to Love’, singer Grace Slick’s spooked vocals haunting her band’s lysergic drone. Released that summer, Moby Grape’s eponymous d?but LP fused rock, blues, country and pop into a sound that oozed heady adventurism and a sense of unbridled joy. From LA he embraced a further two bands in particular. Buffalo Springfield brought together two gifted songwriters, Neil Young and Stephen Stills, whose woozy folk-rock was setting as much of a template for the era as the Byrds, the same tensions destined to pull both bands apart. Then there was Love and their ornate psych-pop symphonies conjured up by another singular talent, Arthur Lee. Love put out two albums in 1967, Da Capo and then Forever Changes, their masterpiece. Although neither of these records would make stars of Lee or his band, each served up a kaleidoscopic musical tableau for others to feast from. ‘All that music from the West Coast just went “Bang!” – and there was nothing else there for me after that,’ Plant told Melody Maker’s Richard Williams in 1970. ‘Three years before I had been shuddering listening to Sonny Boy Williamson. Now I was sobbing to Arthur Lee.’ Soon John Peel brought this music to his front door. The DJ began hosting a regular Sunday evening session at Frank’s Ballroom in Kidderminster, often appealing on air for a lift up to the Midlands. ‘It was fantastic,’ enthuses Kevyn Gammond, like Plant a champion of these shows. ‘Peel would bring up people like Captain Beefheart and Ry Cooder, but also the first incarnation of T-Rex. There was a great story about Captain Beefheart’s band being sat in the dressing room, rolling up these big joints, and Peel offering them cups of tea and cucumber sandwiches. Peel hipped us to this whole great scene and Rob especially got so into it.’ The first incarnation of the Band of Joy began to gig in the spring of 1967, playing both of Birmingham’s hippest clubs, the Elbow Room and the Cedar Club, the latter as warm-up to former Moody Blues man Denny Laine’s Electric String Band. It was still a covers band but one heading gingerly for the acid-rock frontiers. Local music historian Laurie Hornsby recalls the group he was then playing guitar for doing a show with the Band of Joy at the city’s Cofton Club on 25 April. ‘The club was an old roller rink,’ he says. ‘I remember the place was packed. Drugs hadn’t yet become a part of the scene. It was all about going out for a pint and to pull a bird. The mod look had gone by then – Robert and his band were all wearing Afghan coats, buckskins and things like that. ‘Because they were far superior to us, we went on and did forty-five minutes and then they did an hour. I watched the Band of Joy’s set but I only remember Robert. He sold himself so well, knew exactly how to make people watch him.’ ‘In the Midlands, there were two schools of thought about Robert at that time,’ says John Ogden. ‘People either liked him or hated him. All the women loved him. You could see them eyeing him up from the audience. Because of that the blokes most often didn’t.’ This antipathy towards their singer extended to the band’s de facto manager, ‘Pop’ Brown, father of their organist Chris Brown. Following a heated altercation between the two, Plant conspired to get himself fired from the Band of Joy. ‘Robert had his own ideas and “Pop” Brown didn’t like it,’ suggests Ogden. ‘Robert’s always known his own mind and what he wanted, which was, basically, to be a star.’ That June the Beatles presented Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to the world and with it Britain was launched into its Summer of Love – one founded upon sounds, fashions and a predilection for mind-bending drugs that were all directly imported from California. The suggestion that this amounted to a sweeping cultural revolution has been exaggerated – the preposterous Humperdinck, Tom Jones and a crooner of even greater vintage, Frankie Vaughan, fronted four of Britain’s ten bestselling singles that year. Yet there could be no denying the extent of its impact. This much was fast apparent to Plant. Within weeks of Sgt. Pepper’s emergence both his beloved Small Faces and Stevie Winwood’s new band Traffic scored hits with songs that mined the same seam of psychedelic whimsy, ‘Itchycoo Park’ and ‘Hole in My Shoe’. The Traffic song would have jarred him most. Again he was confronted by the stark fact of how far his contemporary Winwood had travelled, and the distance he trailed behind. By the time ‘Hole in My Shoe’ had risen to Number Two in the UK charts Plant was working as a labourer for the construction company Wimpey, laying Tarmac on West Bromwich High Street. Turning up for his first day on site, his new workmates took one look at his long, blond hair and began calling him ‘The Pop Singer’. It would not be long before Plant hauled himself up from this latest low ebb, since he was never lacking in resolve or self-assurance. He soon gathered about him another group of musicians, announcing them as Robert Plant and the Band of Joy. ‘Pop’ Brown howled in protest and for a time there were two Band of Joys hustling for gigs, but the others blinked first, changing their name to the Good Egg and drifting to obscurity. The following year Plant would marry into their guitarist Vernon Pereira’s family – Pereira was Maureen’s cousin – although the two of them never played together again. Pereira died in a car crash in 1976 at a time when Plant was consumed by other troubles. To manage his latest band Plant called on an old contact, Mike Dolan, who had stewarded Listen. Dolan had an immediate effect, although not perhaps a considered one. Plant had an impending court date to answer a motoring charge and Dolan convinced him this could be used to drum up publicity. Dolan hatched a plan to stage a ‘Legalise Pot’ march on the same day. He contacted the local press, suggesting that his singer was going to lead a crowd of young disciples to the courthouse steps, protesting their civil rights. In the event Plant arrived at Wednesbury Court on the morning of 10 August 1967 accompanied by a supporting group that numbered just seven, one of whom was his girlfriend’s younger sister Shirley. This ragged band carried placards daubed with slogans such as ‘Happiness Is Pot Shaped’ and ‘Don’t Plant It … Smoke It’. A report in that evening’s edition of the Express & Star described the scene: ‘Police peered curiously from the windows of the police station and some even came out to photograph the strangely assorted bunch, which included two girls in miniskirts.’ Dolan denied that the whole farrago had been stage-managed, telling the paper: ‘It was a completely spontaneous act on the part of these youngsters, who regard Bob as a kind of leader.’ Although Plant was cleared of the charge of dangerous driving, a fellow protestor, a nurse named Dorette Thompson, was less fortunate, losing her job for her part in the march. ‘That pantomime was Robert’s scuffling side,’ says John Ogden. ‘He didn’t need to do it, but he tried everything. He actually defended himself in court attired in the costume of an Indian bridegroom. Now, I’d been in court once to give a character reference and gotten cross-examined by this snotty lawyer. It’s an intimidating experience. Yet he did that when he was still just eighteen.’ Plant’s domestic arrangements at the time were no less haphazard than the march had been. He lived on and off with Maureen and her family in West Bromwich but crashed with friends, too. That summer he also moved in to a house at 1 Hill Road, Lye, close to his Stourbridge stomping grounds. One of his new housemates was Andrew Hewkin, an aspiring painter then in his final year at Stourbridge College. ‘I can’t imagine that house is still standing – it would be in need of serious renovation after what we did to it,’ Hewkin tells me. ‘People came and went all the time. It was hard to know who was living there and who wasn’t because you’d bump into a different girl or guy every morning. We were all paying virtually nothing in rent. ‘There were lots of rooms, each one with a different colour and smell, all sorts of music blaring out from them. I don’t remember seeing much of Robert’s room but then I don’t recall seeing much of Robert either. The big dormitory up at the college was called West Hill; that’s where all the action happened and where Robert was most of the time. He wasn’t a student but he knew that all the best-looking birds hung out there.’ The house in Lye soon doubled up as a rehearsal space for the Band of Joy. The band set their gear up in the cellar, which was cramped, windowless and feverishly hot. ‘It was seriously loud down there and Robert would drip with sweat,’ says Hewkin. ‘I saw them perform a lot, too. He was very much the same on stage then as he is now, the chest puffed out, but even more so. I think he probably learnt quite a bit off Mick Jagger because Robert strutted, too, though he was more of a cockerel. ‘Otherwise, he was very down to earth, and charming, too, although he was heavily into his hobbits and underworlds. Sad, isn’t it? He bought a car, an old Morris Minor, and parked it in the garden of the house, which was completely overgrown. It never moved in all the time he was living there. I heard later that the police eventually came and took it away.’ This second incarnation of the Band of Joy was no more durable than the first. Their cause wasn’t necessarily strengthened by the image they adopted – daubing their faces in war paint. In particular, this look did nothing for bassist Peter Bowen. ‘It frightened everybody to death,’ Plant told Richard Williams. ‘This big, fat bass player would come running on, wearing a kaftan and bells, and dive straight off the stage and into the audience. I howled so much that I couldn’t do anything at all.’ By the end of the year Bowen and the others had gone, leaving Plant to pick up the pieces once more. This he did with great zest, persuading both Bonham to join him again and Kevyn Gammond to walk out on reggae singer Jimmy Cliff’s backing band. With typical chutzpah, he next turned to the Good Egg, bringing in their bassist Paul Lockey and organist Chris Brown, doubtless to the considerable ire of his father. With this line-up, the Band of Joy gelled at last. Bonham’s hulking drums giving them added weight, they were all heft and power, indulging themselves on sprawling instrumental workouts. This was a precursor to all that would soon enough change the lives of Plant and his hooligan drummer, although at the time neither could have known it. Yet it was all too much for the Midlands audiences of the time. ‘I used to run a club at the Ship and Rainbow pub in Wolverhampton and booked them for a gig,’ says John Ogden. ‘It wasn’t really a success because a lot of the audience were still blues freaks and Robert wasn’t doing that then. ‘I do remember him singing Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and it being bloody great. We had a chat afterwards and he was disappointed with the response. He was saying people ought to listen, that he couldn’t keep doing the same thing. But back then if you were unusual, and especially if you were loud, you couldn’t get gigs around here.’ Mike Dolan took the band outside of the area to the Middle Earth and Marquee clubs in London, and up north to Club A’GoGo in Newcastle. That March they did a handful of dates around the country with an expat American folk singer, Tim Rose. Such gigs were intermittent and paid less than the covers circuit they had each started out on but to begin with a shared purpose spurred them on. ‘You couldn’t call what we were doing freak rock but it had that spirit to it,’ says Kevyn Gammond. ‘It was exciting and it set us apart from all the twelve-bar stuff that we’d grown up with. A number could go on for ten, fifteen minutes ­ – God help the poor audience. There was also a battle going on between John and Rob, because Bonzo was such a showman. He’d set up his drums in such a way that Rob and I could be pushed a bit to the side or behind him.’ Just as he had done with Listen, Dolan got the band to record a demo tape. It was done at Regent Sound Studios in London and featured versions of Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What It’s Worth’ and the murder ballad ‘Hey Joe’, plus two self-penned songs, ‘Memory Lane’ and ‘Adriatic Seaview’. Both covers suggest the potency of this Band of Joy, although little room was afforded for subtleties and even less for restraint. Plant embodied their full-on assault, his voice pitched lower than it would later be, attacking ‘Hey Joe’ as if by doing so he could rid himself of all his doubts and demons. Yet each of the Band of Joy’s own songs was as unremarkable as the next and the tape generated no great interest, Plant not even being able to rustle up enthusiasm at CBS, who retained his contract. Dolan managed to secure the band a residency at the Speakeasy Club in London but by then the game was up. Bonham accepted the princely sum of ?40 a week to join Tim Rose’s backing band and the Band of Joy crumbled. It had become an all-too-familiar scenario to Plant, this act of coming so far and then falling short. He had other, more pressing matters on his mind now, too. Maureen was pregnant. And he was just a few months from turning twenty, the point at which he had promised her he would give all this up. He went back to labouring and got engaged to Maureen. One can imagine the pressure exerted on them by their parents to do the right thing and uphold traditional values, however belatedly. He had come to appreciate the true worth of money, how helpless he was without it, how to treasure it and not to waste it. But still he would not quit. Still he kept on seeking that elusive break. Meanwhile, the Move’s guitarist, Trevor Burton, had passed on the Band of Joy’s demo to his manager, Tony Secunda. Eventually, having listened to it, Secunda invited Plant down to London to audition for him and his business partner, Denny Cordell. Plant asked Kevyn Gammond to go with him. ‘We had no money so we hitched down there,’ Gammond remembers. ‘They put us up in the shittiest, run-down hotel – the Madison. The next day, we went to Marquee Studios, just Robert and myself and those guys. They said, “OK, write us a song.” We made something up, demoed it … I don’t know what happened to it. ‘On the way back we couldn’t get a lift. We met this girl hitchhiker at the start of the M1. We asked her to pull her skirt up, and we ran and hid behind a hedge. A car pulled up, the door opened, and we leapt out of the hedge and jumped in as well. Got us back as far as Birmingham.’ During the Band of Joy’s Speakeasy residency the blues musician Alexis Korner had popped his head round the dressing door to say hello. Then forty years old, Korner was the son of an Austrian-Jewish father and a half-Greek, half-Turkish mother, and had come to England via France, Switzerland and North Africa. Proficient on guitar and piano, he had joined Chris Barber’s jazz band in the ’50s, putting together his own blues collective in 1961. He named it Blues Incorporated and the band became a finishing school for a generation of young British blues players. At one time or other Charlie Watts, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce passed through the Blues Incorporated ranks. And Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Rod Stewart and an angel-faced guitarist named Jimmy Page each got up to jam with Korner at his band’s regular Marquee Club residencies. Plant went along to see Korner perform at the Cannon Hill Arts Centre in Birmingham, re-introducing himself to Korner with his usual boldness. He told me: ‘Alexis was up there playing away. He had this guy called Steve Miller on piano, a great player. I had a harmonica in my pocket and I started playing along, looking up at Alexis as he stood there on the stage. I just had that audacity, couldn’t get enough of anything. ‘He finished the song and looked down at me. I said, “Can I get up and play harp with you on one song?” He told me to come by the dressing room in the break. I ended up doing some eight-bar blues with him. He was a very charming and regal man.’ Korner asked Plant back down to London, putting him up in his flat in Queensway. He told his guest the sofa he was sleeping on was the same one Muddy Waters bunked down on whenever he was in town. Together with Steve Miller, Korner and Plant did a handful of club shows and began writing songs. The trio cut two of these tunes – ‘Operator’ and ‘Steal Away’ – at a recording session. Both were solid but unspectacular blues numbers. Plant, however, sang each as if for his life, baying, howling and desperate sounding, here at last able to show he had the measure of Jagger, Rod Stewart and all the others ahead of him in the queue. The idea that the three of them might make an album was left hanging in the air. Back in the Black Country he went to see his old friend Bill Bonham’s new band and asked if he could join. They had the truly awful name of Obs-Tweedle but he would be able to earn some beer money and, since Bonham’s parents ran a pub in Walsall called the Three Men and a Boat, have a place to lodge when he was not staying with Maureen’s family. Billed as Robert Plant plus Obs-Tweedle, the band did a bunch of local gigs during June and July of 1968. They were on at the Three Men and a Boat each Wednesday and most Saturday nights. There were dates at the Connaught Hotel and Woolpack pub in Wolverhampton, the sort of places Plant must have thought he had seen the back of. He taught them the same Buffalo Springfield and Moby Grape songs he had first done with the Band of Joy, although there was now no Bonham to make them sound murderous. ‘I went along with anything he said, all of his ideas,’ says Bill Bonham. ‘He was great to be in a band with; hard-working, constructive in his criticism. People have often said to me that Robert is aloof or cold but I never experienced that from him.’ On 20 July Obs-Tweedle were booked to do a gig at the West Midlands College of Education in Walsall. It was a Saturday night and Bill Bonham recalls it being a typical student audience: ‘They just stood there and watched, trying to be cool.’ There were three interested members of the small crowd that night, though. One was Jimmy Page, now guitarist in the Yardbirds, and a second was that band’s bassist, Chris Dreja. The third was also the most conspicuous, their manager Peter Grant. A great, looming lump of a man, Grant had once worked as a bouncer – and as a wrestler, too – before breaking into the music business as minder to Gene Vincent and Little Richard. He shepherded the visiting American rockers around Britain, sucking it up and cracking skulls. The reason each of them found themselves in Walsall on this particular evening was Robert Plant. The Yardbirds were then going through their death throes – wunderkind guitarists Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck were gone, the blues-boom hits long since dried up. On their most recent, wretched tour Page had confided in Grant his concept for a new band, one of all talents that could use the blues like heavy artillery and do much more besides. He would be its general, with Grant at his right hand. Page had reached out first to the Who’s drummer Keith Moon and their bassist John Entwistle but this had come to nothing. For a singer, he thought of Steve Marriott of the Small Faces, until their manager, the notorious Don Arden, asked him how he would like to play in a band with broken fingers. He next approached Terry Reid, an eighteen-year-old British blues singer then tipped to be the next big thing. Reid was working on his first solo album and declined but he tipped Page off to Plant, recalling a gig he had done earlier in the year with the Band of Joy. So here, to Walsall, Page and the others had come, and there they stood watching Obs-Tweedle load their gear onto the stage. The initial omens were not good. ‘They mistook me for a roadie,’ Plant told me. ‘Makes perfect sense – I’m a big guy. Terry Reid had told me that he’d mentioned me to Jimmy and I knew the Yardbirds had cut some great records – I’d seen them play with Eric. I didn’t have anything to lose.’ Obs-Tweedle did nothing to impress Page that night. But their singer was something else. Page left the Midlands wondering how Plant had remained undiscovered, fearing it must be the result of some defect in his personality or a fault he had yet to spot. He decided to give the matter further thought. Plant was left to carry on as before. That summer, a club opened up in an old ballroom in Birmingham. It was called Mothers and it fast became a magnet for the growing band of local ‘heads’ and hippies. Plant began to hold court there, a king still looking for his kingdom. Recalling first seeing Plant at Mothers, the English folk singer Roy Harper says: ‘I was twenty-six and he was nineteen. He was accompanied – or being followed, I don’t know which – by four women. He automatically struck a light in my estimation. My clearest memory is seeing him waft away into the middle distance, surrounded by this coterie of chickpeas, and thinking, “That guy’s got something very attractive going on.”’ Returning to his lodgings at the Three Men and a Boat one night, Plant found a telegram from Grant waiting for him. It read: ‘Priority – Robert Plant. Tried phoning you several times. Please call if you are interested in joining the Yardbirds.’ A month shy of his twentieth birthday, Plant’s moment had come at last. Not that it seemed this way to him at first. He had, after all, grown used to having his hopes raised and then dashed. And anyway, the Yardbirds were no longer anyone’s idea of a sure thing. ‘I ran into him one night at the Queen Mary Ballroom in Dudley and he told me that he’d had this offer to join the Yardbirds,’ says Jim Lea of the N’Betweens. ‘He’d got Maureen with him and he said he wasn’t sure about it, didn’t know if it’d work out. He told me he’d rather be playing the blues with Alexis Korner. ‘We were doing quite well at the time and I’d bought myself a sports car, an MG Midget. Planty had this green Ford Prefect. I was just getting into my car and he shouted over, “Nice car – I guess I’ll have to start playing pop!”’ Plant went and picked up the phone to Grant. What else was he going to do? Speaking a year later to Mark Williams of the International Times he said, ‘It was the real desperation scene, man. I had nowhere else to go.’ (#uc3fb3d24-a4d5-5111-8b53-3e1f8483f198) (#uc3fb3d24-a4d5-5111-8b53-3e1f8483f198) Do what this man says, or fuck off. Peter Grant passed on an invitation to Plant to meet with Jimmy Page at his home in Pangbourne on the banks of the River Thames so that they could test the waters and get the measure of each other. Stepping off the train from Birmingham, Plant found himself being set upon by an old woman. She began slapping his face and shrieking about the length of his hair. This would soon seem in keeping with everything that happened to him. He would feel as though he were walking in an alien land, the terrain littered with the unfamiliar and unexpected. The village of Pangbourne was a rural retreat for well-off Londoners to escape to and Page had found himself a charming boathouse on the river. A new Bentley was parked in the driveway. Out back a flight of steps led down to a mooring and the water. Inside the house Page had installed a large aquarium and filled the place with antiques he had picked up on his travels. This had all been paid for with the money he had earned from the Yardbirds and years of session work before that. For Plant it was a vision of what success looked like. Yet it also made clear to him that, here and now, he and Page would not be meeting as equals. ‘I was taken aback when Jimmy asked me to his house,’ Plant told me. ‘I mean, the Yardbirds had cut some serious shapes at one point and obviously they were working in America. Then I met Jimmy and he was so charismatic. His contacts were phenomenal.’ Four years older than Plant, Page was born in the London suburb of Heston, five months before the end of the war in Europe. An only child, he had been a keen athlete at school, a promising hurdler, but nothing else mattered to him once he heard Elvis on the radio. He got his first guitar, a Spanish acoustic, at the age of twelve, teaching himself to play by copping licks off James Burton, Elvis’s guitarist. In his teens Page joined his first band, Neil Christian and the Crusaders, doing one-night stands around the country, bashing out rock ’n’ roll covers. Upon leaving school he enrolled at an art college in Surrey. Most nights he headed into London’s West End with his guitar and began getting up with the house bands at clubs such as the Marquee and Crawdaddy. This led him on to the session circuit, where he flourished, since he was a fast learner and versatile, too, as proficient with ornate acoustic melodies as stinging electric leads. The session jobs came thick and fast. He played on the Who’s ‘I Can’t Explain’ and the Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’ singles, but also with Burt Bacharach and on advertising jingles. In 1965 the Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham hired him as staff producer at his new record label, Immediate, for which the Small Faces and Fleetwood Mac recorded. He joined the Yardbirds as bassist the following year, switching to guitar when Jeff Beck, whom Page had known since school, upped and left. He toured the US, storing up knowledge and being shaped by all he heard. Kim Fowley, the veteran American producer and hustler, recalls Page running into him in Los Angeles on one of these first visits. ‘I was having breakfast one morning at the Hyatt House Hotel on Sunset Strip when in he comes, Mister boyish, dressed in crushed velvet. He spotted me, and came and sat down. He told me he’d just had the most insane, disturbing experience. ‘A well-known singer-songwriter of the time, a pretty blonde, had asked him over to her house. When he got there, she’d detained him. He said she’d used restraints. I asked if he meant handcuffs and he said yes, but also whips – for three days and nights. He said it was scary but also fun. They say there’s always an incident that triggers later behaviour. I contend that this was it for Jimmy Page. Because being in control – that became his deal.’ Plant stayed at Page’s house for a week. The time was spent sizing each other up and rifling through Page’s record collection to find shared touchstones. An immediate chord was struck when Plant alighted on Joan Baez’s version of ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’, written by Anne Bredon in the ’50s. A delighted Page told him that he had marked the song out for his new band, something they could electrify. Yet in most other respects the two of them were very different. Page was reserved and withdrawn, Plant outgoing and cocksure. Plant had left home at seventeen and been scuffling on the fringes of the music business ever since. Page lived with his parents till he was twenty-four, and had them nurture and encourage his passion. For as long as Plant had scrapped, Page had been at the heart of the action. Before Plant left he played Page his old Band of Joy demos. Page had not yet found a drummer and Plant suggested he check out John Bonham. On the evening of 31 July 1968 Page and Grant trooped along to a club in Hampstead, north London, to see Bonham drum with Tim Rose. Bonham’s playing was ridiculously loud but also fast and dextrous, so one might miss the great skill behind the thunder. Page, however, had a keen ear and was sold. Bonham was less taken with the idea of throwing in his lot with Page. He and his wife Pat were still living in a caravan behind his parents’ house. The couple now had a two-year-old son, Jason, and Bonham was indebted to his father. He was getting a steady income from Rose, not to mention the fact that Pat was of a mind that anything involving her husband’s big, daft mate Robert Plant was bound to end in financial ruin. Plant was nonetheless dispatched to work on his friend, although Bonham was finally swung by a visit from Page and Grant, and their offer of more money than Rose was paying. Plant now had a familiar face along for the ride, someone to hold on to should the going get rough. He opened a bank account, depositing ?35, his first rewards from this latest band. A week before his twentieth birthday he and Bonham returned to London for rehearsals. That summer there were portents in the air for them. Both of the other mercurial guitarists who had been Yardbirds, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, had put out new records. Clapton’s Cream released Wheels of Fire, their third, a sprawling double album that was shot through with fiery blues but also burdened by excess and over-indulgence. Beck debuted his Jeff Beck Group on Truth, with Rod Stewart on vocals, coming up with a sound that was also steeped in the blues, but heavy and portentous. Yet Cream would not survive the year and Beck’s group were no more built to last. As a result there would be a clear run for what Page had in mind. Arriving at a poky rehearsal room beneath a record shop on Gerard Street in London’s Soho, Plant and Bonham met their other new band mate. Like Page, John Paul Jones was an only child. Born in 1946 into a musical family in Sidcup, Kent, he was also in a touring band by the time he was a teenager, playing bass guitar for the ex-Shadows duo, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan. He, too, had gone on to do sessions, which is where he and Page had first crossed paths. Jones was accomplished on both bass and keyboards but gifted as an arranger as well. He had scored the Rolling Stones’ ‘She’s a Rainbow’ single and ‘Sunshine Superman’ for the Scottish folk singer Donovan, a US Number One in 1966. Again like Page, Jones was an introvert, although there was something still more enigmatic about him, as though he kept a part of himself locked away at all times. This, then, was the band. Two diffident southern Englanders with experience beyond their years, two garrulous lads from the Midlands as green as they were driven. To begin with, Page called them the New Yardbirds, since it afforded them both instant recognition and the opportunity to take on some bookings left over from his old group. The reaction in Britain to them was lukewarm at best. The weekly music paper NME named their singer ‘Bob Plante’, and in Plant’s own neck of the woods John Ogden at the Express & Star newspaper was even less engaged. ‘I don’t think I even wrote about it,’ he says. ‘I thought the Yardbirds were old hat. It seemed to me like another bloody lost cause for him.’ The four of them knew differently. This much had been clear from that initial rehearsal. They had thrown themselves into ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’’, a staple of the Yardbirds’ live sets, and the force of their collective sound had shocked them. It became more apparent still during the first gigs they did together that September. These were club dates in Denmark and Sweden, 40-minute sets a night, the songs hand-picked by Page: blues covers, tracks he had done with the Yardbirds, and an ominous-sounding dirge called ‘Dazed and Confused’ he had begun messing around with during the end days of that band. Each of them understood, no words needing to be spoken, that this was a band apart. It was as if they had captured lightning in a bottle. ‘Straight away, we could see the power of it,’ Page told me, years later. ‘It was a very intense thing. Was it extreme for the time? Good God, yes. The use and employment of electric and acoustic guitars – that hadn’t been done by anyone – or the shaping of the songs. There was something alchemical between the four of us that was totally unique.’ Plant nodded, adding his own rejoinder: ‘We were really good and we didn’t fuck about.’ Still buzzing from their short Scandinavian excursion and having been together for just a few weeks, the band trooped into London’s Olympic Studios on 27 September to record their d?but album. Based in Barnes, on the south-west edge of the capital, Olympic was a small, eight-track studio housed in an old music hall. The Rolling Stones had used it that same summer to record Beggars Banquet. As he would do on all their albums Page was producing the sessions, assisted by the in-house engineer Glyn Johns. Plant’s studio experience, like Bonham’s, was limited, so much so that he had to be told to use headphones. Despite this he gave off his usual aura of self-confidence. Phill Brown was then a teenage apprentice at Olympic. ‘Glyn Johns was using down-time at the studio for them,’ he recalls. ‘He’d bring them in at weekends, when no one else was using the place, and that’s how they made the record. I met Robert and Jimmy. Robert was very striking. He seemed sort of god-like. As a band they definitely had a vibe to them. They were very focused and full-on. Arrogant isn’t the word but they were self-contained and sure of themselves.’ Page, however, was the band’s undisputed leader. Since there was no record deal at this point he was funding the sessions out of his own pocket and kept a forensic eye on costs. Plant moaned to Kevyn Gammond, his friend back home, about Page charging him for a plate of beans on toast he had ordered for lunch one day. Page did not ease up on this control in the studio, where he took the major role in creating and moulding the songs, although he often tapped into Jones’s arranging skills (Plant, still under contract to CBS, was not permitted writing credits). In his soft-spoken manner Page directed the others, Plant and Bonham in particular. The pair were both then on wages, no more than hired hands. The singer seemed carefree but he feared being replaced at any moment and so was compliant. Bonham was more bullish. It was left to Grant to step in and set the drummer right. ‘Do what this man says,’ he instructed him, ‘or fuck off,’ as Charles Cross reports in Led Zeppelin: Shadows Taller than Our Souls. ‘I wanted artistic control in a vice-like grip,’ Page told the writer Brad Tolinski, ‘because I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the band. That first record sounded so good because I had gotten so much experience in the recording studio. I knew precisely what I was after and how to get it.’ Such was Page’s attention to detail and the work ethic he instilled, recording was completed in just thirty hours’ studio time. The sessions had cost a mere ?1,782, the shrewdest investment Page would make. Long before the album came out the band that made it had become Led Zeppelin. This dated back to when Page first proposed forming a group to the Who’s rhythm section, Keith Moon telling him it would go down like a ‘lead balloon’. For the record’s cover Page chose a screenprint of a burning airship. The stark, explosive nature of the image was fitting. Led Zeppelin was a trailblazing album. Perfect it was not – the material was too much of a mess for it to be that, and not all of it flew. Yet when it took to the air its power seemed almost elemental, Page’s guitar strafing the grunge of ‘Dazed and Confused’, Bonham filling pockets of space on ‘Good Times, Bad Times’ with dazzling flourishes, the revved-up rush of ‘Communication Breakdown’ and the rousing ‘Your Time Is Gonna Come’. In moments such as these, Zeppelin soared. Plant shone on ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’, the song that first bonded him to Page. Here it embodied the sense of light and shade that Page intended to be at the band’s core – winsome acoustic passages giving way to full-bore rock, Plant riding the currents of both. Less convincing were two Willie Dixon covers, ‘You Shook Me’ and ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’, Plant as overwrought in his reading of the old bluesman as the band were leaden. He was otherwise somewhat constrained, suggesting little of the wild abandon he had shown with Alexis Korner just months earlier. Grant began shopping the album to record labels in the UK. The offices of Island Records were on a floor below his own on London’s Oxford Street, and he pressed a copy upon the label’s founder, Chris Blackwell. Birmingham-born drummer Mike Kellie was then a member of blues-rockers Spooky Tooth and signed to Island. ‘We went in to see Chris one day and he handed me this record, telling me there were a couple of guys on it that I knew,’ Kellie recalls. ‘I had no idea who they might be but I took it with me. Those were the days of getting it together in the country and we were living on a farm out in Berkshire. We went back there and put the record straight on. ‘Our singer, Mike Harrison, and I had the same reaction to it. We wanted to be in that band. It was the best of everything we’d heard and all we aspired to be. It was only later that I found out it was Robert and Bonzo. To me, Robert sounded just like Steve Marriott on that first record, when Marriott was at his very best.’ The general reaction to the band continued to be more muted. Grant could not negotiate a deal for them in the UK, and they often met with unresponsive audiences during their first gigs around the country that October and November. If this put Page’s nose out of joint, it was nothing Plant was unused to. ‘When I opened up shows for Gene Vincent and the Walker Brothers in the town halls, I was playing to thirty-five people,’ he told me. ‘And that was the zenith of all opportunity. Bonzo and I couldn’t even get in to some of the first gigs we did because we didn’t have a tie on. The fact that we kicked up a gear and got bigger audiences, that was just an act of God.’ More specifically, it was the act of Grant turning his attentions towards the US that did it for Zeppelin. The Yardbirds still had enough currency there to open doors for him, and when he flew out to New York he was also blessed with good fortune and opportune timing. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/paul-rees/robert-plant-a-life-the-biography/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.