Robert Plant: A Life: The Biography

Elvis Presley, young and full of spunk, released his first recording on the Memphis label Sun Records in the summer of 1954. It was called ‘That’s All Right’, and it gave birth to a new sound. A bastardisation of the traditional blues songs of black African-Americans and the country music of their white counterparts, rock ’n’ roll was loud, brash and impossibly exciting – and it arrived like an earthquake, the tremors from which reverberated across the Atlantic. Behind Elvis came Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent and others, all young men with fire in their bellies and, often as not, a mad, bad glint in their eyes.

In 1956 the mere act of Elvis swivelling his hips on TV’s Ed Sullivan Show was enough to shock America’s moral guardians. It was also instrumental in opening up the first real generational divide on either side of the Atlantic. Elvis’s gyrations acted as a rallying point for both British and American teenagers, and as an affront to their parents’ sense of moral decency.

In the English Midlands rock ’n’ roll first arrived in person in the form of Bill Haley. In 1954 Haley, who hailed from Michigan, released one of the first rock ’n’ roll singles, ‘Rock Around the Clock’. He followed it with an even bigger hit, ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’. When, on his first British tour, he arrived at Birmingham Odeon in February 1957 the city’s teenagers queued all around the block for tickets. At the show itself they leapt out of their seats and danced wildly in the aisles. It mattered not one bit that, in the flesh, Haley had none of Elvis’s youthful virility.

Laurie Hornsby, a music historian from Birmingham, recalls: ‘The man who was responsible for going down to Southampton docks to meet Haley off the ship was Tony Hall, who was the promotions man for Decca Records in London. He told me that he stood there at the bottom of the ship’s gangplank, and down came this old-age pensioner hanging onto his hair for grim death. Hall thought, “My God, I’ve got to sell this to the British teenager.” But sell it he did.’

By the time Elvis burst onto the scene Plant was a primary-school boy. Tall for his age, he was blessed with good looks and a pile of wavy, blond hair. He might have been too young to grasp the precise nature of Elvis’s raw sex appeal but he was immediately drawn in by the untamed edge to his voice and the jungle beat of his music. From the age of nine he would hide himself behind the sofa in the front room at 64 Causey Farm Road and mime to Elvis’s records on the radio, a hairbrush taking the place of a microphone.

He soon progressed to the songs of Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. Each weekend he and his parents would gather around the TV set to watch the variety show Sunday Night at the London Palladium, and it was on this, in the spring of 1958, that the ten-year-old Plant first saw Buddy Holly & the Crickets. That year Holly also came to the Midlands, playing at Wolverhampton’s Gaumont Cinema on 7 March and, three days later, giving an early and later evening performance at Birmingham Town Hall.

By then Plant had begun to comb his hair into something that approximated Elvis’s and Cochran’s quiffs, much to the chagrin of his parents. He was also digesting the other sound then sweeping the UK, one that made the act of getting up and making music seem so much more attainable. Its roots lay in the African-American musical culture of the early 20th century – in jazz and blues. In the 1920s jug bands had sprung up in America’s southern states, so called because of their use of jugs and other homemade instruments. This music was revived thirty years later in Britain and given the name ‘skiffle’.

Britain’s undisputed King of Skiffle was Lonnie Donegan, a Glaswegian by birth who had begun playing in trad jazz bands in the early ’50s. Having taught himself to play banjo, Donegan formed a skiffle group that used cheap acoustic guitars, a washboard and a tea-chest bass. They performed American folk songs by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. Starting in 1955 with a speeded-up version of Leadbelly’s ‘Rock Island Line’, Donegan would go on to have twenty-four consecutive Top 30 hits in the UK, an unbroken run that stretched into the early ’60s.

Donegan’s success, and the simplicity of his set-up, prompted scores of British kids to form their own skiffle groups. One of these, the Quarrymen, was brought together in Liverpool in the spring of 1957 by the sixteen-year-old John Lennon. For his part, Plant was still too young and green to even contemplate forming a band. But in skiffle, as in rock ’n’ roll, he had located a route back to black America’s folk music, the blues. It was one he would soon follow with the tenacity of a pilgrim.

The thing that Plant thought about most on the morning of 10 September 1959, however, was not music but how little he liked his new school uniform. There he stood before his admiring mother dressed in short, grey trousers and long, grey socks, a white shirt, a red and green striped tie and green blazer, with a green cap flattening down his sculpted hair. At the age of eleven, and having passed his entrance exams, he was off to grammar school.

But not just to any grammar school. Plant had secured a place at King Edward VI Grammar School for Boys in Stourbridge, which had a reputation for being the best in the area. For his parents, his attending such an establishment would incur extra expense but would also impress the neighbours. The school had been founded in 1430 as the Chantry School of Holy Trinity and counted among its alumni the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson. A boys-only school of 750 students, it was so steeped in tradition that first years were introduced in the school newspaper beneath the Latin heading salvete, the word used in ancient Rome to welcome a group of people.

On that first morning Plant and ninety or so other new arrivals were lined up outside the staff house in the school playground. Surrounding them were buildings of red brick, including the library with its vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows. The masters in their black gowns and mortarboards came out and assigned each of them to one of three forms. Those boys who had excelled in their entrance exams and were considered to be future university candidates were gathered together in 1C. Plant was placed in the middle form, 1B.

The school operated a strict disciplinary code, one that was presided over by the headmaster, Richard Chambers. A tall man who wore horn-rimmed glasses, Chambers had a hooked nose that led students to christen him ‘The Beak’. Behind his back he was also mocked for a speech defect that prevented him from correctly pronouncing the letter ‘r’. But Chambers mostly engendered both respect and fear.

‘He was extremely strict, a sadist really,’ recalls Michael Richards, a fellow student of Plant’s. ‘If you got into trouble, he would call your name out in assembly in front of the whole school. You would have to go and stand outside his office, and eventually would be called in. He would reprimand you for whatever you’d done and then whack you across the backside four times with a cane. Then he’d tell you to come back after school. So you’d have all day to think about it and then you’d get the same again.’

In many respects Plant was, to begin with at least, a typical grammar-school boy. He collected stamps and during the winter months played rugby. Although the school did not play his beloved football – indeed footballs were banned from the playground – he would join groups of other boys in kicking a tennis ball about at break times, using their blazers as makeshift goalposts. In his second year he was nominated as 2B’s form monitor by his tutor, a role that gave him the giddy responsibilities of cleaning the blackboard and trooping along to the staff room to notify the other masters if a tutor failed to arrive for a lesson.

What marked him apart was his love of music and the manner in which he carried himself. Going about the school he would typically have a set of vinyl records tucked under his arm – and these, often as not, would be Elvis Presley records. He even took to imitating Elvis’s pigeon-toed walk.

‘Bloody hell, Rob did a fantastic Elvis impression,’ says Gary Tolley, who sat next to Plant in their form. ‘He was Elvis-crazy, but early Elvis, not the Elvis of G.I. Blues, when he’d started to go a bit showbiz. He was very into Eddie Cochran, too. He had the same quiff. When you see all those pictures of Cochran looking out from the side of his eyes at the camera, that was Robert.’

Plant and Tolley, who was learning to play the guitar, soon became part of a clique at school that was based around their shared interest in music. Their number included another classmate, Paul Baggott, and John Dudley, a budding drummer. They prided themselves on being the first to know what the hot new records were and when the likes of Cochran or Gene Vincent would be coming to perform in the area.

‘Not blowing our own trumpets, but we were all popular at school,’ recalls Dudley. ‘The other kids sort of looked up to us, because we knew a little bit that they didn’t. Robert was a nice guy, but a bit full of himself. He was quite cocky. He’s always been like that. The Teddy Boy era had died by then, but he made sure that he’d got the long drape coat and the lot. A lot of people thought he was arrogant because he’d got that sort of body language about him.’

‘Rob was very good looking and he always seemed to be at the centre of whatever was going on,’ adds Tolley. ‘He had something. Charisma, I suppose. In those days, the Catholics would have a separate morning service to everybody else and then come in to join us for assembly. Robert would walk into the main hall with his quiff and his collar turned up, and you could see all the masters and prefects glaring at him. He wore the school uniform but somehow he never looked quite the same as everybody else.’

Plant and Tolley would become good friends. Outside of school they went to the local youth club to play table tennis or billiards, and Plant would bring along his Elvis and Eddie Cochran singles to put on the club’s turntable. Plant had also picked up his father’s love of cycling, and he and Tolley would go off riding around the Midlands on a couple of stripped-down racing bikes.

‘Robert’s dad knew someone at the local cycling club and I can remember going to a velodrome near Stourbridge with Rob, riding round and round it and thinking we were fantastic,’ says Tolley. ‘He’d come to my house a lot and always turn up at mealtimes. If we were going out cycling for the evening, he’d arrive forty-five minutes before we’d arranged. Inevitably, my mum would say, “There’s a bit of tea spare, Robert. Would you like it?” “Oh, yes please, Mrs Tolley.”’

‘He’d be round our house for Sunday tea,’ says John Dudley. ‘He was always very polite. He’d ask my mum for jam sandwiches. If you’re going to put people into a class, his mum and dad were a class above mine. My father worked on the railways. I believe Rob’s father by then was an architect. They lived in a better house than we did. Rob was never from anywhere near an impoverished background.’

For as long as their son maintained his academic studies Plant’s parents tolerated his love of rock ’n’ roll, although his father, who mostly listened to Beethoven at home, professed to being mystified by it. In 1960 they bought him his first record player, a red and cream Dansette Conquest Auto. When he opened it he found on the turntable a single, ‘Dreaming’, by the American rockabilly singer Johnny Burnette. With his first record token he bought the Miracles’ effervescent soul standard ‘Shop Around’, which had given Berry Gordy’s nascent Motown label their breakthrough hit in the US.

A future was beginning to open out for the eleven-year-old Plant. It was one now free from the spectre of being required to spend two years in the armed forces upon leaving school, Macmillan’s government having abolished compulsory National Service that year. It did, nonetheless, still lie beyond his grasp, as was emphasised when his mother insisted he trim his quiff and he glumly complied.

There was us, academic whiz kids in total freefall.

By the time Plant entered his third year at grammar school in 1962 music had usurped his other interests. To begin with he was to be frustrated in his search to find something else that brought him the same sense of feral abandon he had felt upon first hearing Elvis. It was entirely absent from the TV light-entertainment shows of the time and his radio options were limited to one station, Radio Luxembourg. On that, at least, he came to hear Chris Kenner, a black R&B singer from New Orleans, and this nudged him further down his path.

‘When I was a kid there was nothing to latch onto,’ he told me. ‘In the middle of everything, all these comets would occasionally come flying over the radio. But think about the difference between here and America. In America you just turned that dial five degrees on the circle and you were into black radio.

‘We Brits, we’re monosyllabic when it comes to music. When people say we took the blues back to America, it’s such bollocks. Because John Hammond, Canned Heat, Bob Dylan, Mike Bloomfield, Elvin Bishop … all these people were already playing it. Their vision and awareness of music is so much greater than ours. All this stuff was going on, and being British I was only exposed to tiny bits of it. There wasn’t a great deal of attention being paid to the stuff that lit me up.’

Half a million black American servicemen were drafted overseas during the Second World War and it was they who first brought blues records into Britain. In time these records found their way into specialist shops and were picked up by collectors. Old 45s and 78s, they were by men and women with such evocative names as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Memphis Minnie and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Their songs documented the entire span of the black American experience, from the chains of slavery and grinding poverty to the pleasures of liquor and the love of a good – or bad – woman.

This was folk music in its most raw and pure form, the ground zero for the twelve-bar stomp of rock ’n’ roll. For Plant, as for countless other British kids at the time, it was all that he was looking for. Ironically, it would be an Englishman who opened up the floodgates for him. His interest sparked by rock ’n’ roll singles and odd nuggets captured from the radio, he picked up a book titled Blues Fell This Morning, first published in 1960 and written by Paul Oliver, a scholar from Nottingham. Oliver related the history of black American blues in an entirely dry, academic manner, but this did not deter Plant. He had an ordered mind and began noting down each of the records Oliver referenced in his book. He was to have a further Eureka moment when he found out that a shop in Birmingham stocked these records, and more besides.

The Diskery record shop, still going strong to this day, was founded in 1952 by a jazz buff named Morris Hunting. By 1962 its home was on Hurst Street, a tucked-away side road a few minutes’ walk from Birmingham’s main railway station. Cramped and poky, the Diskery’s floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with rare and imported vinyl. It became a mecca for the area’s aspirant musicians. One of the guys that worked there, a local black DJ known as Erskin T, specialised in turning these regulars on to the earliest blues, R&B and Tamla Motown sounds.

‘There was a group of about twenty of us from school who were heavily into American artists, Robert no more so than the rest,’ says Gary Tolley. ‘But he was more interested in the original recordings. In that period before the Beatles came along there were lots of British artists doing pathetic covers of American songs. We’d all go up to Birmingham, but Rob, and also Paul Baggott, would go to great lengths to find the original versions.’

To fund these visits, Plant took on a paper round, heading out on his bike each morning before school. With the money he earned he picked up such records as John Lee Hooker’s Folk Blues and Robert Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers. This last record had a profound effect on him.

Born in Mississippi in 1911, Robert Johnson, more than any other bluesman, is surrounded by myth and mystery. It was said that his mercurial talents as a guitarist, singer and songwriter came to him overnight. The legend grew that one night he had gone down to the crossroads on Highway 49 and 61, outside the town of Clarksdale, and there made a Faustian pact with the Devil. Johnson’s early death at the age of 27 fuelled such speculation, although he was probably poisoned by the jealous husband of a woman he had been seeing.

Decades later Plant would tell the Guardian newspaper: ‘When I first heard “Preaching Blues” and “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” by Robert Johnson, I went, “This is it!”’

He had, he would also add, never heard anything quite so seductive as Johnson’s voice – a wounded howl that spoke of pain and lust all at the same time. Propelled deeper into the blues by Johnson, Plant began expanding his record collection as fast as the money he got from his paper round would allow.

Coming home from school he would go up to his room and play these records over and over again. He catalogued and carefully filed each of them, having first pored over the sleeve notes and recording credits. It had become an obsession, one that his parents found increasingly difficult to understand. Staunch Catholics, they began to refer to the songs blasting out from their son’s room as ‘the Devil’s music’.

‘My dad really didn’t get much bluer than Johnny Mathis,’ Plant suggested to the Guardian. ‘I think he found Robert Johnson too dark.’

One evening, when Plant had played a Chris Kenner song, ‘I Like It Like That’, seventeen times in a row, his father came up to his room and cut the plug off his son’s record player.

As Plant was embarking upon his journey through the blues a beat-group scene was bubbling up in and around Birmingham. By 1962 scores of suited-and-booted bands had begun playing the local pubs and clubs. Some of these had grown out of schoolboy skiffle groups but all were inspired more by the Shadows. Backing band for the British rocker Cliff Richard, a sort of virginal Eddie Cochran, the Shadows had struck out on their own in 1960 when their tremulous instrumental ‘Apache’ topped the British charts. Their bespectacled lead guitarist, Hank Marvin, was the Eric Clapton of his day, compelling fleets of callow boys to take up the guitar.

These were covers bands, their members scouring record shops in the city to find songs from the US they could learn to play. Jimmy Powell was credited with the first recording to emerge from this scene, his cover of Buster Brown’s R&B tune ‘Sugar Babe’ being released as a single on Decca that year. Later it was claimed that an eighteen-year-old named Jimmy Page had played guitar on this session, although in Birmingham it was also said by some that if bullshit were an Olympic sport Powell would have a home filled with gold medals.

As 1962 turned to 1963 Britain was in the grip of its coldest winter on record, snow blizzards and freezing temperatures bringing the country to a virtual standstill for two months. 1963 would be the year in which President Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas and a war in Vietnam began to escalate – it was also the year when the Beatles came to Birmingham in the middle of the big freeze. Like so many of the local bands, the Beatles had been born out of a skiffle group that had first been gripped by Elvis and Buddy Holly; they, too, cut their chops re-interpreting songs that had been flown across the Atlantic. The Beatles, however, had their own songs as well. Their second single, ‘Please Please Me’, was one of these and it was released in the UK on 11 January 1963, beginning a month-long run to the top of the British charts.

On 13 January the Beatles arrived at the ATV studios in Birmingham to perform ‘Please Please Me’ for that night’s Thank Your Lucky Stars variety show. Police were forced to seal off the streets around the studios as thousands of kids turned out to catch a glimpse of them. Six days later the Beatles returned to play a gig at the Plaza in Old Hill, two miles from Plant’s family home.

Promoting this show was Mary Reagan, who would come to play a significant role in Plant’s early musical career. A formidable Irishwoman known to one and all as Ma Reagan, she and her husband Joe, who stood less than five foot tall, had established a dancehall business in the Midlands in 1947. By 1963 the Reagans were running four ballroom-sized venues in the area, the Plaza at Old Hill being seen as the most prestigious on account of its revolving stage.

In the wake of the Beatles’ visit the Midlands music scene took off. By the end of that year there would be an estimated 250 groups operating around the city. It was said that half of these still wanted to be the Shadows, the other half the Beatles. These bands were made up of kids in – or just out of – school. They were playing up to twenty shows a week in the hundreds of city pubs and clubs that nightly put on live music, earning more than their fathers did for going to work in the factories. Each of these bands aspired to get on the Reagan circuit, as it came to be known. The local acts that passed an audition for Ma Reagan could expect to perform regularly at all of her venues, often in a single night and for good money.

In July 1963 the Shadows’ producer Norrie Paramor pitched up at Birmingham’s Old Moat House Club to audition local bands for EMI, which was by then desperate to unearth another Fab Four, and he subsequently signed six Birmingham acts to the label. Although none came close to being the next Beatles, he did at least give the Midlands scene a name, christening it ‘Brumbeat’, a knowing adaptation of Liverpool’s then reigning Merseybeat sound.

One band just then starting out on the Brumbeat scene was to have a direct influence on Plant. The Spencer Davis Group had debuted at a Birmingham University student dance in April 1963, performing a set of blues and R&B covers. The band was a tight one and the undisputed star was their singer, Stevie Winwood, a white schoolboy with the voice of a black soul man. Like Plant, Winwood was then fourteen years old but he was moving faster.

In September 1963, at the start of the academic year, King Edward VI’s students were gathered together for a school photograph. In this picture Plant can be seen standing towards the centre of the group, six rows back. He alone among the many hundred students looks as if he is posing for the camera – his curly hair is rustled up into its habitual quiff, a look of practised insouciance on his face. To his right stands Gary Tolley, appearing to be somehow much younger and less worldly-wise.

Yet it was Tolley, not Plant, who by then had formed a first band with two more of their friends, Paul Baggott and John Dudley. Tolley played lead guitar, Baggott was on bass and Dudley on drums. A further pair of boys from their school year completed the line-up: Derek Price on guitar and the singer Andy Long. This school group had begun playing in pubs and youth clubs, calling themselves Andy Long and the Jurymen. They performed contemporary pop and rock ’n’ roll covers and dressed up in maroon suits with black velvet collars. Plant would often accompany them to these gigs.

‘He sort of followed us around for a long time,’ says Tolley. ‘He’d come to see us play but he’d carry our gear as well. Derek Price’s dad would drive our van and he lived just up the road from Robert. He’d pick Rob up first and then the rest of us.’

‘It sounds daft but he was more of a hanger-on than anything at that stage,’ adds Dudley. ‘It only slowly dawned on us that what he wanted to do was sing.’

The Jurymen’s nightly engagements soon brought them to the attention of Headmaster Chambers. He saw a piece on the fledgling band that ran in the local newspaper, the Express & Star, one that made much of the fact that they were playing in places in which they were too young to drink.