Interviewer: Cliff Jones – Rock CD, April 1993

FOR A MAN who’s spent the last 20 years protesting that his own colourful history is of little interest to him, it comes as a shock to discover that Robert Plant is currently engaged in a very public reliving of his own past.

It doesn’t appear to be a premature crise de la quarantine nor does it have the whiff of artistic bankruptcy about it. It’s not in the way he looks or dresses, or that he doesn’t carry his 45 years well. (Dame nature has been unusually kind on that front. Outwardly, if you squint hard, Plant could almost be the same man who strutted his camp, lanky frame across the stage at Madison Square Garden in ’73. By his own reckoning he’s just seven pounds heavier than he was at 20 and can run seven or eight miles without feeling the burn.) No, it’s the way he talks, with an animated passion of a man half his age, of artistic re-discovery.

A new album, Fate Of Nations, sees Plant forsake the cock-rock bluster and the feckless boy-meets-girl American AOR of recent years in favour of acoustic power-rock, the kind that recalls the swirling folk infused landscapes of the very best Zeppelin. It also hints at a nostalgic and emotional return to the that moment in Rock’s protracted adolescence when literature, mysticism and money helped open up a new and distinctly bookish chapter in popular music. This doesn’t mean that Plant has given in to retro faddism either. Far from it. Closer inspection of the album reveals wistful songs tinged with regret, loss and a profound sense of one man’s apparently traumatic rite of passage into middle age. The trademark gymnastic vocals mix with more subtle gliding eastern-tinged melodies, emotive Celtic folk and orchestration that you’d be hard pushed not to describe as austere. Bleak and brooding, portentous and care worn, these songs are the sound of a man putting his eventful past into some kind of order – looking again at those curios that belong to an earlier person and moving on.

“I know this sounds silly, but the record came out of nothing, from contemplation, from a period of time spent walking and reflecting. I live on the Shropshire borders and I had a few weeks on my hands after the Manic Nirvana tour finished so I took off into the Black Mountains, Radnorshire, the old Neolithic sites, and rediscovered their power. It was like, ‘I remember now why I wrote those songs back then. I remember how inspiring all this was the first time round.’ I’d rediscovered it almost by accident. It sounds corny but the history, the sense of spirit time passing, the battles, the lives, the places and the people that had lived and once trodden beneath my feet was the spur. I was thinking stuff like ‘On this ground 2000 years ago what was going on? How did a man treat a woman then and what was the family bond really like?’ I got all the books out again and I remember thinking ‘What am I now?’ A Julian Cope fan, that’s what. That book [The Modern Antiquarian] is magical and insane, hahaha.”

All this recalls elements of Plant’s Zeppelin past, a past that he’s more than happy to acknowledge but one which, with the insight of middle age, he’s coming to understand in a more considered way than the man he was in the early 1970s. And while the gap in time may be more than 20 years some elements, like the songs themselves, remain sort of the same. “I realized while I was out walking the Welsh borders 18 months ago that I wanted to make a record that I could sing by myself, take a guitar around and play the festivals without the backup or gloss of a big electric band. This record is almost a reaction against all the stuff I’d done before if you like. There’s still going to be a band but if I want to do a festival I can just pack my bag and go. I saw Van Morrison recently and he was going off to do some festival somewhere with just an overnight bag and his guitar. I think I wanted be able to do that too. That’s true freedom and I’ve dedicated myself to living under that principle, at least for a little while. It’s the approach that’s important, like coming full circle.”

Fate of Nations marks the return of Robert Plant, jobbing muso and all round Celtic renaissance man then? “Yes, if you like. With Manic Nirvana it was a sort of the failed son of Aerosmith in a way. All that ‘blowjobs on the aeroplane’ stuff. I think I was trying to conform to some commercial idea of what I was. It worked, mind you. At least in the States it did. That’s what people seemed to want.” While he values the departures from the Zep sound through his five album solo career, there is a definite attempt on this new album to re-establish the lyrical feel and natural folk tinged warmth of the best Zeppelin material. If Zeppelin could be seen as a folk band who went electric, this album reverses the process.

“Occasionally Zep were able to illuminate aspects of our lives and hit an ambiguous nail on an abstract head. Like Arthur Lee and Love who I was into at the time and still rate – precisely because they wereabstract. I was trying to convey a spirit, a non-literal picture you could go back to again and again. The press hated it. They couldn’t bag us. Anyway, Zep albums weren’t some trendy badge in the early days, far from it, but that’s also why they don’t date. In the same way I think I’ve made an album that doesn’t owe anything to any trend at all. It’s more honest in that way. I think, at times, we touched on some genuine sentiments and that stays with people doesn’t it? I think people pick up on the vibes on a record. If you fake it they know. They might still buy it but they wont believe it.” It was the surprise discovery that there were still good vibes to be had on the maligned, occasionally parodied – and much overlooked – British folk scene that helped nudge Plant onto his present course.

“Last year I was asked to play a gig with an old mate, Dave Pegg from Fairport [Convention]. It was their 25th anniversary and they asked if I’d come along and sing a few numbers. We did Dylan’s ‘Girl From The North Country’ and ‘Ramble On’ and a couple of others. It was this little theatre in Banbury and, do you know, I really enjoyed it. It was so easy. It was rock without all the posturing and pretense. Just a great vibe going down and people playing the way they felt. It was a reminder of the people we all were once. Back then we didn’t know how to do it any other way. We learned that, hahaha! The whole idea of it [folk] being about middle aged real ale drinkers with pint pots isn’t what was going on that night. Never really was either. So much of what went on then is misunderstood.”

Is this as close to nostalgia as Plant is willing to come? With a prog-rock revival currently underway (if you believe the trend mags anyway) surely this could be beginning of Plant’s slow walk back in from the unforgiving wastelands of rock? “Good God. A prog revival. Is there really? Well thankfully that went out the window for me a while back. But I’m not denying Zep made its own special contribution to all that hahaha! Being a gifted player was almost the kiss of death by the late Seventies. In many ways, though, that was a very good thing. I mean, being prolific is one thing but falling asleep while Steve Howe goes on and on and on when you know he’s had too many bean sprouts for tea is just tedious. I’m glad that all went because it became a bit…” Plant pauses searching for just the right word, “It became sacred. That’s the true reason why bands like the Angelic Upstarts were a real breath of fresh air. They weren’t acting like only the ordained could do it.”

It’s often said that – in their run – Zeppelin and bands like them presided over the death of the Hippy ideals of the late 1960s. They came along at the tail end of a cultural and aesthetic revolution, a vast touring machine that became the very antithesis of the anti-materialistic hippy credo. Plant remains cooly philosophical about the industry he helped create. Yes, he’s comfortably off and he’s the first to point out the hypocrisy in what he says, but money never meant that much to him. Still doesn’t. Is he still preaching the hippy line after all these years? “I’d better clarify something here. I think it’s possible to touch the hippy soul and say something real without ending up as The Groundhogs. I mean hippy wasn’t safe from all the clichés the first time round and really money wasn’t the issue. It was how you were that mattered. “I’m really in the middle of caring about all the things that are going on around me and that isn’t some hippy nonsense, that’s just being an aware, concerned human being. You cannot ignore the earth or nature or the fact that people don’t always behave in the best way. Could I really choose to ignore all of that for the sake of a fashion within music not to care? Of course I couldn’t.”

As for Zep, did they, like so many of their contemporaries, ever claim to speak any kind of greater truth to anyone? “When I look back I really don’t think Zeppelin personified anything in particular. Really. I think we came to be synonymous with certain excesses shall we say but the music itself didn’t have a political message or an idea at the heart of it. It was just music. There were moments when our attitude both musically and lyrically reflected the times well, or rather it seemed to capture a mood, but on the whole we followed on from what had already happened; blues, rock, folk and the whole psychedelic thing. We were moving with what was happening in the culture, just like everyone else. I don’t think we had any agenda. I mean I don’t think we thought we needed one. We didn’t push a lifestyle if that’s what you mean.”

What then of the accusation that bands like Zeppelin, the huge dollar-grossing acts, fiddled while Rome burnt, amassing huge fortunes as the idealism and optimism of the hippy generation turned to ash to be snorted up the collective nostril? “In a way I have to agree, of course I do. The hippy ideal died because of greed and drugs and changing times.” He looks thoughtful and considers the thought like he’s fitting together the pieces of a jigsaw for the first time. “There are many other reasons too but within the scenes in music you could see it happen around you. People were taken out. Yes, Zep were a part of that. I suppose we helped define rock as an industry and I suppose a lot of drugs passed under my… or our noses, but the fact that there was no political movement that was focused enough or lucid enough to really last was down to our age and naivety, not individual bands or people. Who really has it together in that way when they are that young? Put it this way, there was no one to take these beliefs and ideals to Congress or into the Houses Of Parliament at the time. I think there are signs that some of it may eventually work its way into politics, some of the green stuff is getting there, but there still isn’t that drive and optimism for change that we had in the 60s.

“The Abbie Hoffmans, the Tim Learys and Ginsbergs were social commentators but they lacked the ability to create a cohesive political alternative. It was a case of the gas tank had to run out sooner or later. I really believed, and still do, that change will come – eventually. If that makes me an old hippy then ‘yes’ I am. Your typical NME staff writer will label anyone who has long hair and has the guts to talk of a better way of doing things as a hippy. That just shows the term itself is misunderstood by all these tu’penny hacks. I mean Sinead O’Connor, she’s a hippy, but she doesn’t have long hair and wear beads or anything that obvious and clichéd but because she believes in a different way of doing things and is willing to go public about it she manifests a simple belief in making things better. But to the NME she’s still a hippy and a mad one at that. “This sort of thing isn’t just a social quirk of the late ’60s, part of a period like some quaint thing in a sociology textbook. It is an ideal that some people still believe in. That’s all hippy is. Shame they won’t be reviving that bit of it hahaha.”

What of Plant’s memories of the original hippy scene in San Francisco and the West Coast. For Zep’s first tour of the US they were catapulted straight into the heart of the hippy heartland in the Haight Ashbury. Was it really all beads, flares, acid and grow your hair? Would today’s trendy revivalists recognize things as they were back then? “The Band Of Joy, my first band with Bonham, that’s where it all started for me. We latched onto Moby Grape and Buffalo Springfield. As a matter of fact I was playing the Grape the day that Pagey came over to my place to see if Terry Reid’s recommendations about me were right. God knows what he thought! “The whole sort of Love-In vibes, the essence of what I was singing about in ‘The Rover’ was happening by late ’66, early ’67. There was the superficial thing of course but we always knew how to spot the real thing from the trash. There were the weekend hippies like the Move, all that Bell and Ami record label stuff, most of it was junk. Laughable and in no way connected with the real thing.

“Hippy was definitely there by ’67, it was all there in the UK but, as usual, we had this tradesman’s approach to it. It was a case of gazing at your navel and a lot of humming and hawing then off home for your tea before things got too strange, hahaha! When I got to the States there was this sense that socially and politically we could really effect a change. That was the essence of what happened in that short period of time. Freedom felt like it was entirely possible. Kids had a genuine sense of power. In that respect the West Coast was way ahead of us in England. They had already thrown out the restrictions of the ’50s that we were still in the throes of in England. We were still coming to terms with the end of the war and all those years of austerity. “When we got out to San Francisco I became good friends with Janice [Joplin]. We did a lot of festivals with the Youngbloods and people like that. It was a good time and the US musicians were a lot less ego-driven. There was a lot of rivalry between [Jeff] Beck and The Stones and Pagey and bands like Jethro Tull and Ten Years After were all caught up in that. Intense rivals I think.”

While the politics of freedom obviously had a huge impact on Plant, did he involve himself in the social politics of the Love And Peace generation? Was Plant to be seen on demos or at any of the big hippy communities? “No, I just plugged away writing those inane lyrics about goblins and Tolkien, hahahaha!” Might that be a faint trace of embarrassment Lord Percy of Zeppleshire? “Embarrassed? Crumbs no, I was 20 when I wrote those songs and to me then, Tolkien was a big influence. Hugely popular then he was. Good triumphed over evil and all was well with the world. Stephen King turns me off and I don’t go to watch violence at the movies. To me, Tolkien was rich with allegorical meaning and the symbolism of these ancient fights between the forces of good and evil. When you are 20 these elemental battles can seem very potent in your life. The parallels in my own life were there and I knew that other people would identify with these basic ideas and still do. I think that’s all those lyrics were attempting to show – that I was identifying with big ideas and relating them to things that important writers were saying. The new album is as much bound up in those elemental truths as ever. It’s a preoccupation of mine hahaha!”

Did the eventual slide from the heady optimism of hippy into wasted excesses of the 70s do as much damage to Plant as it did to say, Jimmy Page and John Bonham? “I didn’t think about it until later because you can’t see anything like that until it’s past you. If you are in it and it’s happening to you are often the worst placed to have any sense of perspective. I think I just carried on really. It was so intense that I think that’s all you could do. Besides, it wasn’t quite the way it’s portrayed, at least not for me. Page was living a different life to me. I was coming back to England after the tours and playing soccer for the Sunday district league. I reasoned that I could sing about misty mountains and chip a ball into the back of the net on my days off. That felt like a good life to me back then. It wasn’t all-consuming for me in the way that it was for the others. I had a release. Don’t forget that we had no choice but get caught up in all that hotel room, drug binge kinda thing because it was part of the experience, almost expected, but I always knew there was time-out when I would get off the bus, come home and play footy again. Page, and to a degree Bonham, were different.

“I always knew that the biggest let down of my career would be if I was relegated to the reserve bench when I got back! I was fucking furious, especially since I was a self-employed groundsman in the early days of Zep. If I wasn’t on tour I’d be there marking out the spot and making sure the goal mouth was looked after. I’d whizz about the pitch singing some Grateful Dead song from Anthem Of the Sun. It’s surreal when you think about it but life was simpler. You didn’t expect to be huge or that it would become your career for ever.”

In what could be seen as a case of reduced circumstances, Plant, at one time amongst the biggest names in the vast pantheon of rock, will be playing warm-up man for Lenny Kravitz on the latter’s forthcoming European tour. Plant claims there’s logic behind it – and besides, he’s got no ego problems. “I know what you’re telling me and you’re not the first, but I’ve thought about it. I’ve heard the overloaded drums and Hendrix licks but I’ve rationalized it. The only way I’m going to be able to play my songs to a large audience is to play along with someone who’s already opened the door for me. Even though he’s Retro King, his choice was to be like Black Sabbath, The James Gang or Lynyrd Skynyrd so we should accept it and go with it. At least he’s gone into an area where there’s still a little sensitivity left. I have my doubts sometimes about these revivals of the old sounds though. I mean, The Jayhawks are great but Neil Young’s Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere is like so much more vital and…real. His lyrics really meant something and it was contemporary when he wrote them. The new promise of the hippy revival is like the master cliché to end them all. There is no intellectual fabric to it now and no reason for people to be that way. There is nothing to connect it with what’s going on in the world now. It’s a style. The difference is that when it was around first time it was new and really reflected the times. Now it’s like you do it because it’s fashionable and this year’s fad.”

Plant isn’t precious about this golden past. While bands may well be ripping off his and many more of rock’s golden greats wholesale, to today’s audience it’s still exciting. And as the fat lady sings and postmodern, irony-driven rock takes over of the airwaves, with genres and periods colliding: punk and metal co-exist happily in a new wave slipstream, we are forced to admit that it’s only rock ‘n’ roll and maybe it never meant anything more than awoopbopaloobop after all. “Look, if this interview was being held in Berkeley in 1969, you would be asking me the same questions. Really you would. People used to ask us why we were ripping off blues records. They were almost angry. “What about the ‘Killing Floor’? Aren’t you guys just stealing the blues, living off the past? What about The Wolf?” The people who are going to these shows to see The Black Crowes or Lenny Kravitz are casual music fans and I’m an obsessive. Of course I can spot an influence a mile off but to most people it’s just music they like or don’t like – it’s a song and that’s all. They don’t care if Rod and The Faces did it 20 years back – and why should they? It’s just entertainment to them. If there is a problem it’s that we have given it too much meaning perhaps. Some critics and some musicians have got a moralistic view of music that’s irrelevant to most people. If you like it and people get off to it then so what?

“By the time I get to Glastonbury [later this year] I’ll have played support for Def Leppard and Lenny. Now I know I could team up with a well-known blues guitarist and have an old folks’ vomit if I wanted to. It’s either that or play 2000 seaters in Europe to a crowd full of Zep fans who’ve come along to see if I’m going to sing ‘Stairway To Heaven’. I won’t settle for that! This album is too good, and I have my pride.” Amazingly it seems, Plant places less current value on his Zeppelin past than the many reverent fans do. He’s all too aware that to many of today’s music lovers, he is a dimmer star in the firmament than he once was. “My currency as someone who was in Zep is not worth as much as it was. I want a stimulating career and I’m not going to wait around for some abstract pedestal to be erected for me. I’m a musician who’s fed up of not gigging. It has a touch of the last emperor about it but, hey, I don’t have an ego problem. I’m one of the lucky ones. So many of the people who were around when I was 20 are now label-less and playing the pubs. Etta James played in Nottingham a few months ago and 60 people turned up. No joke! With a voice like hers for God’s sake! Now you know why I’m hanging onto Lenny’s dreadlocks.”

And there you have it. Plant is seemingly pleased to simply ramble on, like the greats he chose to follow way back when. Lenny better watch his sequined velvet ass. Robert “Have harmonica, will travel” is on his trail and he has the hunger.