Interviewer: Carol Clerk – Melody Maker, January 30, 1988

Over the past three years Led Zeppelin have been used and abused by everyone from The Cult to the Beastie Boys. On the eve of his latest solo album, Robert Plant talks to Carol Clerk about why the supergroup of the seventies have become the inspiration behind the eighties

IT HAPPENED without warning onstage at Wembley in September, 1985. One minute Robert Plant was up there doing the business as usual, and the next… “A little light came on above my head.” The little light was probably something similar to the one which, some years before, had startled that Paul chap on the road to Damascus. Robert Plant peeled a satsuma and stared across the kitchen table in his London management office as he recalled the great Moment Of Illumination. “It happened half-way through the set. I might’ve been singing ‘Squeeze my lemon till the juice runs down my leg’ or ‘I’m a fool for a cigarette’ – no, seriously, it could’ve been anything, but I suddenly realized that I’d taken this little journey round and round in circles, ever-decreasing, dumbfounding everybody by showing them how to waste a perfectly good career.

“I’d been writing music and going out of my way particularly to avoid commerciality and, more-so, the obvious trappings of a Led Zeppelin-ite. My solo career has meandered self-consciously between total amnesia and rejection of anything I might’ve been doing before 1982 and an inexplicable desire to write songs with no choruses. Those things, and many more of the things I’ve been doing, have been pre-meditated, determined, hot-headed and, I think, pretty crazy. “I had the clap so many times years ago that I was almost immune to penicillin, and in music, subsequently, I’d ‘oooohed’ and ‘babyed’ so many times I couldn’t do it any more. I lost a lot of the power. I tried to convince everybody this was contemporary. So I finally woke up at the Empire Pool (as he sentimentally refers to the Arena). And now I’m setting sail and heading off to the land of the Deep And Meaningless again. And it’s great fun.” At the time of Robert’s Moment Of Illumination, the huge revival of interest in Led Zeppelin had already begun, fueled by the band’s somewhat chaotic reunion at Live Aid. And now, at a time when Zeppelin fever, spread by the likes of the Beasties, The Cult and The Mission, is epidemic and highly contagious, Plant is back with a new album, Now And Zen, which not only admits to the glorious past, but hugs it.

THE “OOOOH”S ARE BACK! AS SOMEONE who fondly remembers the vivid physical effects of Robert’s “ooooh”s upon young ladyhood, I’m delighted to find them, after all this time, in excellent working order. But don’t expect to hear any over-the-top screeching: that’s a thing of the past. “The primal scream effect was in the very, very early days, because I couldn’t think of anything else to do,” said Robert, tossing back the famous mane of tangly, long, blond hair. “To use any kind of vocal dynamic, it has to be an effect and it has to be in sympathy with what else is going on. You don’t have to go wailing all over the place. The Deep And Meaningless ‘Spinal Tap’ scream always heralds a quick run to the button on the radio and a quick ‘off’.”

JIMMY PAGE IS BACK! WELL, HE’S on two tracks, the current single, a moody song called ‘Heaven Knows’, and the perky, eccentric ‘Tall Cool One’. The arrival of Page to play his guitar parts so excited the normally celebrity-weary studio staff that they ended up climbing over each others’ heads to watch the master at work. “His persona, his imagery, his myth, his mystique are intact,” said Robert. “He retains the mystique that Led Zeppelin as a unit had, simply because he’s not doing what I’m doing now. Jimmy doesn’t talk to anybody. To have mystique, you do… f*** all. Why do you think Led Zeppelin was so much of an intangible thing? We were completely out of the media’s reach. Occasionally Nick Kent staggered his way across the ocean to review a concert, but it was occasionally. We never courted the media. “Nowadays, in certain quarters, people say ‘Plant’s okay, he talks’. I’m part of the machine. I’m doing what I’m doing now because I’m promoting my record. Would Jimmy Page ever agree to being cornered by Simon Bates?” Jimmy Page is currently working on new material to which Robert Plant has contributed the words and main melody line of a song called ‘The Only One’.

THE SONGS MAY NOT REMAIN THE SAME, BUT THEY’RE BACK! WHEN PLANT goes out on tour shortly – “It begins on Friday next in Camelot, somewhere on the M25” – he intends to include a handful of Led Zeppelin songs in the set, something he always insisted would never happen. “It’s time to eat some of my words,” he nodded, remaining vague about which numbers he might resurrect and remarking only that “I won’t keep the obvious ones in”. He did, however, take on ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’, ‘The Lemon Song’ and ‘Trampled Underfoot” at a recent “secret” gig.

THE RIFFS ARE BACK! IN THE most significant reference of all to his membership of Zeppelin, Robert has included on his new album samples of some of their riffs. “Zeppelin samples have been used quite regularly in the last two or three years,” he said. “I just think that if Rick Rubin can do it rather poorly and quite obviously and seriously, by the sound of it, like some American jackdaw, then I might as well do it myself. There’s nothing wrong with theft, there’s nothing new under the sun, but when the riff is the only thing – on ‘She’s Crafty’ for example – you’ve gotta be being cynical, I guess. But it served its purpose. It was ‘rich boys play dirty’.

Jimmy Page didn’t know I was going to do any sampling on my own album. He didn’t hear what we’d done until the end, and he just raised an eyebrow and looked quizzically at me. The idea of lifting off our own records – it’s taking the piss, really, isn’t it? You draw on photographs sometimes, and you cut up boxes of chocolates and make models out of them. If you lift something off a record, it’s neither here nor there. I’m sure Jimmy sees the point. The point is that those are some of the finest and toughest riffs that ever were, and in their original form they were masterpieces. They are Jimmy Page riffs, not mine, so maybe he was entitled to form an invisible question mark.”

Robert Plant’s on a bit of a health kick just now. He hasn’t smoked a cigarette in six months, and he gave up the bottle on New Year’s Day. “I wanted to concentrate on my sexual prowess,” he explained. “I thought one or two things might be hampering it. I thought it might go somewhere, like disappear altogether. I saw pictures of Mick Jagger jogging and I knew that something was going on. I spoke to my body and it said ‘Jagger’s got it right’. I’ve drunk lots in the past, but never really to great excesses. I’ve never been seen staggering around — or if I have, then obviously I can’t remember! But at the moment, there’s no fags, no drugs, no drink. Just a barbed tongue.” It’s a barbed tongue which is particularly scathing about Plant’s own contemporaries, the people he collectively dismisses as “Deep Sabbath”. I wondered what he’d have to say about the younger, Zeppelin-influenced crop of rock bands. The Cult, for instance.

“I like The Cult,” he responded. “They’re good guys, you know. It would be pretty futile me criticizing them for what they lean on, having had so many love affairs myself with Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters and so on. Everybody leans somewhere or another. If The Cult were stopping me selling records or continuing to build the remarkably strange audience that I do, then I would be down on them like Wolverhampton Wanderers Subway Army.” In the past 10 years, Led Zeppelin, leading dinosaurs on the punk rock hit list, have, through no efforts of their own, become everybody’s darlings, with even arch enemy John Lydon confessing his interest and asking Robert Plant for the lyric to ‘Kashmir’. “It was an about-turn for him, really,” agreed Robert. “I like him. I think he’s great. He’s Max Bygraves with odd suits, isn’t he? He’s disturbing enough to warrant being heard, but I don’t care what the f*** he thinks about Led Zeppelin”. Or what he used to think:

“When I was a kid, it was always pretty hip to knock everything that was successful. I’d knock The Beatles, but I wouldn’t knock The Merseybeats. Yet, The Beatles were stunning. I soon grew up and kept my mouth shut.” Plant believes that many of the punk rockers who claimed to hate Led Zeppelin had no clear idea of what it was they were slagging off, and that those same people, on subsequent tours of Europe and America where Zeppelin records are still comprehensively played on the radio, became obliged, through familiarity with the music, to change or modify their opinions. “If anybody ever thought that Led Zeppelin was like Deep Purple, it must have been a hell of a shock for them to hear Physical Graffiti or Presence or In Through The Out Door. If you think Led Zeppelin is some old hippy band, you don’t know what it was about. If you listen, if you forget about the Tolkeinesque, whinging lyrics, you can hear the texture and the scope of what it was.”

How do you feel about The Mission, Robert? “I think that when the first record company dinner is being digested by the starving musician, he realizes there are greater things in life than gobbing at the crowd and asking God for mercy. Suddenly the idea of doing well doesn’t seem so bad, and if you have to listen to Led Zeppelin III to do okay, then I must say that I wear black all the time now. They’ve joined my club. I wonder if I can join theirs? I wonder if I’d have to ask John Paul Jones for membership? That would be the greatest irony.” Former Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones is, of course, the man behind the controls on the new Mission album, a tape of which happened to be close to my person on the day of the interview. Plant listened to the extremely ‘Kashmir’ – sounding ‘Tower Of Strength’, beaming, visibly impressed. “Yeah, he’s made ’em into a band,” he enthused. “Sounds great, the rhythmic quality of it, and he (Wayne Hussey) soundslike he’s enjoying singing the thing a bit more. Post-gothdom. Never mind whether it sounds a bit like ‘Kashmir’ – it’s a bit like ‘Friends’ actually. The thing that pleases me most is that it’s given Jonesy some sense of purpose. I’m really pleased for John that he’s found some young boys to play with again…”

ROBERT Plant, on the day we met, seemed like the most contented individual in the world, a man whose only worry is “whether the next Let’s Active album will be as good as the one before”, a man burstingwith confidence in his own LP (his favourite since Physical Graffiti) and his band, which was born of the collaboration between Robert and keyboardist Phil Johnstone, the co-author, with partner Dave Barrett, of ‘Heaven Knows’. “We’ve made a really fine record,” said Plant, proudly. “It’s better than anything I could’ve hoped to put my name to. We were trying to craft something which should maintain parts of my trademark, my style, but at the same time should be dotted with the personality of the people who played on it, rather than it just being Robert Plant standing there like some lone sky trooper surrounded by Whitesnake throw-offs.” Oh-oh. That mischievous barbed tongue again. “A lot of people I know used to work for David Coverdale…”

I’VE ALWAYS been a Plant rather than a Page person myself, ever since the moment I first heard ‘Heartbreaker’ stop dead and Robert leap headlong into that wonderful line: “With a purple umbrella and a 50 cent hat…” But with the exception of Pictures At Eleven, his solo work has brought me more disappointment than enjoyment, which is why it’s doubly cheering that in my brief acquaintance with the variety and the wit (and the “ooooh”s) of Now And Zen, it’s growing! Plant’s own enthusiasm is such that I wouldn’t be inclined to put any money on the current batch of “Zeppelin to reform” rumours, especially when you consider Page’s notorious, um, unreliability. “I became good friends with John Paul Jones because I could never get the other two up,” cracked Plant. “If we ever did reform, we’d have to play three different towns on the same night just to prove what we really are in everybody’s imaginations. As this is pretty impossible, we may have to shelve it until at least September. Snigger.”

While it’s true that Led Zeppelin always did loom larger than life in the fanciful imagination of the public, their legend reached truly awesome proportions with the publication of the Hammer Of The Gods book, filled as it was with scandalous revelations supplied by a former member of the entourage. “He sold his yarns to satisfy his own cravings,” commented Plant. “His fables are a little distorted, really. I think he must’ve traveled with another band, probably The New Christy Minstrels. He’s very well now, though. I bear him no malice and I’m pleased to see him when I see him. He’s made his peace with Jimmy. I think he does feel embarrassed. If I ever start drinking alcohol again, he can buy me a drink and we’ll call it quits.”

IT ONLY remained to find out what role Robert Plant can now see for himself in the present scheme of things. “I’m constantly searching to make that ultimate piece of music,” he decided. “The world is convinced it was made in 1972 and that it went on for 12 minutes.” No prizes… “The mood of music like ‘Kashmir’ and ‘Achilles’ Last Stand’, ‘Slow Dancer’ and, now, ‘Heaven Knows’, is what I pursue, catching that drama. I like to maintain some dignity and individuality. I don’t consider that I’m part of the heavy metal gang, or the hard rock gang, or the anything gang. I haven’t quite passed enough commercial examinations to join the old pals act yet. And if I play my cards right, I’ll never get asked.”