‘We had a bit of time off for good behaviour’ – when Robert Plant and Jimmy Page got back together in 1998

Taken from Uncut, April 1998.

“Give an Englishman 50,000 watts, a chartered jet, a little cocaine and some groupies and he thinks he’s a god,” Rolling Stone once sniped at Led Zeppelin. The magazine never approved of the band and somehow contrived to exclude from its snide equation all mention of some of the most powerful, dynamic and explosive music in rock ‘n’ roll history.

In a sense, Zeppelin were gods. They descended fully formed from riff heaven and, for a febrile decade throughout the ’70s, strode the rock’n’roll world like a colossus. They battered and blitzkrieged the musical landscape so that its contours would never be quite the same again, and since they disbanded upon the death of John “Bonzo” Bonham almost 20 years ago, the legend has continued to grow.

The template for a thousand inferior headbanging imitators, Zeppelin were always far too subtle and diverse ever to be classified merely as a heavy metal band. Yet when they cranked it up they were the loudest, heaviest and most climactic of them all, and to this day no-one has come within a metal mile of bettering the sonic onslaught of “Whole Lotta Love” or “Dazed And Confused”.

Their recorded legacy has stood the test of time remarkably well and only The Beatles ever sold more albums. Yet it was perhaps onstage that Zeppelin were at their incendiary best. Not even Prince or Madonna, and certainly not the Stones, have ever matched the wanton sexual energy of their live shows.

On a good night, Robert Plant, once said, he felt like “wanting to fuck the entire front row”.

The hammer of the gods, indeed.

September, 1968. How history could have been so different. A name is only a name, but it’s somehow hard to imagine rock’n’roll history being made by a band called The Whoopee Cushion, one of the original suggestions for the new group arising out of the ashes of The Yardbirds. Mercifully, The Who’s Keith Moon came to the rescue with some typical punning humour about “going down like a lead zeppelin”, and the name stuck. Led Zeppelin weren’t a supergroup like Blind Faith, formed from the remnants of other successful bands, yet somehow the band hit the ground running.

There were no trial runs, months of rehearsals or lineup changes. Whether by fate or chance, the chemistry was just there, and within weeks of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant’s first meeting in August 1968, the nascent band had recorded what still stands as one of the best debut albums of all time. Within little more than a year, Led Zeppelin were on the way to rivalling the Stones as the greatest rock’n’ roll band in the world.

Initially, Zeppelin seemed an improbable mix of sophisticated musical operators and untried callow hopefuls. Page was already one of the best-known guitarists in the country, an in-demand session player and a star in his own right after replacing the unpredictable Jeff Beck in The Yardbirds. John Paul Jones was also a respected backroom man and arranger who had worked with Page on a variety of sessions.

It was while the two were in the studio backing Donovan on “Hurdy Gurdy Man” that Jones asked Page if he needed a bass player for the new band he had heard he was putting together out of the ashes of The Yardbirds. On the other hand, Robert Plant and John “Bonzo” Bonham were gauche and unknown, provincial bumpkins in the Band Of Joy, a popular group on the West Midlands club circuit, but unheard of south of Watford.

Indeed, Plant was not the first choice singer for Zeppelin at all: the job was initially offered to Terry Reid, and Steve Marriott was another name considered.

Neither was available and Reid recommended Plant instead. Page and Peter Grant, the former Yardbirds manager, went to see the unknown 20-year-old singing at a teacher training college near Birmingham in front of a dozen people – and offered him the gig. Bonham followed, taking some persuasion to come on board after turning down offers from Joe Cocker and Chris Farlowe.

The phenomenal speed of Zeppelin’s take-off from a very short runway was partly due to talent, partly down to hard work, and totally dependent on the extraordinary drive and singleminded determination of Grant. As soon as Zeppelin had recorded their first album – in just 36 hours and with a budget of just €1,700 – Grant was on a plane to New York with the tapes and the artwork for the sleeve, looking for a deal.

Within days, he’d persuaded Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun to sign Zeppelin to a five-album deal for a down payment of $200,000. Grant also secured what was at the time a unique deal: total creative control by the band not just of all their recorded output but of ads, publicity, artwork and everything else. It was the reason why, despite the pleading of Atlantic executives, Zeppelin were always able to veto the issue of any singles in Britain.

Grant’s strategy was to break the band by a relentless diet of live dates, particularly in the States. There were four US tours in the band’s first 12 months, and Zeppelin’s rise was meteoric, destroying as they went the reputations of those unfortunate enough to share a bill with them (Iron Butterfly were one band so comprehensively blown offstage by Zeppelin that their career never recovered).

It was during these early touring days that Zeppelin also developed a taste for the rock’n’roll lifestyle that was later so luridly detailed in books such as Stephen Davis’ Hammer Of The Gods and road manager Richard Cole’s even more salacious memoir, Stairway To Heaven. While Jones had a reputation as the quiet one, Page had well-developed exotic tastes and Plant and Bonham, 20-year-old lads from West Bromwich, could scarcely believe their luck. Zeppelin’s rocketing fame brought money, power, privilege and an endless supply of groupies, drugs and booze: it was small wonder they occasionally went more than a little wild.

Moreover, Grant’s managerial style was not to try to keep his young charges in check but positively to encourage their every excess.

Indeed, it frequently seemed to be the manager who would be leading the destruction – and he never denied even the most exaggerated tales that got into the press (although most of them were largely true) on the grounds that they only added to the band’s mystique.

By the early ’70s, with The Beatles no more and The Rolling Stones in a state of shock after Altamont, Zeppelin were unrivalled as the biggest band on either side of the Atlantic. Grant was boasting to The Financial Times that Zeppelin would make $30 million from their next American tour, and even the daughter of the American president, Gerald Ford, went on prime-time television to tell the nation Zeppelin were the best band in the world.

Their second and third albums topped the charts, as did 1973’s Houses Of The Holy. In between came the multi-platinum fourth album, with its mysterious symbols and the enduring “Stairway To Heaven”. Zeppelin were now in their pomp, flying around America in a private jet known as The Starship and earning more money than any rock’n’roll band in history. Yet somehow in the middle of all the madness they were still making music of startling originality and power – 1975’s Physical Graffiti, which included the epic “Kashmir”, was probably their finest creative hour.

But there was a growing uneasiness that the band had become a juggernaut that was out of control, that the excesses had grown too excessive and the abuses too abusive. Just as Dylan had been metaphorically travelling too fast in the ‘6os, and whose motorcycle accident seemed in retrospect like a disaster waiting to happen, there was a feeling that the wheels were about to come off Zeppelin. It wasn’t only the drugs (and heroin as well as cocaine was by now heavily in evidence), the trashed hotel rooms, the underage girls and the undertone of violence that seemed to accompany the group’s entourage. Stories began to circulate of the band’s “bad karma”, that there was some sort of black magic curse on Led Zeppelin. There were mutterings about “Satan’s own rock band” and suggestions that the group was dancing with the Devil – perhaps literally.

At the route of the stories was Page’s obsession with the occult. He had even bought the former home of the occultist Aleister Crowley, dubbed “the most evil man in Britain”. When a series of mishaps and disasters befell the band, some were all too ready to draw superstitiously ludicrous conclusions. In August, 1975, Plant and his wife, Maureen, were seriously injured in a car crash in Greece. Tour dates were cancelled, and it was 18 months before Plant and Zeppelin took to the road again. As soon as they did, Plant’s five-year-old son, Karac, died following a stomach infection, and the remainder of the band’s 1977 tour was cancelled. It was another two years before they returned to live performances again, with 1979’s Knebworth appearances in front of 200,000 people.

In the meantime, the band’s feature film, The Song Remains The Same, had received a critical mauling, and there was only to be one more studio album of new material before Bonham died of inhaling his own vomit after a prolonged drinking session at Page’s Windsor home on September 25, 1980. Six weeks later, the three remaining members announced that they could not continue without him. And that was it. Over the years, there were persistent rumours of a reunion and there were a few one-off gigs with Bonzo’s son, Jason Bonham, on drums. There was a final studio album of outtakes, and then belatedly last year the first official release of the famous BBC live sessions. Plant pursued a successful solo career and Page played with Paul Rodgers in The Firm and later, to Plant’s disgust, with David Coverdale, the former vocalist with Whitesnake.

Bonham’s death was seen as the end of an era, but in truth the graffiti on the wall was discernible several years earlier. After the personal tragedy that struck Plant, the lengthy lay-offs from the live work which was so integral to what the Zeppelin experience was all about, and the onslaught of punk, the world had become a very different place. Even the richest rock’n’roll band in the world could not turn back the clock.

Three decades after they first met and Robert Plant and Jimmy Page are musical partners once more. After reworking their old repertoire for MTV on 1994’s No Quarter, Walking Into Clarksdale – with Steve Albini, founder member of the seminal US noise rockers, Big Black, and uncompromising producer of, among many others, Pixies, P) Harvey and Nirvana, in the control room – represents the first time the two of them have recorded an album of all-new material together since 1979. They appear relaxed, happy and fit, trading one-liners and exuding bonhomie, a pretty good advertisement for the rock’n’roll lifestyle that has proved fatal to so many lesser mortals.

Now a grandfather, Plant’s leonine mane still hangs in long blond ringlets and he must be one of the few 49-year-olds who still looks convincing in leather pants. True, the face is a little lined, but if only a fraction of the tales of depravity over the years are true, he has no right to look as fit as he does. He’s articulate, friendly and down-to-earth.

Page, too, is astonishingly well-preserved for his 54 years, and the well-documented excesses appear to have wreaked little lasting damage.

Dressed in what the style magazines would call “smart casual”, his satin skin and warm eyes give him an almost baby-faced look.

There’s a slight paunch, which comes as a pleasant surprise after years in which interviewers would routinely describe him as “gaunt”, “painfully thin” and even “spectral”. I had expected to meet someone who could at best be described as “a survivor”.

Instead, he’s sharp, humorous and endearing.

They also seem, at last, to have laid the ghosts and learned to live with their own legends, talking animatedly about the Zeppelin years, despite health warnings from their management not to dwell on the past and their own initial insistence that they preferred to concentrate on the present.

Oddly, it hadn’t occurred to either of them that 1998 marks the 30th anniversary of the band’s formation. Given the sensitivities, it seemed sensible to start with their current plans.

The new album is the first collection of all new material the two of you have recorded together since Zeppelin. How did you approach it?

Robert Plant: “With the previous excursion on the UnLedded album, No Quarter, we were only afforded a minimum amount of time to try and write new stuff. It was the very beginning of when we were renewing our relationship.

“I think we wrote two or three tracks to some tape loops. But the way that the thing was going, we wanted to reinvent some of the old stuff, which didn’t really give us very much time to explore any new ideas. We did get together before the MTV film and we threw around a few skeleton ideas, but we weren’t able to enlarge on them until the last six months or so.

“Once we finished the last tour and we’d given ourselves a bit of a break, the obvious thing was to do an album because we had so much stuff flying around. There were impromptu bits and pieces that came out of the stage show on the last tour, although we were quite restricted because we had an orchestra with us. When it came to this album we just got down to it, like we always did.”

Where did the idea of using Steve Albini come from?

Jimmy Page: “I think he sent a begging letter.”

RP: “We were looking for an engineer. We didn’t want a producer who sat at the back of the room trying to transmit ideas to someone he hardly knew. We didn’t want anybody to get in the way of us and the sound going into the tape. Albini as a conduit or catalyst seemed to be the perfect thing. A lot of producers aren’t hands-on any more. They start as engineers, and then they retreat to the podium, and that wasn’t what we were looking for.”

JP: “The thing about Albini is that he’s one of a rare breed. He’s one of just a handful of engineers who know how to deal with microphones, because a lot of the engineers from the ’80s onwards don’t even know. They just use samples. Some of them have never mic’d up a drum kit, and that’s a fact. Albini has been into the science of this, and so if you’ve got a good guitar sound he knows exactly what microphone to put on there so you can record the music flat without loads of messy EQ. He is really nice to work with. We were very confident it was going to sound good when we went in. He was a really good guy in every respect, and I’d love to work with him again.”

So was a lot of the album recorded live?

RP: “The sound we made in the room is what you hear. There was no struggle to reproduce the strength of Jimmy’s guitar sound, for instance. Steve had that down. The insistence was that we played together, all of us at the same time, so Jimmy’s guitar sound would drift across the drums and through the microphones over the drums. The whole thing was very much a live deal. There was a bit of tweaking here and there, but it was basically played on the spot.”

JP: “He has a very honest approach, which is what we were going for.”

RP: “His purism was quite heartening, really, the whole idea of capturing it there and then.”

“I find the first one and a half albums a bit of a compromise, vocally. by iii, i had started relaxing and enjoying it more”

Robert Plant

Does it irritate you when people want to talk in the past tense about Led Zeppelin rather than about what you’re doing now?

RP: “No, we just stop talking rather quickly. I mean, there is no point going on about the past. It is what it is, and the music is all there to be heard. The albums that we made as Led Zeppelin were done with all the influences of the time and the effects of what was going on at that time. So to look back now and discuss it is not really relevant to anything or to the fact that we’re sitting here in a café in the middle of Ladbroke Grove or wherever it bloody is. It’s 1998 and, you know, we’re moving along.”

JP: “Certainly the thing with Zeppelin was that we always wrote about where we were at that point in time. The albums came out as a statement of their time, and I think that’s exactly concurrent here.”

But there’s bound to be a lot of interest around the fact that it’s the 30th anniversary…

JP: [surprised): “Sorry?”

You don’t need me to tell you that Zeppelin formed 30 years ago this year…

RP: “Fucking hell! [laughter] We had a bit of time off for good behaviour.”

You once said, Robert, that you felt very intimidated when Zeppelin recorded the first album. What was it that intimidated you?

RP: “In my own environment, I had been king. I was a big fish in a little pond, but to be part of the recording of Zeppelin I was pretty intense. I thought that I’d got it all down, because when I was in the Band Of Joy people used to rave about me – you know 20 people in Barrow-in-Furness used to go mad when I played there. I thought that was it. Then suddenly I was in the studio with Glyn Johns and Jimmy, and I didn’t really think I was relaxed enough to cut it, to open up as much as I knew I could.

“I felt the whole thing was so big, and there was an amount of stress and tension which to some degree I created. I was ingesting my own fear and I made it more difficult for myself than I needed to, really.”

JP: “Plus, it was all happening so fast. That album was recorded really quickly. But that created an urgency that was good.”

RP: “Sure, it had its good side. But I didn’t know anybody apart from Bonzo. I’d just moved bands and I didn’t just have to sing a fill at the end of an eight-bar piece which would work. It was much more demanding. I had to keep it going within the framework of things which were already brilliant in the first place. So I was going, Woooooooa, oh God, I don’t think I like this. ‘I was thinking, ‘Maybe I can sing Buffalo Springfield’s Rock And Roll Woman’, or ‘On The Way Home, or something that I knew I could do. It was just a teething period when I was a bit jumpy.”

JP: “You can tell by those BBC sessions that finally came out last year. There are two performances on there. The first is very close to the time the first album was recorded, which Robert is talking about. But, by the time you get to the second session, it’s totally different. It’s only a matter of months, really, but the whole thing has changed for all of us. Everybody’s approach is different, it’s so much tighter and the intensity is electrifying. It’s a really good live performance.”

Were you really desperately nervous when you joined Zeppelin, Robert?

RP: “I think Jimmy and Jonesy had a lot of experience of working under pressure, which I didn’t. They had done a lot of sessions and they had confidence. Jimmy was a sought-after guitarist who was used to vamping up other people’s records. So he would walk into a studio knowing that he’d been employed to kick it into a new level of excitement – and he knew he could do it. Whereas I was busking, really.

“Honestly. I didn’t know whether or not I could do it. I had never been in such an amazingly instantaneously successful sound. One little voice bellowing through a 50-watt PA at the rehearsal? I didn’t really know what I’d got, or how much of a contribution it was.”

JP: “But that was the thing about Led Zeppelin. We all matured and developed within the group because it felt so good. The relationship between each member was startling.”

RP: “I do find the first one and a half albums a bit of a compromise for me, vocally. I think by Led Zeppelin III, I had started relaxing and enjoying it a bit more.”

In Ritchie Yorke’s book, Led Zeppelin: The Definitive Biography, Jimmy, you say you were disappointed with elements of your playing on Led Zeppelin II. Surely that can’t be true?

JP: “I can’t believe I said that, either. That was probably in the days before journalists had cassette tapes to verify what we really said. I wouldn’t have said I was disappointed by my playing on Zeppelin II. No, not at all, never. That’s the end of that. There’s no point in even talking about it.”

But Zeppelin had a bad time with the press, didn’t they? Rolling Stone conducted a vicious vendetta against you.

RP: “Only in a certain period. We hit England like a steam train, straight through everything- crash, bang – and we had very little respect from most of the journalists that were around then.

“There were journalists who would go to the Reading Jazz & Blues Festival and review the show from the beer tent. We were only too aware of that, so whenever we had the opportunity, we let them know that we thought they were pretty slack and lightweight. With their character assassination, they knew that they could finish off a band without even listening or taking any notice of them. Nowadays, it all seems to be based on fashion and sports clothing.”

Did press criticism get to you?

JP: “I think the reviewers had a dilemma. I’m not excusing some of them, but I think what happened was that after the second album and the success of “Whole Lotta Love”, they listened to the third album, and they said, ‘Where is “Whole Lotta Love”?’ After the fourth album, they’d go, ‘Where is “Stairway To Heaven”?’ The problem was, they only had a short time to review it, and they wouldn’t get the plot at all. They knew us up to a certain point and then we’d do something different on a new album and it was too fresh on their ears. With a live audience, it was a totally different story because they had time to digest it.”

It’s charitable of you to take that view.

JP: “After a while there was no point in caring about what anybody said. We knew what sort of quality we had and what we expected of ourselves and why the songs were on the album. We worked hard in every respect and we worked hard onstage, too, you know!”

Led Zeppelin were always much more than a heavy rock band. There were acoustic guitars on the first and second albums, and Page at the time regularly namechecked folk guitarists such as Davy Graham and Bert Jansch as big influences.

Plant had similar interests, was an obsessive Joni Mitchell fan, and championed The Incredible String Band. After the second album and five American tours in 18 months, the two retreated to a cottage at Bron-Yr-Aur, Wales, during the summer of 1970 to write new material. Not surprisingly, the idyllic surroundings were reflected in Led Zeppelin III, an album of considerable light and shade which disappointed some of their heavy metal devotees.

There’s a lot of acoustic guitar on the third LP. Do you feel that everybody was so into the Planet Riff thing that the gentler side was overlooked?

RP: “I don’t know. Obviously, the huge guitar riffs and the screaming vocals on things like ‘Immigrant Song’ and the power of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and ‘Black Dog’ are immediately in your face. I think you can quite easily pass by the beauty of “Tangerine’ or “That’s The Way’ if your musical appreciation is of a fairweather kind. We tried to make music which people couldn’t talk over. The whole idea of Led Zeppelin being in the background as everybody tucks into their rocket and balsamic vinegar salad is out of the question. You’ve either got to have it full on or forget about it altogether. People either liked what we did for that very reason or cast it aside.”

So do you feel you never really got proper credit for the acoustic side of the band?

RP: “When we played the acoustic aspects of it, the music didn’t have the same compulsion, so I think people probably thought it was there as a little bit of a rest. But it was crucially important. Without it, we most definitely wouldn’t be here now because we would have just been like a lot of the other bands at the time whose attitude was, Turn the amps full up and get a few bob in the bank.’ Our influences were so broad and so wide from the minute that we met – look at ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ on the first Led Zeppelin album, which Joan Baez had done. Or listen to ‘Your Time Is Gonna Come’. We certainly weren’t just a heavy rock band – we drew from so many different places.”

But when you explored those influences further on Led Zeppelin III, there was a critical backlash. I saw a reference only the other day to the “difficult third album”.

JP: “The curious thing was when Led Zeppelin III came out, I remember the reviewers slamming it and saying we were doing a Crosby Stills & Nash. It was as though everyone’s ears had been shut to the fact that we had been heavily acoustic on parts of the first album and on the second with things like ‘Ramble On’. After all that touring around the first two albums, we had the first proper break that we had and we got together to write at the cottage in Wales, and the material reflected the mood. The second album was actually recorded while we were on the road.”

RP: “It was a very English attitude or opinion ‘cos it was a natural thing to be both acoustic and electric in most of the countries we visited. They didn’t want one to outweigh or outbalance the other – they regarded both the acoustic stuff and the heavy stuff as all part of the weave that allowed us to play dynamic concerts where you could chill out after some thunderous piece of music and just sit down and open it up again.”

Was life on the road with Zeppelin as lurid as legend would have it?

RP: “How do you answer that without either being smug or ridiculous?”

JP: “Or writing a book. There’s volumes on it. The good thing was coming off the road because it was always so intense when we were touring.”

“After a while there was no point in caring about what anybody said. we knew what sort of quality we had”

Jimmy Page

It was all happening for you so fast that it was bound to get a little wild, wasn’t it?

RP: “Our progress in America in those days was pretty phenomenal. We were moving through the ranks at a rapid rate and not really knowing where the hell it was all going. We went over there and played the clubs, and before we knew it we were headlining. It’s only six months later and suddenly the people who are supporting us are people we knew as seriously big names.

“They were prepared to reduce themselves and go scuttling down the bill. I don’t know the reason. I can’t imagine why they did that. If I had been Iron Butterfly or whoever, I think I’d have just gone and done a different gig somewhere else rather than try and get anyway near us because we were really moving then.”

JP: “There were some bands who didn’t actually turn up. They shall remain nameless but maybe they were right.”

Was touring very different then from today?

RP: “The thing is we didn’t really understand what was happening or how big it was. When you’re in the middle of it all, you just don’t know. Things were pretty disorganised in comparison to the way things run now. We used to leave for America sometimes not knowing where we were playing. That’s a fact. Now we know so much more – everybody knows everything except for maybe a couple of brothers from Manchester. We just kept going.”

JP: “I remember one tour when we didn’t know what the venues were. We worked the first two gigs and they were Atlanta and Tampa. One was 52,000 people and one was 57,000. And those were the first two gigs on the tour! I mean, Jesus.

“There was just us playing, no support, and it was purely by word of mouth. Yeah, it was meteoric.”

There was an extraordinary energy about Led Zeppelin onstage – musically, sexually, in every way. Even now, do you still miss that?

RP: “No, because there is an extraordinary energy now. It’s just that it is a bit more enjoyable. There aren’t so many loose cannons or grey areas. We know where we are and what we’re doing. It used to worry me when sometimes we’d be standing there backstage and the big, metal security doors are being bashed in. There are two or three hundred kids attacking them. We were in the building standing there all wanting to know what we should do. Where’s the car? Who’s in charge? Where’s Peter Grant? How do we get out of here in one piece? All that stuff added such chaos.”

But you feel the reaction onstage now is as good as it ever was?

RP: “When we were playing the last tour together in 1995, I do believe that the responses were every bit as exciting as they were in the beginning. It’s just that we’re older and we’ve seen it loads and loads of times. But, if you stop and take it in, the reception we’re receiving in parts of America and in Brazil and so on is unbelievable. It’s just that it doesn’t have that sort of anguish there used to be. We know we’re OK, we know what we’re doing, we know exactly what’s going on around us, and we have a good time, whereas before there were lots of tenuous areas.”

So there’s a more comfortable feeling now?

RP: “Yeah, I think so – but that doesn’t make it any less exciting. It just makes it a bit easier.” JP: “You have to be careful about the word ‘comfortable’. Things are more organised now. There’s still an energy, and we’re still moving things around and improvising as we always have. That’s the thing that keeps us going.”

Are you perceived differently in the UK than in the rest of the world?

RP: “In many of the other places that we’ve played, there’s a much more varied age group coming to see what we’re doing. In Spain or the Latin countries or South America or a good deal of the United States or Australia, the average age of the audience is a lot lower than it is in the UK. In those places, the music that we’re creating now and have been creating over the years is still part of the fibre of the musical world.

“Much more so than here, which is all about ‘Stairway To Heaven’ – now only No 14 on the Capital Countdown or whatever it is. That’s a load of old bollocks. That’s not what it’s all about.

“On Spanish radio, for example, it’s just the fact that it’s good music whether it’s The Verve or Hendrix or Fugees or Jeff Buckley. They play it back-to-back. You don’t get that here. You don’t hear The Doors on British radio and you don’t get very much of us, whether it’s new or old.

“The British audience is that much older because they come out of memory – there’s a lot of nostalgia and reminiscing going on at a British gig, which is not quite so strong elsewhere. Other countries seem to want to know what’s going on now. They don’t complain because there is no ‘Stairway To Heaven’.”

Did “Stairway To Heaven” become a millstone around your necks?

JP: “No, not really. I mean it’s a great song, but the very fact that we’re together is a millstone, really! There are other ways of doing things, but what we’re doing now is really having a good time. Who can complain about being successful for 30 years?”

You seem to have a very good relationship again after all these years…

RP: “You know, it’s fucking great, and it comes from a good chemistry and a lot of straight talking now. We have a lot of yep, no, instant decisions, and there’s a sensitivity that we’ve got between ourselves which I think has taken a while to kindle in these new times. But it’s good stuff, there’s no better place to be.”

Having started the interview three hours late (“Twenty years ago, you might have been kept waiting two weeks,” joked their press officer), time is tight. I never asked about Page’s interests in the occult and his anger at the way in some quarters it was blamed for the group’s run of bad fortune from 1975 onwards. He was also reluctant to discuss his life away from the music industry. Yet, when we were leaving I told him I was off to Haiti the following week to write about voodoo. “Yeah, I’ve seen a bit of that,” he said, and asked me for some more details.

However, we did talk about the alleged Zeppelin jinx, and Page was visibly moved when I asked Plant about how his world had caved in following the loss of his son in 1977.

There you were, the biggest band in the world, and then suddenly you had that terrible loss. That must give you a whole different perspective on the nature of success. It must make you think, it doesn’t matter how big you are, no-one is immune…

RP: “Well, that’s what it took for me, yeah. I was in the middle of seventh heaven as this kid from the Black Country really doing a good job and doing it very professionally. At the same time, I was being exposed to lifestyles the like of which very few people could even dream about, you know. The people we met were so stimulating and there were so many experiences, but when you have a personal tragedy as real and immediate as that, you can’t retrieve anything that you’ve lost. You have to just realise there are more important things than jumping around swinging your arse about. If people need you, you’ve got to be there for them and, yeah, I’ve never come back from that, really. But God’s been good to me and I’ve got great kids now and I have a good time and they come with me. And these are clean days completely. So everybody enjoys it and what I’ve got left is fantastic.”

So tell me a little bit about your lives these days. How do you spend your time?

JP [emotionally]: “I don’t know. I don’t really want to answer that. It’s a fair question, it’s just that I don’t really want to… I was pretty moved by what Robert has just said.”

But music is still the most important thing in your life?

JP: “Well, it certainly is. Yeah, it definitely is. But I don’t really want to discuss my personal life.”

RP: “I think our lives have broadened a hell of a lot. I think as we get older we have more people to care for and we have more people who care for us – and that really is far more of a crown to wear than in being whatever we are professionally. We travel a lot and we come back with ideas. Both of us individually and separately when we travel take in all manner of things. My notebook’s constantly open, it was even open on the North Circular yesterday morning. Our ability to observe, come back, exchange ideas, get excited, is not diminished. We get excited when we’re not working, we get stimulated by things Jimmy may have absorbed in Brazil or moments for me in Kashgar in China last year.”

Page and Plant’s interests in world music pre-dated Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel by years, and when they started talking about their travels in Brazil or Central Asia both displayed the animation of the true enthusiast. We talked about how their original inspiration 30 years ago from the blues had expanded to draw upon a far wider musical atlas.

“Other countries want to know what’s going on now. they don’t complain because there is no ‘stairway to heaven’

Robert Plant

The last time I saw you, Jimmy, was at the Ali Farka Touré gig last year. Now both you and Robert have had wide musical tastes for a long time. You were recording with Indian musicians as long ago as 1971, long before anyone even invented the phrase world music’, and you work a lot with Egyptian and Moroccan musicians. Where did those interests come from?

JP: “For me, this music is a blessing. In the early days I used to listen to folk people like Davy Graham, and he started it. He used to go and just play with the Arabs in Tangiers, whatever. When we were in Morocco recording, I was thinking of him because that’s what opened up so many more interesting things for me. We then made our own interpretation.”

RP: “The breadth, the access to every different kind of music that is available to people today is phenomenal, and most people don’t even open their ears. The music which stirred us when we were in India in 1971, or even when I was in West Bromwich in 1966, is all at everybody’s fingertips now. There are certain artists who have been heralded as being radically important who come from Central African states, and have ended up being just a little bit too cabaret to get those few more record sales, but there are so many choices and so many options. I was lucky because when I was 17 I met a girl from India [Plant’s ex-wife Maureen) and I was immediately exposed through her family and neighbours to Indian film music and stuff like that on a daily basis as a part of the general backcloth to life.

“I started listening to all this other stuff and at the same time the chaps I had been singing with a year before were still playing ‘…..Midnight Hour’ by Wilson Pickett, and really never opened up to these other influences.”

Do you find a common thread between African and Arabic sounds and your blues influences?

RP: “I think what happened for me is that the blues became very sad. The masters of the urban blues, who shipped up through the Mississippi Delta to Chicago and Detroit, did so as an economic reality in order to obtain a decent lifestyle for musicians. That took them to Chess and VJ Records and whatever other labels there were, and these great artists really flourished from the mid-’50s through to about 63 or 64. But then the creativity sagged and the artists went away and eventually died.

“The thing is that in Africa and in Morocco, as Jimmy mentioned, they still carried the essence of where the blues came from, emotionally.

“People like Ali Farka Touré from Mali, but it’s everywhere, really. It’s very tangible. Even though it’s not ‘Woke up this morning/Tears falling down like hail’, it comes from the same place and it’s got all that bluesness.”

JP: “It’s the quality of the riffs as well, which is what really became the blues.”

RP: “So all that is now called world music, but really it’s just the roots of the blues and it is tremendous. If you listen to Umm Kulthum from Cairo, who died 22 years ago, and you listen to the blue notes in her voice, that’s amazing. I can have a much better evening listening to that than tuning into what is now called contemporary R’n’B. Black music in America has gone too far. Whereas Alan Lomax used to go down to the plantation to record McKinley Morganfield or Mississippi Fred McDowell, now people are going to Senegal or Mauritania and coming back with singers like Dimi Mint Abba in perfect condition. It’s brilliant.”

JP: “Robert mentioned Brazil and the thing you have to understand is that Brazil was one of the last places to abolish slavery, and of course there’s a very heavy African presence there. When you hear the berimbau [a Brazilian musical bow made out of a bendable stick, a wire and a hollowed-out gourd], it’s just like you’re hearing something from Africa, which it is because those were the African slaves who were taken there to work on the plantations. In Brazil, Thave found all these different sources to be inspired and moved by. They certainly haven’t been captured on record. When you hear these drummers just bouncing off the walls, there’s a fantastic rhythm to it. It’s a massive sound and it’s stimulating. It sends shivers up the spine.”

What were you doing in China, Robert?

RP: “I went last July and heard the most amazing fusion guitar players there. God knows where it all comes from, because Kashgar is the most landlocked city in the world. You’ve got characters there of Mongolian descent who have daggers in their belts and wear long Cossack coats, and I was standing in the main square where there is the only remaining statue of Chairman Mao in China. It’s the least likely place because the people loathe the Chinese.

“But they can’t get rid of the statue because if they blow it up it will fall down on the houses built around the mosque. I mean, that’s what we do in our spare time. We stand in a square in the middle of nowhere going, ‘What’s this?”

What else do you listen to these days?

RP: “Everything. David Holmes at the moment, which is amazing. The whole Asian caste thing. I’m still praying that Najma Akhtar [who sang on No Quarter) will get a good record deal and people will help make her voice sound as beautiful as it always does. We’re eagerly waiting for something to happen with the Jeff Buckley tapes.”

JP: “That was one of the greatest losses of all, Jeff Buckley.”

Once Zeppelin had split, Plant in particular set out to forge a new identity with a series of very ’80s, contemporary sounding albums. Page produced a soundtrack for Michael Winner’s movie, Death Wish 2, and played guitar in different lineups. Despite the talk of a reunion which persisted throughout most of the decade, none of the surviving members had any desire to relive the past.

At one time in the 1980s, Robert, you clearly felt a great need to get out from under the considerable shadow of Zeppelin. I’m not sure that you felt that in the same way, Jimmy?

RP: “It was me being concerned about a very flimsy media approach. Whenever I made a solo record that I felt was happening, I always had to deal with the ghost of Zeppelin first. I understand that because everybody’s points of reference are the most successful, groundbreaking things that a person has done in their lives. I was saying that’s fine, but all I wanted to do was make a clean break and see how far I could go in another direction without constantly being reminded of the effect or the triumph or whatever it was of what I’d done before. I wanted to do different stuff.”

What do you think of your solo albums now?

RP: “If you listen to an album like Manic Nirvana, it sounds pretty dated. I was obsessed with trying to get cutting-edge sounds at the time. I can’t listen to it now unless I’m feeling very benevolent towards myself. But I think I got somewhere with the intention of the vocals and lyrics. That was important to me. And this is very important to me now because we have got somewhere under a new flag, with new songs. We might go on the road for six months and say, ‘Let’s kick it on the head now and pursue some other musical approach.’ Playing live is not the same as that great flame of creativity.”

You didn’t feel that same need to escape, Jimmy?

JP: “No, because my circumstances were different. I could be the guitar player with anyone I was working with – and, having worked with Robert and then Paul Rodgers, I have been totally spoilt.”

RP: “But look what you did. The soundtrack to Death Wish was brilliant. It’s one of the greatest pieces of work you’ve done. I still play it and say, ‘Wow, this is fantastic.’ But you wouldn’t have done that if you hadn’t had the space to do it.”

JP: “Thanks for the compliment – but when it came out as an album it was buried. I asked the record company why and they said, ‘We don’t think it’s what you ought to be doing.’ That didn’t deter me. It’s still going on.”

There seems to be something cathartic about the Led Zeppelin experience, for bandmembers and fans. Looking back, it is hard to separate the reality from the legend?

RP: “I distanced myself because I wanted to do something different. I didn’t want people always to ask me where Jimmy was, any more than he wanted everyone to ask where’s Robert. And I had tragedy when I was a part of Led Zep. I wanted to get that whole psychosis of it out of the way so I could start again – cut my hair off, be clean, family values, diddly-dah. Then I got divorced [laughter]. And we’re sitting here talking about Led Zeppelin. Another day, another café.”