Interviewer: Steve Turner – The Independent, April 6, 1991

STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN, PAVED WITH GOLD: LED ZEPPELIN’S SNOWDONIA

It was a marriage of electric bombast and Celtic mythology; of bone-shaking riffs and ethereal thoughts. Led Zeppelin’s riffs came from guitarist Jimmy Page via the honky tonks and shotgun shacks of the Mississippi delta. The legends from vocalist Robert Plant via the swirling mists, border wars and mountain spirits of Wales. Plant grew up in Kidderminster, close to the Welsh border. On a typical summer weekend his father would pack the family into the 1953 Vauxhall Wyvern and motor up the A5 through Shrewsbury and Llangollen into Snowdonia. The young Plant fell in love not only with the scenery and the place names but with the tales of sword and sorcery.

One place he visited was a remote eighteenth-century cottage called Bron-yr-Aur owned by a friend of his father’s. Here there was no bathroom or electricity. Lighting was by Calor gas and the nearest town was two miles away down a gated mountain road. In 1970, when Led Zeppelin’s star was rising, Plant was to return to his childhood haunt with Jimmy Page and write a collection of songs which would redefine the group’s sound. “I was pretty keen to go because I had never spent any time in Wales,” Page said later. “We took our guitars along and spent the evenings around log fires, with pokers being plunged into cider and that sort of thing. As the nights wore on the guitars came out and numbers were written.”

It was here that they wrote ‘Bron-yr-Aur’, ‘Bron-y-Aur Stomp’ (Bron-yr-Aur is the name on the house, meaning “breast of gold” although to confuse matters, the Ordnance Survey map has Bron-y-aur), ‘Misty Mountain Hop’ and ‘That’s The Way’. It was here, too, that Page first fumbled with the opening chords of ‘Stairway To Heaven’, the mystical song that was to become Zeppelin’s best-known track.

The most noticeable effect of Welsh mountains on the music was that they brought a hush and a contemplation not there before. In the hotel rooms of American cities while in full touring flight, they wrote such lemon-squeezing numbers as ‘Living Loving Maid’ and ‘Whole Lotta Love’, but at Bron-Yr-Aur they tapped into a kind of Celtic folk music inspired by the Incredible String Band. “It was time to step back, take stock and not get lost in it all,” Plant explained. “Zeppelin was starting to get very big, and we wanted the rest of our journey to take a level course. Hence the trip into the mountains and the beginning of the ethereal Page and Plant.”

Bron-Yr-Aur stands at the end of a narrow road that climbs off the A493 just outside the small market town of Machynlleth in Gwynedd. It is an area rich in myth and legend. The giant Idris Gawr has his seat on the mountain of Cader Idris and anyone who sits on it will either die, go mad or become a poet. It is said King Arthur fought his last battle in the Ochr-yr-Bwlch pass east of Dolgellau. Half a mile up the steep mountain road there is a black slate sign on the right-hand side which points the way to the property. After passing down through an avenue of overhanging trees with sheep fields on either side, the grey stone shape of the cottage looms up in a clearing at the end. It has a blue front door with a horseshoe nailed above it. A tattered Welsh flag flies from a flagpole to the right of the clearing. Mountains rise steeply behind.

The present owner is the Reverend Canon John Dale, a churchman in the diocese of Worcester, who bought it in the mid-seventies with no knowledge of its pop cultural history or of who on earth Led Zeppelin were. When I met him, he was dressed in running shorts and painting his window frames. His dog was playing in the long grass. I introduced myself and explained my interest. As soon as “Led Zeppelin” passed my lips he smacked his forehead in mock horror. Did he get a lot of trouble from fans? Not really, he admitted, but the traffic increased whenever there was a mention in a new biography. For the first few years of his ownership there were no callers, but now there is a steady trickle. Last year some people had wanted to camp out in his garden.

“Mostly they just want to see where the songs were written,” he said. “They just can’t believe they have found it. They are normally happy just to see the place, marvel and then go away again.” Why was the house named “breast of gold”? Canon Dale speculated on its origin: “The bracken at the end of the year turns gold and that could have given rise to the name or, possibly, it could have been a reference to gold in the mountains behind. We are not far from Dolgellau where gold has been found.”

This part of Wales, on the southern fringe of Snowdonia, has long attracted artists and idealists keen to escape the pressures of urban life. Rich hippies were fond of buying Welsh cottages to go with their Chelsea flats, and seekers of alternative lifestyles came with their tepees hoping to return to the Garden of Eden. In 1973, Plant decided to buy a working sheep farm in the nearby Llyfnant Valley, four and a half miles from Machynlleth on the road to Aberystwyth.

While living here Plant immersed himself in the life of rural Wales: taking Welsh lessons, learning to dip and shear sheep and pursuing his fascination with the legends of the Dark Ages through the manuscripts kept at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. The large library, which stands on a hillside overlooking the university town, has on display the thirteenth-century Black Book of Carmarthen and the Book of Taliesin, a fourteenth-century manuscript of poems by the sixth-century poet Taliesin.

When his first son was born, Plant named him Karac after the legendary Welsh general Caractacus. Karac unfortunately died of a respiratory virus in 1977. Because the band had what Page called “warm vibes” about this area of Wales, Led Zeppelin decided, in January 1973, to play Aberystwyth. They booked the 800-capacity King’s Hall, a sea-front venue demolished in 1989. The gig exploded with all the force of a damp squib. The audience remained in their seats throughout and offered only polite applause. “That’s the first and only time that happened to us,” said Page much later. “It’s good to have one concert that is strange and a bit unnerving. But only one.”

In the same year the American director Joe Massot began shooting The Song Remains The Same, ostensibly a documentary about Led Zeppelin. The core of the film was a concert at Madison Square Garden, but spliced between the songs were “fantasy sequences” where each band member revealed his innermost soul. Plant’s episode, unfortunately, contained more corn that a bumper harvest. His vision of the self hiding behind the exterior of the flouncing cock-rock vocalist was of a medieval hero given to sailing, horse riding and rescuing blonde damsels in distress. The castle chosen for the filming was the fifteenth-century Raglan Castle, built half-way between Monmouth and Abergavenny by Agincourt veteran Sir William ap Thomas, “the blue knight of Gwent”, and later extended by his son, Sir William Herbert. It is a wonderful ruin for romantics, especially on a dreary winter morning when the surrounding fields are damp and a cold wind blows through the empty holes of windows. There is an air of mournful mystery about the sandstone walls that drip with water and are flecked with moss. For The Song Remains The Same, Plant was filmed cantering alongside the long western wall and then fencing with his enemy on the cobblestone floor of the Great Tower, once the safest part of the castle. The fight ends when Plant manages to hurl his opponent into the moat.

When Led Zeppelin’s career began to fluctuate, giving rise to rumours of a break-up, the band reconvened not far from Penallt at Clearwell Castle, an eighteenth-century neo-Gothic mansion in the Forest of Dean, to prepare for their last “real” album, In Through The Out Door. Clearwell was then privately owned and its cavernous cellars hired out to bands for recording and rehearsing. Today it is a quiet country hotel where peacocks cluster on the windows of the banqueting hall and a log fire roars in the huge reception hall. There are oil paintings up the oak staircases, stuffed birds in glass cases along the upper hallway, and evening meals are served by candlelight in a panelled dining room. The cellars are used for medieval banquets and business functions.

I slept in a huge room with two half-tester beds where the bathroom was around the size of most entire city hotels. The castle is reputed to be haunted. The maid who serviced my room spoke of the ghost with a ready familiarity. “Her” it was who would mess up rooms when they were under lock and key. Recently two guests from different rooms complained about some one singing lullabies to a child on the landing all night and playing a musical box. My room, apparently, was at the epicentre of the hauntings.

Led Zeppelin rose from Clearwell to make one last album before drummer John Bonham’s death grounded them for ever. Significantly, when Robert Plant returned to the studio it was to Wales that he came, cutting his first solo album at Rockfield Studios in the village of Rockfield, just outside Monmouth.

At the end of the first Led Zeppelin biography, written by Ritchie Yorke in 1976, Plant is quoted as saying he believed Wales would figure strongly in his destiny: “The Welsh have voices sweeter than angels. The beauty of their voices is just fantastic. If I had a voice like that, I wouldn’t be talking to you now. I don’t think there is anything finer than a Welsh choir.”