Interviewer: Barney Hoskyns – Tracks, 2003

WHEN YOU’RE TOLD that Robert Plant will meet you on the platform of Machynlleth station in southern Snowdonia, you figure, “Sure, some hapless lackey will be dispatched from Percy’s mountaintop Valhalla to bundle me into the back of a muddy Range Rover.” But it says a lot about the 55-year-old former Led Zeppelin frontman – he of the lion’s-mane locks and the maiden-come-hither open shirt – that he is leaning, one leg cocked, against the wall of Machynlleth’s ticket office as the 10:48 from Birmingham pulls in.

Nobody appears to notice, mind you. Even if the reddish-gold locks are the same ones Plant sported during Zep’s ten-year reign as the transatlantic warlords of ’70s rock, they’re not enough for the other folks on the platform to ID him. To them, I’m guessing, he’s just another of the countless hippie types dotted about Wales, which is pretty much how Plant sees himself. Given the regal mop that encircles the singer’s face, it’s apt that it has weathered into the visage of a kindly lion. The Pre-Raphaelite pretty boy of 1970 is long gone, leaving a rock & roll Aslan with a wry smile and an enduring enthusiasm for life. Not long after he picks me up, Plant is peering through the sitting-room window of a small stone cottage at the top of a bumpy mountain lane. “The owners aren’t here,” he reports. “I think we’re okay.” The singer has succumbed to pleas to show me Bron-Yr-Aur, the remote cottage to which he and Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page repaired in the early spring of 1970. Bron-Yr-Aur is where, after conquering America with the pulverizing Led Zeppelin II, Page and Plant wrote the folk-haunted songs on Led Zeppelin III–”Friends,” “That’s the Way,” “Gallows Pole,” “Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp” – as well as some of the tracks on the fourth album and on Physical Graffiti. I’ve always imagined Bron-Yr-Aur as an intensely romantic spot, and it doesn’t disappoint me. The views are sublime.

“No matter how cute and comical and sad it might seem now,” Plant told me when Zep’s DVD came out earlier this year, “Bron-Yr-Aur gave Jimmy and me so much energy. Because we were really close to something. We believed. It was absolutely wonderful, and my heart was so light and happy.” The fact that Plant’s heart is equally light and happy in the fall of 2003 has more than a little to do with the recording sessions taking place just a few miles from here, at the farm he bought in 1971. Inspired by a world-music festival near Timbuktu earlier this year–captured on the marvelous album Festival in the Desert, which includes Plant’s live performance of “Win My Train Fare Home (If I Ever Get Lucky)”, he has converted a barn into a makeshift studio and is working with guitarist Justin Adams and guitarist Skin Tyson on music he describes as mesmeric. “In Timbuktu we were exposed to some of the most vibrant music and delivery I’ve ever experienced,” he says. “We’ve taken quite a few of the rhythms from there and superimposed them onto rock & roll structure. And it’s sounding great. I’m a little lost for words – that’s a good title for the whole project, actually!”

The sessions sound a bit like the creation of something that could be called World Music from Big Pink. “More like Big Green,” Plant says, laughing. “This environment just seemed like the right thing to do – a place where we’d be together 24 hours a day, five days a week, so that people could go off in different little factions. It’s a beautiful place. There are two pairs of red kites up there, and a bunch of sheep who used to shit in the barn and now rather resent our presence.” When it’s released next year, Music from Big Green (The Sheepshit Tapes?) will be merely the latest in a series of commendably doing-my-own-thang adventures by the onetime Zeppelin deity. The solo Plant has always gone on instinct, taking risks and having fun, a fact admirably demonstrated by a new two-CD survey of his solo career both pre- and post-Zep. The collection, Sixty Six to Timbuktu, as Plant has titled it, is a highly engaging journey through almost four decades of gleeful music making.

The first disc is a virtual best-of that darts about through such classics (and intermittent hits) as “Big Log,” “Sea of Love” and the awesome “Tie Dye on the Highway.” The second disc is sequenced more chronologically. Starting with the amusingly formulaic 1966 blue-eyed-soul single “You’d Better Run,” by the forgotten group Listen, it pulls together 1967 demos by the pre-Zep Band of Joy and a slew of other outtakes, bonus tracks and contributions to tribute albums and soundtracks. Everyone else is doing it these days, so why not Robert Plant? “There was so much stuff of mine that had never seen the light of day,” he says. “If anyone were to say to me, ‘Well, your solo career has been a bit patchy, and you’ve been a bit schizoid with the way it’s danced around,’ I would say, ‘Absolutely so, and merrily so.’ I was spinning all over the place – working with a guy from a punk band in New York one week, then doing something a little more tasty for an Arthur Alexander tribute a year later. “I suppose I wanted this CD to say, ‘Hey, I know that historically, and in quality of material, there’s no way I could ever touch the legacy of Led Zep. However, I am having a good time with my life, and these are the sorts of things that I think were quite a hoot at the time.”‘

I wonder if it’s possible for Plant to recollect what his aspirations were when he recorded “You’d Better Run” in London a year or so before the Summer of Love. It turns out they were surprisingly modest. “Well, I’d bludgeoned everyone around me into believing that I’d got something to offer,” he says. “But when I went in that studio and was faced with Clem Cattini [on drums] and Kiki Dee [on backing vocals], I thought, Jeez, I must’ve come to the wrong place. To squawk my way through these things was incredibly tense. But then it came out, and it had a label, and it was a record with me on it!”

The Band of Joy, featuring Plant’s Black Country mucker John Bonham on drums, was more in sync with the innovative spirit of ‘67; hence the demos of such contemporary favorites as “Hey Joe” and “For What It’s Worth.” “Bonham came to me in an orange ostrich-skin bomber jacket and said, squinting, ‘Yer all roit, but yer no good without me,”‘ Plant says. “So he joined, and the Band of Joy became a total freakout. We moved away from the blue-eyed-soul circuit into the underground movement.” When he and Bonham subsequently teamed up with Page and John Paul Jones in the New Yardbirds, who were soon to become Led Zeppelin, they made the leap that would eventually enshrine them all in the rock & roll pantheon. But at the time it did not seem like a dramatic departure except in terms of sheer force. “Led Zep was an extension of what we were all already doing,” he says. “The only difference was that there was such quality of playing. It felt unbelievably powerful, and unashamedly so. And that, I think, is where I triumph within my own soul, at the expense of anything like credibility or respect. I just really believed in it, and I don’t think I’ve done many things since then that have been away from what I really thought was the right thing to do.”

Led Zeppelin created a body of work that continues to exert enormous influence. Plant’s self-described “patchy” solo work, on the other hand, is another matter entirely, however enjoyable it was for him to record. How did it feel, for example, to go back over all that frankly overcooked techno-rock from such albums as Now and Zen (1988)? Plant is candid in his assessment: those albums were products of their times. “I was so attracted to the technological developments that came along in the studio,” he says, “that I became just like every other nerd, sampling this and piddling about with that. Countless hours of my life which, if I could put them all in a row now and subtract them from my current age, I’d probably be about 30! But we all went through that: even Neil Young had his electronic moments. With Now and Zen we were looking for a hit, and that’s what we got.” But in addition to experimenting with sounds, Plant also had something to say, and his concerns have lost little of their relevance. Ten years on from the eco-hand-wringing of Fate of Nations, how despairing is the singer about the state of the planet in the era of globalization and terrorism? His answer is not encouraging. “l’m beside myself,” he says. “America is almost a foreign place to me now, and I think a lot of Americans feel that too, you know. I don’t even know whether I or anybody really fits into an environment where you’re either ‘with us or against us.’ I feel so ineffectual.

“I mean, it’s OK to look back and remember how Joni Mitchell was able, with such succinct word play, to sum up a lot of environmental issues,” he says. “But even if we had a million eloquent troubadours now, it ain’t gonna do anything. It’s gone past the Summer of Love, and I don’t know what we’re into now. I mean, what happened to virtuous representation? Perhaps there was never any such thing. Perhaps the last great leader of virtue was King Arthur. ‘Cause he didn’t exist.”

I sense that Plant is itching to get back to Big Green – to disgruntled sheep and mesmerizing Timbuktu beats. But I can’t resist one last Welsh-oriented question. Does he recall the ill-conceived show that Led Zeppelin played in nearby Aberystwyth in January 1973? “I certainly do,” he says with a pained smile. “lt was a very well-meant gesture on the part of Jimmy and me, intended to drag Bonzo and John Paul up here and give something back to the mountains and the people. In fact, we gave it back to some very uninterested, bearded, pipe-smoking folks who were not impressed. And quite rightly.”

Now lost in that time, his mind turns to the one member of his former band who has passed on. “I remember Bonzo bashing away,” Plant recalls, “and giving me one of those looks that said, ‘This was a fookin’ good idea, wern it?’”