Robert Plant: A Life: The Biography

‘Because of the way things were for kids then, if you had hair an inch too long and were playing in a band, the figures in authority did look down on you,’ says Dudley. ‘Chambers had us all up before him. He pulled Robert in for that, too, because he knew that he would have been with us. He told us we were nothing more than a rabble – but because he couldn’t pronounce his “r”s, it came out as a “wabble”. That may have been the start of the masters disapproving of Robert.’

For Plant, however, the world was now expanding beyond the gates of his grammar school and 64 Causey Farm Road. Down the road in Stourbridge something was stirring. Blues, jazz and folk clubs had started to spring up around the town; so too coffee bars. The Swiss Café became the main meeting place for local teenagers. Later, a local singer named David Yeats opened the Groove record shop, catering for R&B enthusiasts like Plant.

In the pubs and clubs one could hear everything from Woody Guthrie songs to Dixieland jazz being performed. It was a movement largely driven by Stourbridge College, a technical and art institution that in the ’60s had begun attracting students from all over the country and across Europe, and it was one into which Plant threw himself.

‘It was a huge, amazing, subterranean moment,’ he told me. ‘There was poetry and jazz, there was unaccompanied Gallic singing. There were off-duty policemen standing up in folk clubs, holding their pints and singing “Santy Anna”.

‘There were hard drugs. There were registered junkies mixing with beautiful art students. And there was us lot at the grammar school down the road, academic whiz kids in total freefall. I was just mincing about with my Dawes Double Blue bike, with my winklepicker shoes in the saddlebag, listening to all this stuff.’

Plant had by now also bought a cheap harmonica that he taught himself to play by blowing along to records on his repaired Dansette turntable. He began to take this harmonica with him wherever he went, delighting in pulling it out from his back pocket and blowing away, to entertain himself more than anyone else. On one occasion at school, Headmaster Chambers, fast becoming Plant’s nemesis, spied him doing as much in the playground. Chambers loudly informed him that he would get nowhere in life messing around with such nonsense.

‘Rob was so much into the kind of music that we weren’t,’ says Dudley. ‘I mean, where on earth he got the knowledge that he had of the blues from I don’t know. He was forever going on about people like Sonny Boy Williamson, and from that age. For God’s sake, in those days you wouldn’t hear anything like that on the radio.’

Plant got to see a physical manifestation of the blues for the first time on 10 October 1963 when his aunt and uncle took him along to the Gaumont cinema in Wolverhampton to see one of the new package tours that had begun travelling around the UK. This one featured the young Rolling Stones, the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, and a Mississippi bluesman, Bo Diddley. It was Diddley who transfixed him.

‘I was sweating with excitement,’ he told Q magazine in 1990, reflecting back on that night. ‘Though the Stones were great, they were really crap in comparison with Diddley. All his rhythms were so sexual – just oozing, even in a twenty-minute slot. Now that’s an evening.’

Before the year was out Plant had also stepped onto the stage himself. His opportunity came when Andy Long was struck down with appendicitis, which at the time required a six-week period of convalescence. Long’s Jurymen were by now playing several nights a week and did not want to turn down the work, so who better to fill in for their singer than their friend Robert Plant, given that he already knew their set inside out?

Plant’s début live performance came at the Bull’s Head pub in Lye, a regular haunt of the Jurymen since it was run by John Dudley’s grandfather. On this night one might imagine that he would have been stricken with nerves as he looked out from the small, low stage and into the eyes of an audience for the first time. That here, in this smoky bar, he would wilt before such judging looks and when standing next to his then more experienced schoolmates.

‘When he first got up there, he was full of it – absolutely full of confidence,’ says Dudley, laughing at the memory. ‘He played more than half-decent harmonica even then and so he transformed our set into something a lot more bluesy. We had to busk it but we went down okay. I can’t remember how many gigs we eventually did with Rob but people always reacted favourably. Even then he sang in this blues wail. He used to like to take it down to a low rumble and then build back up to a crescendo.’

His stint as the Jurymen’s singer took Plant as far away as the East Midlands city of Leicester, a two-hour drive from home in the band’s old van. It also brought what he wanted to do with his life into clear perspective. Before Andy Long returned Plant began to go to work on his fellow Jurymen, attempting to persuade them that he should now become their permanent singer. He was to be frustrated in his efforts, just as he would be many times during the next few years.

‘We told him Andy was our singer and thanks very much,’ says Tolley. ‘We were all a bit mercenary. To be honest, we all had our stage uniforms and there wasn’t anything that would fit Robert.’

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