Robert Plant has backed his reluctance to turn Led Zeppelin’s O2 stadium show into a full-blown tour, preferring instead to focus on solo projects in the vein of his Grammy-winning Raising Sand.
“It’s really like, What’s new?” Plant says in an interview in MOJO magazine, on sale next week. “We did it once. That was really the best Led Zeppelin gig since 1975. But of course it wasn’t Led Zeppelin. Let’s not forget that.”
Plant argues that a Zeppelin without late drummer John Bonham, who died in 1980, did not quite merit the name, but acknowledges that “if the three of us got together and called ourselves ‘Page & Jones & Plant’ it wouldn’t carry the same oomph.”
Among other Zep-centric revelations, he describes the scene backstage at the 02, where John Bonham’s mother told him, “You haven’t changed a bit - you’re always scratching your balls.”
But it is a different kind of restlessness that drives Plant, discovers MOJO’s Keith Cameron. He’s the quester who followed his nose from the ’60s’ Stourbridge beat scene (in groups including Perry Foster’s Delta Blues Band and Black Snake Moan), taking on board West Coast psych and lending his full-on banshee wail, luscious hair and born frontman hauteur to Led Zeppelin’s rich and heavy music mix.
“Bonzo used to say to me, quite categorically, ‘You’re no f**king good,” Plant recalls. “‘Just go out there and look good.’ And he was probably right most of the time, from what I’ve heard on the bootlegs.”
Not afraid to move on, even from successful incarnations, Plant enters a new phase with Band Of Joy, his latest album named after the pre-Zep group he formed with John Bonham. It features country-folk-rock rearrangements of songs including Richard Thompson’s House Of Cards, the trad arr. Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down and two tunes by Minnesota Mormons Low: Monkey and Silver Rider. Nashville names Buddy Miller, Parry Griffin, Byron House, Marco Giovino and Darrell Scott help out.
Robert Plant’s Band Of Joy is out on September 13.
http://www.mojo4music.com/blog/2010/07/robert_plant_mojo_exclusive.html
Loading...