By: Will Hodgkinson

The Led Zeppelin singer on the joys of a quiet life in rural Worcestershire, the death of his son and the challenges of working with Jimmy Page.

When I meet him in a quiet corner of the Loews Vanderbilt hotel in Nashville, the morning after he received a lifetime achievement award at the city’s annual Americana festival, Robert Plant is in a cheerful mood. He performed a swampy rendition of the old spiritual Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down at the show in the Ryman Auditorium, before hanging out in a dive bar until two in the morning with the rural revivalist Gillian Welch. It’s a long way from sounding the hammer of gods in stadiums the world over with Led Zeppelin.

“Ever since we opened for Vanilla Fudge in 1968,” Plant says, referring to the first US tour Led Zeppelin embarked on, “I’ve wanted to know about this kind of thing. I love my home, I love [the British folk artists] Bert Jansch, Anne Briggs and Davey Graham, but there was just so much more energy from the American roots and I’ve never stopped exploring it. I’m a nerd. What a wonderful thing to be.” Plant doesn’t look like a nerd. In a black cowboy shirt, with curling, shoulder-length hair belying his 78 years, he looks more like a grizzled outlaw, heading off for one last ride. But Led Zeppelin’s deep knowledge of Americana was there from the start. The Muddy Waters blues classic You Need Love served as the basis for Whole Lotta Love, while Babe I’m Gonna Leave You is a heavy rock take on an old folk ballad made famous by Joan Baez. The band put together by the guitarist Jimmy Page in 1968 may have invented stadium rock and the lifestyle of excess that went with it, but its former frontman seems happiest when he’s digging into the band’s musical roots and leading a normal life. “Tuesday night is bingo night,” he says of his weekly routine in Shatterford, the Worcestershire village he has lived in, on and off, for the past three decades. “You might win 25 quid. Wednesday is misery corner at the local pub, where all the musicians who never quite made it on the Birmingham scene moan about their lot.”

Plant first came to America aged 20, touring with Led Zeppelin and finding the country “completely overwhelming. There was a momentum with Led Zeppelin that meant we were rolling all the time and I never had a chance to lift up the carpet for a deeper look. But after John [Bonham, the drummer] passed away and I stepped out on my own, I started to see America as one massive adventure.” That adventure took in moving to Austin, Texas, with the singer Patty Griffin in 2010, until they split in 2014. “I missed the fact that where I’m from, you can’t get away with a single thing,” Plant says of his pining for the Midlands. “I’ve been a quasi big shot for so long that in Worcestershire nobody gives a f***. The most they say is: ‘All right, Bob? Still doing a bit?’ ‘Well, I won five Grammys with Alison Krauss…’ ‘What’s a Grammy?’ But in Austin, Patty and I walked up the street and cars would be crashing into each other. Eventually I had to say: ‘Patty, I think the Wolves are playing Arsenal on Saturday. I’ll see you soon.’.

Ever since Led Zeppelin’s Ramble On, a tribute to the British countryside couched in imagery from The Lord of the Rings, Plant has written about the landscape of his home. “I was obsessed,” he says. “Crossing the border of England, over Offa’s Dyke and into the Welsh hills, made me feel this freedom on a small island. For years I was embarrassed by the coyness of those lyrics, but I was trying to put some gentleness across the power and intensity of Led Zeppelin.” Except for a short, disastrous return to the stage for Live Aid Philadelphia in 1985, and an equally ill-fated five-song set for an Atlantic Records anniversary in New York in 1988, there has only been one reunion concert: a tribute to Atlantic’s co-founder Ahmet Ertegun at the O2 in London in 2007. Twenty million people applied for tickets, Jason Bonham took the place of his father on drums, Kashmir and Stairway to Heaven made it on to the set list and Rolling Stone magazine described the band as “ready, rehearsed and out to kill”. It was a huge success and it never happened again. Plant’s reluctance to return seems to be the reason for that. “That was always my plan,” Plant says of the reunion as a one-off event. “The concert was nerve-racking because it could have been a shambles, and who wants that? Someone said, ‘Why does Plant turn his back on the majesty of Led Zeppelin? Why is Person A representing the power and the glory while Plant goes to bingo in the Welsh borders?’ Person A is, of course, Page. “Well, what else would you do?” Plant asks, rhetorically. “I’m so lucky to have grown into this guy instead of gritting my teeth and trying to keep something going. It felt like the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the king says, ‘One day, lad, all this will be yours.’ And his son says, ‘What, the curtains?’”

The whole private-jet-setting, stadium-stomping, hotel-trashing fun of Led Zeppelin must have come crashing down after his five-year-old son Karac died of a stomach virus in 1977 (he was the second oldest of Plant’s four children - his daughter Carmen is the eldest and there are two younger sons, Logan and Jesse). “Well, there was no map, no instructions to Led Zeppelin, and we just carried on,” Plant says of dealing with the aftermath of the tragedy. “But I didn’t need the group after losing my boy. These musical romances are great when everything is great. When things go left of centre, who wants to sit backstage for hours and hours with people you’ve been stuck with since 1968? You’re not playing cards, you’re not going to the movies, you’re just waiting. I was always looking to get away.” He finally had his chance after the death from heavy drinking of Bonham, his friend since they were teenagers, in 1980, bringing a close to the Led Zeppelin story. “John was a sensitive, big-hearted guy who got overwhelmed by the boredom of the moving monolith,” Plant says. “He was torn between missing his family and being the classiest drummer from any rock band. He couldn’t leave it behind.”

Plant’s present band couldn’t be more different. He put Saving Grace together after hiring a bunch of musicians from his local pub. They stick mostly to old folk, blues and Sixties rock songs, bringing a north African influence to imbue them with a droning, ancient quality that’s intoxicating. The band features Plant duetting with the singer Suzi Dian, which will remind the Led Zeppelin faithful of The Battle of Evermore, the band’s 1971 folk rock classic on which Plant sang with Sandy Denny of Fairport Convention, the only time they collaborated with an outside singer. In the main, though, there is nothing of Led Zeppelin’s bombast here but something quieter, more mysterious.

“I met a multi-instrumentalist in the village called Matt Worley and we started talking about [the Scottish folk-rock group] the Incredible String Band,” he says. “And I was heading in this direction to save myself. Right into the Nineties there was an earnest, intense approach to honouring Led Zeppelin, like we were dragging it around with us. I still honour Led Zeppelin, but in a lighter way. When I play it now, Gallows Pole sounds like a Tommy Steele B-side.” While Plant confesses to “massacring the blues” in the past, he rejects the long-held accusation that Led Zeppelin plagiarised the form. He recalls an incident when Robert Lockwood Jr, the stepson of the country blues pioneer Robert Johnson, cornered him on a street in Chicago. “He balled me out for stealing the blues, which I thought was a bit rich. Everyone uses Robert Johnson’s Crossroads [also known as Cross Road Blues], but that was based on a riff by [another country-blues pioneer] Kokomo Arnold. It’s all just another take on the same old thing.”

I wonder if Plant will ever return to songwriting. Raising Sand (2007) and Raise the Roof (2021), his bluegrass-tinged albums with Alison Krauss, featured covers of songs by Tom Waits, the Everly Brothers and Bert Jansch, while Saving Grace have run the gamut from Sixties psychedelic rockers Moby Grape to the Nineties indie band Low. Plant hasn’t released an album of original material since Carry Fire in 2017. “I really want to write,” he says. “But what we have going on around us right now is so vast, with a helplessness about everything and a national sense of panic in America, that my words have nothing to do with anything at all and it would just be trite. I want to entertain, sing as well as I can, crack jokes, send myself up and make people feel good. At this time in my life, that’s everything. That and getting out of bed.”

There are physical realities to singing in your eighth decade. Plant says he has to pace himself to get through a tour and not let rip as he once did. “In the old days, kicking off the set with Immigrant Song was a challenge to say the least. In 1970, before a concert at the Royal Albert Hall, I lost my voice entirely. [The dubious doctor to the stars] Doctor Robert gave me a shot of adrenaline and boom! I was off.” Having to maintain his voice also distanced Plant from Led Zeppelin’s more notorious excesses. “There was a lot to read in those hotel rooms. Welsh border archaeology for a kick-off,” he says of his post-concert reality. “You learnt that it was better not to refute any of the stories and just get on with it, because whatever Led Zeppelin was, it was definitely not glamorous.”

Still, it was the uneasy alliance at the front of the band that gave Led Zeppelin its magic, and if you look at all the great rock bands of the Sixties and Seventies, from the Beatles to the Stones to the Who, two contrasting characters made each of them work. “My life is so much better for having worked with Jimmy Page, but you do have to deal with a very different personality,” he says. “I know Roger Daltrey pretty well. He’s on the road at the moment, solo, and he’s free. I’ve been free for years.” Since Bonham died he has tried to be one of the boys in the band, but he can’t. He’s too famous, too much a part of history, too blessed with a once-in-a-generation voice to simply slot alongside whoever he happens to be playing with at the time. “I’m not like everybody else,” he accepts, somewhat sadly, before it is time to head off on the tour bus for a gig in St Louis, Missouri. “It’s not just about fame. It’s about what you’ve got between your ears on a musical level, the travelling you’ve done, your emotional experience of life. I’m not coming from the same angle as these guys in the band.”

That’s Robert Plant in a nutshell: the regular guy who, however hard he tries, cannot escape his past as the golden god of rock’n’roll.