Robert Plant: A Life: The Biography

This one’s for Denise, the love of my life, and the lights of it, Charlie and Tom.

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Encore

PART ONE: BEGINNINGS

1 THE BLACK COUNTRY

2 THE DEVIL’S MUSIC

3 KING MOD

4 THE RUBBER MAN

5 THE REAL DESPERATION SCENE

PART TWO: AIRBORNE

6 BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

7 VALHALLA

8 BLOND ELVIS

9 SODOM AND GOMORRAH

10 CRASH

11 DARKNESS, DARKNESS

12 THE OUT DOOR

PART THREE: SOLO

13 EXORCISM

14 SEA OF LOVE

15 TALL COOL ONE

16 CROSSROADS

17 GOOD TIMES, BAD TIMES

18 DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAIN

19 REBIRTH

20 GONE, GONE, GONE

21 JOY

22 CODA

Acknowledgements

Sources

List of Searchable Terms

Picture Section

Copyright

About the Publisher

How can you ever tell how it’s going to go?

For a moment he was alone. Back in his dressing room, where he had paced the floor little more than two hours before. Then, he had been in the grip of a terror at what was to come. The weight of history pressing down upon him; the burden of all the demons he had come here to put to rest at last.

He had felt fear gnawing away at him. The dread of how he might appear to all the thousands out there in the dark. Here he was, a man in his sixtieth year, desiring to roll back time and recapture all the wonders of youth. Did that, would that, make him seem a fool? In those long minutes with himself he had looked in the mirror and asked over and over if he really could be all that he had once been; if it were truly possible for him to take his voice back up to the peaks it had once scaled. He had so many questions but no answers.

There would be ghosts in the room, too. Those of his first-born son, of his best friend and of all the others he had lost along the way. For each of them he wanted to be the Golden God this one last time …

It was going on midnight on 10 December 2007. Robert Plant was gathering himself in the immediate aftermath of Led Zeppelin’s reunion concert at London’s O2 Arena. The roar of the crowd, which had rolled over him like thunder, had faded. He could hear the chatter of many voices in the corridors backstage; the same corridors that had earlier been silent and still, pregnant with expectation before he and his band had walked tall once more.

Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, the other surviving original members of Led Zeppelin, were off in their own corners thinking their own thoughts. Tonight they had come together but there would remain a distance between them. It was one that spoke of all they had built together and then seen turn to ruin; of shared victories and bitter recriminations; of relationships so complex and complicated they were all but impossible to unravel.

When at last Plant threw open his door, all of those who came to shake his hand and pound his back told him what he already knew. He, they, had been great. Better than anyone could ever have hoped they might be. His doubts had been stilled. His debt, such as it was, had been honoured.

Pat and Joan Bonham, wife and mother of John, the friend and colleague he had buried a lifetime or a heartbeat ago, were among the last he welcomed and he held them especially close. Jason, their son and grandson, had sat in his father’s drum seat that night. He told them how proud John would have been of his only son. And then the ghosts came to him again.

He was supposed to go to some featureless hospitality room upstairs to meet with friends. There was a VIP party to attend where he would be feted by Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, Priscilla and Lisa-Marie Presley, and more and more. He instead took one last look around the scene of his triumph, then summoned a car and asked to be driven away from it. He wanted nothing more now than to get as far from everyone and everything as it was possible to be.

‘The rarefied air backstage at the O2 was something you could only savour for moments,’ he told me three years later.

On that cold, dark night he drove north, across the River Thames and through city streets aglow with Christmas lights. On to Chalk Farm, a corner of north London a mile from the bustle of Camden Town and a short walk from the more genteel Primrose Hill, where he had a house. The car dropped him off at the Marathon Bar, an inauspicious-looking Turkish restaurant on Chalk Farm Road.

Going inside, he walked past two spits of grey meat cooking in the window, past the stainless-steel counter and the garish display board advertising kebabs, burgers and fried chicken. He went into the small, windowless back room. There he sat at a wooden table, and ordered half a bottle of vodka and a plate of hummus. They knew him in this place and let him be. Here, at last, among the Marathon Bar’s usual late-night crowd – the young bucks, the couples and the local gangsters – he felt at peace. Through an open archway he could look out over the restaurant’s main room and onto the street beyond.

I first met Plant in 1998 when I was working for the British rock magazine Kerrang! At the time he and Page were about to release their second album together as Page and Plant, Walking into Clarksdale. I interviewed the pair of them in London. During the course of our conversation Plant veered back and forth from being testy and disinterested to disarming and expansive, and I found him hard to read. I was fascinated by him because of this, drawn as much to his contradictions as to his obvious charisma. The quieter and more fragile-seeming Page left a much less enduring impression.

Our paths crossed a number of times during the years that followed. We shared a journey on a public ferry in Istanbul, and I bumped into him in the backstage corridors at assorted television and music-awards shows. Discovering I was both a fellow Midlander and a football fan, he appeared to warm to me – although the team I supported, West Bromwich Albion, were local rivals of Wolverhampton Wanderers, the one he had followed from boyhood. One summer he sent me a couple of emails proposing a bet on the outcome of a forthcoming game between the teams. I am still waiting for him to honour this wager – a meal in an Indian restaurant on London’s Brick Lane.

I interviewed him again in 2010, this time for Q magazine and when he was basking in the afterglow of the success he had enjoyed with Raising Sand, the album he had recorded with the American bluegrass singer Alison Krauss. He was warmer and friendlier on this occasion, and also appeared more at ease. This was perhaps as a result of how well both Raising Sand and his work subsequent to it had been received, or just as likely because Page was absent. He reflected on his formative years in England’s heartland, on the wild ride he had taken with Zeppelin and on his solo career, through which his fortunes had been as varied as the albums he had made.

Two things that struck me most about Plant were his passion for music – which burns as fiercely now as it did when he was captivated by the great American blues singers as a grammar-school boy – and the uniqueness of his story. The best work of the vast majority of his peers is many years behind them but Plant continues to seek new challenges and adventures. This has kept his music fresh and vital, filling it with surprises and delights. Such was the spark for this book, fanned by the knowledge that no one had yet documented the entire span of his life.

There was also the challenge of forming a sense of what made Plant tick and drove him on. To the casual observer he might seem garrulous, but beyond this front he is guarded and private, careful never to reveal too much of himself. I wanted to reach the man behind the music, since gaining a better understanding of him would shed new light on the road he has travelled.

As he sat in the Marathon Bar collecting his thoughts that December night, the hours running to morning, did he reflect upon how far he had come and how long he had journeyed? Upon the years of struggle, the fights with his parents, when there was no money in his pocket and he had sensed the dream that had driven him slipping from reach. Upon the soaring heights to which Led Zeppelin had taken him, when he had basked in the adulation of millions and felt the heady rush of that band’s power pumping through his veins. And on into the deep, black depths into which he had sunk, when there had been nothing to fill the empty spaces in his heart.

Through it all there had been music. It was, then and now, the thing that most lit him up. First it came crackling over the radio waves, then as something wild and primal from within. All the endless possibilities it promised had made his head spin. So often and so much he had been stirred by Elvis Presley and Robert Johnson, by sounds that rushed to him from the American West and the north of Africa. It had, all of it, carried him along. It had given him more than he could have dared to ask for and he had taken every last drop of it. And as he did so it had exacted from him a heavy and terrible price.

And in looking back, did he also turn to contemplating his present and on then to what might lie over the horizon? Raising Sand, of which he was so proud, had awoken something new within him, but there was the question of what to do next, of where to roam and with whom. This relentless curiosity at all that could be was something he had never lost. Even on this night, when he had puffed out his chest and swaggered back into the past, what sustained him most was the sensation of forward motion, of new frontiers and the mysteries held within.

‘You can never have a life plan if you’re going to be addicted to music,’ he told me when I had asked him about such things. ‘At this age, when you find you’re still getting goosebumps and a lump in the throat when you hear it, how can you tell how it’s ever going to go?’

Bloody hell, Rob did a fantastic Elvis impression.

Robert Anthony Plant was born on 20 August 1948 in West Bromwich, in the heart of England’s industrial Midlands. His parents were among the first to benefit from the new National Health Service – the grand vision for a system of universal free health care set out by Clement Attlee’s Labour government upon coming to power in 1945 that had been made a reality the month before their son’s birth.

Plant’s father was also named Robert, like his father before him. A qualified civil engineer, he had served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. Before the war he had been a keen violinist but the responsibilities of providing for his family took precedence over such things when he returned home. He retained, however, a love of classical music. His other great passion was cycling and he would often compete in local road races. He was by all accounts a decent, straightforward man, no more or less conservative in his outlook than other fathers of the time.

Father and son found a shared bond in football. Plant was five years old when his father first took him to see a local professional team, Wolverhampton Wanderers. Sitting on his dad’s knee he watched as the players came out from the dressing rooms and onto the brilliant green pitch, those from Wolves in their gold and black strip, and felt euphoric as the noise of the thousands-strong crowd consumed him. His father told him that Billy Wright, the Wolves and England captain, had waved up to him as he emerged from the tunnel that day.

His mother was Annie, although people often called her by her middle name, Celia. Like most households then, it was she who ran the home and put food on the table. Plant would inherit his mother’s laugh, a delighted chuckle. She called him ‘my little scoundrel’. The Plants were Catholics and raised their son within the strictures of their religion. Later on they would have a second child – a daughter, Alison. But Robert was to be their only son, and as such it was he who was the receptacle of all their initial hopes and dreams.

From an early age, Plant can remember music being brought into the family home. His grandfather had founded a works brass band in West Bromwich and was accomplished on the trombone, fiddle and piano.

‘My great-grandfather was a brass bandsman, too,’ he told me. ‘So everybody played. My dad could play, but never did. That whole idea of sitting around the hearth and playing together had gone by his generation. He went to war, lost his opportunities, and had to come home and dig deep to get them back, like so many men of the time.’

The town in which the young Plant spent his first years was two miles by road from the sprawling conurbation of Birmingham, England’s second city. Locals called the regions to the north and west of Birmingham the Black Country. This was on account of the choking smoke that had belched out from the thousands of factory chimneys that sprung up there during Britain’s industrial revolution of the 19th century. Writing of these acrid emissions in The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens described how they ‘poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light and made foul the melancholy air’.

By 1830 the Black Country’s 130 square miles had been transformed into an almost entirely industrial landscape of mines, foundries and factories, a consequence of sitting upon the thickest coal seam in the country. The rush to heavy industry brought not just bricks and mortar, but also the creation of new canal and rail networks, enabling the Black Country to export its mineral wealth to the far-flung corners of the British Empire.

They were still hewing coal out of the Black Country earth in the 1950s, although the glory days of the mines had passed. Iron and steel were worked intensively in local factories until the 1980s, glass to this day. The anchors and chains for the RMS Titanic’s first – and last – voyage of 1912 were forged in the Black Country town of Netherton, and the ship’s glass and crystal stemware was fired and moulded in the glassworks of nearby Stourbridge.

In keeping with their austere beginnings the people of the Black Country pride themselves on being hard workers; tough and durable, they tend in general towards a stoical disposition and a droll sense of humour. Their particular dialect, which survives to this day, has its roots in the earliest examples of spoken English and is often impenetrable to outsiders. Habitually spoken in a singsong voice it conveys nothing so much as amusement and bemusement. There is an old saying around these parts: ‘Black Country born, Black Country bred, strong in the arm and thick in the head.’ This was how they went out into the world.

Two of the most prolific gunfighters of the Wild West, Wes Hardin and ‘Bad’ Roy Hill, who between them killed seventy men, had their roots in the Black Country town of Lye, their families leaving from there for the promised land of America and their own subsequent infamy. The ancestors of Wyatt Earp, the Wild West’s great lawman who wrote his name into history at the O.K. Corral in 1881, hailed from Walsall, less than four miles from where Plant took his first steps.

When the Second World War came the region was inextricably tied to it. Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister at the time of its outbreak who had misguidedly attempted to appease Adolf Hitler, was born into one of Birmingham’s great political dynasties. Although the war was eventually won, its after-effects lingered on into the following decade. The rationing of foodstuffs such as meat and dairy continued in Britain until 1954. At the time of Plant’s childhood, West Bromwich and the Black Country, like so many of the country’s towns and cities, still bore the scars from six years of conflict. As a centre for the manufacture of munitions the area had been a prime target for German bombs. Throughout Birmingham and the Black Country were the shells of buildings and houses blasted into ruin. It was an everyday occurrence to find the tail end of bombs or shards of shrapnel littering the streets.

‘The whole area was still pretty much a bomb site in the early 1950s,’ recalls Trevor Burton, who grew up in Aston to the north-east of Birmingham’s city centre, and who would later cross paths with Plant on the local music scene of the 1960s. ‘The bomb sites, these piles of rubble and blown-out houses, they were our playgrounds.’

The 1950s would bring great change to Britain. At the start of the decade few Britons owned a TV set; those who did had just one channel to watch – in black and white. The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953 led to an upsurge in TV ownership and by the end of the decade 75 per cent of British homes had a set. The ’50s also witnessed the opening of Britain’s first motorways – the M6 in 1958 and the M1 in 1959 – establishing faster, more direct road links between cities such as London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester. Such progress brought the world closer to Britain, making it appear more accessible.

Yet at the same time Britain’s role on the global stage was diminishing. The Suez Crisis of 1956, during which Britain tried and failed to seize back control of the Suez Canal from Egypt, hastened the end of Empire. The United States and the Soviet Union were the new superpowers, Britain being relegated to the role of junior partner to the Americans in the decades-long Cold War that was to unfold between those two nations.

The national mood in Britain, however, was one of relief at the end of the war in Europe and of hope for better times. This began to be realised from the middle of the decade, by which time the nation’s economy was booming and wages for skilled labour were increasing. A rush by the British to be socially upwardly mobile left a void for unskilled workers that was filled by successive governments with immigrant labour from the Commonwealth. With these workers populating its steel mills and foundries – and now its car plants, too – Birmingham and the Black Country soon ranked among the country’s most multi-cultural areas. To the already healthy Irish population in Birmingham there would be added vibrant communities drawn from the Caribbean, India and Pakistan.

In 1957, so pronounced was the collective sense of affluence and aspiration that Harold Macmillan, the Conservative prime minister, predicted an unprecedented age of prosperity for the country. ‘Let us be frank about it,’ he said, ‘most of our people have never had it so good.’ The British people agreed and elected Macmillan to a second term of office in October 1959.

The Plant family embodied the rise of the middle classes in Macmillan’s Britain. As a skilled worker, Robert Plant Sr could soon afford to move his wife and son out from West Bromwich to the greener fringes of the Black Country. They came to leafy Hayley Green, a well-heeled suburban enclave located fifteen miles from the centre of Birmingham.

Their new home was at 64 Causey Farm Road, on a wide street of sturdy pre-war houses just off the main road between Birmingham and the satellite town of Kidderminster. It was a neighbourhood of traditional values and twitching net curtains, populated by white-collar workers. Unlike West Bromwich, it was surrounded by countryside. Farmland was abundant, the Wyre Forest close by and Hayley Green itself backed onto the Clent Hills.

Situated near the end of Causey Farm Road, number 64 was one of the more modest houses on the street. Built of red brick, it had a small drive and a garage, and from its neat back garden there was an uninterrupted view out to the rolling hills. For the young Plant there would have been many places to go off and explore: those hills, or the woods at the end of the road, or over the stiles and across the fields to the town of Stourbridge, with its bustling high street.

It was during this period that many of Plant’s lifelong passions were first fired. The Clent Hills and their surrounding towns and villages were the inspiration for the landscape of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the writer of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit having grown up in the area in the 1890s. Plant devoured Tolkien’s books as a child, and time and again in later life would reference the author’s fantastical world in his lyrics.

In the summer the Plants, like so many other Black Country families of the time, would drive west for their holidays, crossing the border into Wales. They would head for Snowdonia National Park, 823 square miles of rugged uplands in the far north-west of the country. It was an area rich in Celtic folklore and history, and this, together with the wildness of the terrain, captivated the young Plant.

He was entranced by such Welsh myths as those that swirled around the mountain Cadair Idris, a brooding edifice at the southern edge of Snowdonia near the small market town of Machynlleth, which the Plants would often visit. It was said that the mountain was both the seat of King Arthur’s kingdom and that of the giant Idris, who used it as a place of rest from which he would sit and gaze up at the evening stars. According to legend anyone who sleeps the night on the slopes of Cadair Idris is destined to wake the next morning as either a poet or a madman.

At Machynlleth Plant learnt of the exploits of the man who would become his great folk hero, the Welsh king Owain Glyndŵr. It was in the town that Glyndŵr founded the first Welsh parliament in 1404, after leading an armed rebellion against the occupying English forces of King Henry IV. The uprising was crushed five years later, and Glyndŵr’s wife and two of his daughters were sent to their deaths in the Tower of London. Glyndŵr himself escaped capture, fighting on until his death in 1416.

But for Plant there would be nothing to match the impact that rock ’n’ roll was to have upon him as a child. Like every other kid who grew up in post-war Britain he would have been aware of an almost suffocating sense of primness and propriety. Children were taught to respect their elders and betters. In both the way they dressed and were expected to behave they were moulded to be very much like smaller versions of their parents. Authority was not to be questioned and conformity was the norm.

The musical landscape of Britain in the ’50s was similarly lacking in generational diversity. Variety shows, the big swing bands and communal dances were popular with old and young alike. As that decade rolled into the next, the country’s clubs heaved to the sounds of trad jazz, making stars of such bandleaders as Chris Barber, Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball, who played music that was as cosy and unthreatening as the social mores of the time. In the United States, however, a cultural firestorm was brewing.