Archive for the ‘Press’ Category

On the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, Plant gave a a world exclusive; the first televised performance of a track from his new album.

LATE last year, in a Nashville recording studio, Robert Plant, the former Led Zeppelin frontman, had a revelation. He was working on a new solo record, a project he began after scrapping plans for a sequel to “Raising Sand,” his 2007 album of duets with the country singer Alison Krauss that sold 2.5 million copies worldwide.

“I suddenly felt very free and liberated,” Mr. Plant said by telephone from his home in England near the Welsh border. “The moment was open ended, with a huge horizon, and that’s how I used to feel about music. This great weight fell away from me and I thought, ‘I could be 17 here.’ It took me back to how I felt when I was in the Band of Joy.” (more…)

With his Rapunzel hair and frequent grin, Robert Plant  does not immediately give the impression of being the most bloody-minded man in the music industry. He takes to the stage for the first night of his UK tour with a skip in his step; his unbuttoned black shirt merely hinting at the rock satyr of old. And yet the jovial 62-year-old prancing about the stage is a man with his heels dug in hard. (more…)

Robert Plant - Forum, London, 4 out of 5

There’s something a little strange about the audience response as Robert Plant and the latest incarnation of the Band of Joy – the name of his and the late John Bonham’s pre-Led Zeppelin  mob, currently serving as a flag of convenience for a collection of crack Nashville session musicians – launch into Led Zep’s Misty Mountain Hop. This kind of thing is part of the reason people buy tickets to see Plant: a rock legend performing one of the songs that made him legendary in the first place. Yet the reaction seems muted.

Perhaps the audience don’t recognise it. In the hands of the Band of Joy, the song is stripped of its thumping drums, raging guitars and mood of stoned loucheness. Instead, performed as duet between Plant and vocal foil Patty Griffin, it’s wistful and nostalgic, as perhaps befits a song about being busted for smoking grass being sung by a man in his 60s. (more…)

As the charismatic frontman of 70’s band Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant achieved legendary status as one of the original rock-gods.

He is still enjoying huge success as a solo artist 44 years after making his first recordings. His last album, with bluegrass soprano Alison Krauss, won six Grammy awards.

He has now formed a new band and recorded an album, Band of Joy, named after his first teenage group. (more…)

If only more musicians would grow old like Robert Plant. Acknowledging that heavy rock is best left to the kids­ (regardless of how brilliant that Led Zeppelin  reunion was), the 62-year-old has retired the leather trousers, buttoned up the shirt and embraced the more stately environs of country-rock.

His collaboration with Alison Krauss on 2007’s Raising Sands earned him six Grammy Awards and his re-formation of Band of Joy is a similar triumph. (more…)

(Bloomberg) — Robert Plant is back. The Led Zeppelin star is reviving the ghost of his old group and paying homage to Americana in one of 2010’s must-see shows. Plant, 62, still comes on with hair flowing and unbuttoned black shirt. It’s back to the 1970s when he rips through “Rock and Roll” and back to the 1890s with some of the traditional gospel and blues numbers.

Last night Plant started the European leg of his world tour in London. Backed by the Band of Joy, he plays songs from his new CD plus ‘‘Houses of the Holy” and other Zeppelin classics. (more…)

SINCE Led Zeppelin split in 1980, Robert Plant’s road has constantly been the one less travelled. Not for him the cash cow tours of Rod Stewart or Elton John.

Rather, the golden-locked rock god, below, has attempted to maintain contemporary relevance by his forays into everything from world music to synth pop.  Such excursions haven’t always been successful, but it doesn’t take a great leap of faith to declare that Band Of Joy (which reprises the name of his first pre-Led Zep band) is some of his best work since his Seventies heyday. (more…)

**** / 5  - The Grade I-listed One Mayfair was built in the early 19th century as St Mark’s Church, to service the needs of an aristocratic clientele away from their country seats. Restored following its deconsecration in the Seventies, it makes the perfect venue for a secret gig by one of today’s rock aristocracy, Robert Plant CBE, up in London from his Worcestershire home to launch his first album with his new group Band of Joy.

“Welcome to church,” says Plant. “It’s time to be christened in the New Way.” For Plant, the New Way is actually more the Old Way. The band is named after the first group he ever formed back as a Black Country hippie in the mid-Sixties, and the music it plays harks back to an era far older than that, when downtrodden blacks and poor dirt-farmers sought to scratch a living from the empty teats of the American Dream in the early decades of last century. There are more recent songs in tonight’s set – Richard Thompson’s “House of Cards”, Low’s “Monkey” – but they sound ancient as time itself played by Plant’s all-American band led by the guitarist Buddy Miller. (more…)

Robert Plant played an intimate warm-up show in London last night as he prepared for tonight’s gig at the Forum.

Taking the stage with new ensemble Band Of Joy, the one-time Golden God and his team of Nashville sessioneers ran through a short set of songs taken from Plant’s latest solo record. Now 62, he remains in fine form; the permanent glint in his eye evidence of just how much he’s enjoying this latest musical adventure.

The material - a downhome set of folk-blues reinterpretations, country rarities and reawakened spirituals - is rooted in the dusty americana that served him so well on 2007’s Raising Sand, except here the twinkling mandolins and plucky banjos play an even larger part in the mix. Unsurprisingly, the band are super tight, delivering the likes of Townes Van Zandt’s bittersweet Harm’s Swift Way, Richard & Linda Thompson’s House Of Cards and the hushed groove of Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down with rustic cool. (more…)