(1999–2004)
If any single project can be said to epitomize everything that Robert Plant has ever represented in the course of his career, it is Priory of Brion.
Received history and a depleted rain forest’s worth of “best song”/“best album”/“best band” retrospectives can toot the horn for their own private favorites. Disgruntled fans, complaining decades later that Plant doesn’t still play with his old friends, can bitch about his refusal to tread again the trampled stairway to evermore. But in terms of taking the songs that best suited his vocal, matching them to the vocal that best suited the music, and then delivering an entire package with flawless attention to feel and flavor—as opposed to detail, virtuosity, and grandeur—Priory of Brion leaves the rest at the starting post. In the same way that the career renaissance that it inaugurated in 1999, and the fifteen years that have elapsed since then, represent the truest and most honest manifestation of Robert Plant the artist.
Not simply because he had stopped worrying about how it looked to other people or stopped competing with other bands, although that is certainly a part of it. It is because he stripped away all the pressures, and all the people, who felt their interpretation of his talent was the one he should be kowtowing to, and listened to himself alone.
It wasn’t the first time he’d done that, of course. The original, glorious Honeydrippers shows radiate precisely the same qualities that he would be returning to in 1999. So did the albums Now and Zen and Fate of Nations. Those, however, would ultimately be revealed as mere brief flowerings, tentative moments of self-realization before he returned to the industry treadmill once again. This time around, he was doing it for keeps, and the fact that he did not even bother leaving behind a record of all that Priory of Brion achieved cannot dim its glory. It lives on in everything he has accomplished since then.
He had already burned one bridge, informing Page and manager Curbishley that they would not be making another record together, no matter how successful Walking into Clarksdale had been. Neither was he thinking about making another album under his own steam. For the first time since 1967, he didn’t even have a recording contract. Instead, he just wanted to get out and have some fun, in exactly the same way as he had in 1981 and under precisely the same code of semi-secrecy.
With Kevyn Gammond and Andy Edwards again by his side, Plant set about building a band, adding bassist Paul Wetton and keyboard player Paul Timothy, members of a jazz trio that Edwards played around with. Plant’s garage became their rehearsal space, and his bandmates quickly grew accustomed to the silver, gold, and platinum discs that lined the walls. Just as they grew accustomed to some of Plant’s other peculiarities: his insistence that his own entire back (and, indeed, future) catalog was off limits, and his decision only to play shows in Wales, the border counties, and his own midlands stamping ground.
Plant played rhythm guitar through the rehearsals, introducing his new bandmates to the songs they needed to learn—oldies one and all, numbers that might once have been a part of Band of Joy’s live set, or could have been had the group lasted longer. The highlight was, and remains, Donovan’s “Season of the Witch,” a number whose inclusion so thrilled its author that his autobiography credited the cover to Led Zeppelin, and that prompted Plant to remember the time, long before, when a man in a brown corduroy cap sold him a car in Lowestoft. The car had a burned-out clutch, and the seller was Donovan.
More songs followed. “Morning Dew.” “If I Were a Carpenter.” “Darkness, Darkness,” an old Youngbloods number that had seen service in the hands of everyone from Mott the Hoople to Solas. “Early in the Morning.” “We’re Gonna Groove,” a Ben E. King number that Zeppelin did record, but left unreleased until the 1982 Coda collection of odds-and-sos.
“Evil Woman.” “Baby Please Don’t Go.” “Gloria,” the glorious growler that Van Morrison wrote while he was with Them, which had since become an integral component within garage rock’s DNA. “No Regrets,” an aching Tom Rush ballad that gave the Walker Brothers a comeback chart topper in 1976. James Brown’s “Think.” “Girl from the North Country.” Hendrix’s “If Six Was Nine,” and another Tim Rose song, “Hey Joe,” to be prefaced onstage by the observation that it was “a desperate song, for desperate people in desperate times. A dangerous story of everyday country folk . . . a bit like ‘Gallows Pole’ with a New Searchers introduction.”
Walk unawares into one of the band’s rehearsals and you could be forgiven for thinking you’d stepped back in time, with even Timothy’s keyboards set to pipe a ’60s Hammond aura into the air.
Plant came up with a band name, Priory of Brion, a combination of two of popular culture’s greatest spoofs and hoaxes. The Priory of Sion was created in 1956 by French scholar Pierre Plantard and then granted a fictional history that traced its origins back to the Crusades; the bloodline was expounded (as fact) in the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Monty Python’s third movie, The Life of Brian, had as its subtext people who are so desperate to find something to believe in that they end up believing in something utterly absurd. This, in turn, suggested that the whole affair should not be taken too seriously. But that it was not intended as a joke, either. Because when they performed, there was no sense that this was anything but Plant’s heart’s desire.
“I don’t see it as a bold move at all,” Plant told Folk Roots magazine in 2000. “I’m just having fun.” He didn’t want the Priory of Brion to “get any bigger” because that was not the point. He had nothing to prove to anybody, and he would have had no desire to do so even if they asked.
Priory of Brion’s first show, on July 23, 1999, took place at the band’s local pub, the Three Tuns Inn in Bishop’s Castle, in front of a crowd of around three hundred people. Even without an ounce of advertising, word got around that something special was occurring. A month later, Priory of Brion were playing in nearby Oswestry; the following night at the unequivocally named Jazz & Roots Club in Shrewsbury. A larger crowd awaited them at the Bridgnorth Folk festival at the end of August, a smaller one at the King’s Hotel in Newport.
With the Honeydrippers’ old ally Roy Williams again arranging their schedule, steps further inland to Sheffield, Dudley, and Ludlow, saw the last remaining cloak of secrecy fly away from the band’s identity. But still Plant stuck to his guns. Halloween brought an appearance at the National Forest Folk festival in Leicestershire; November saw them hit the Red Lion Folk Club in King’s Heath Birmingham. Other shows as the century faded away caught him almost retreading the footsteps he’d first taken back in the days of the Crawling Kingsnakes and Listen, town halls and village pubs that even the Honeydrippers might have looked twice at.
Plant did not claim to know the words to every song. Many shows, he spent his time seated on a stool, lyric sheets on a music stand beside him, wearing a pair of reading spectacles. Cynics, and of course there were many, argued that he was simply slumming it, going out with a show that had no bearing whatsoever on his career as a superstar, in the knowledge that he could stop it whenever he wanted and dash out a million-seller instead. Nothing hinged upon the success of Priory of Brion, they said; there was no reputation at stake or ego to be bruised.
This is true. But those things are not necessarily negatives. For Plant, they were also cathartic: an opportunity not to humble himself in front of an audience that was more accustomed to see him bare-chested and screaming, but to show them the human behind the deity—and, by doing so, to remind himself of it as well. To prove that his onstage and offstage personas did not need to be so different from one another, and that the talent and showmanship the universe expected from him was always there, whichever role he was playing.
No less than in 1981, not everybody who came to see Priory of Brion necessarily recognized that fact. Several shows attracted audiences that still hoped against hope that Plant might throw in an unscheduled oldie. He never did, though, even as Priory of Brion marched into the new millennium with a rapidly filling date sheet and gigs that took them even further afield, north to Liverpool, south to Reading, and across the sea to Norway, where they appeared at the Ole Blues festival in Bergen. Another run of gigs saw them opening for Van Morrison on a short tour of Ireland, while June 2000 took them to the Glastonbury Festival for a riotously received set in the Acoustic tent.
Always, however, Priory of Brion returned to their roots: barely publicized shows in towns and venues far off the traditional beaten track, the whole band crammed into a single Transit van. “I don’t want all that rock ’n’ roll hoopla,” Plant continued during that Folk Roots interview. The important point, he insisted, was that “the audience don’t agitate for ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ which must mean that they get it. . . . People come with an interest and then the craft of the songs carries the night.” He would, he admitted, have enjoyed trying to move things to “the next level,” but he acknowledged that it couldn’t be done. Not without “reintroducing the rock ’n’ roll madness.”
Slowly, however, it started to feel like work again. At the end of July, Priory of Brion appeared at the Cambridge Folk Festival, an event that—like Glastonbury in the rock world—hung at the very apex of the British folk scene. On either side of it, they played a string of festivals in Europe—across Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, France, and Belgium, with local promoters completely ignoring entreaties to keep Plant’s name out of the advertising. Now it was Priory of Brion whose identity was the surprise.
Venue sizes increased. When they started, Plant was happy to face a couple of hundred people. Now, a couple of thousand was becoming the norm. Isolated gigs in out-of-the-way locations were slipping off the radar, replaced by virtual tours. Crowds were growing rowdier, PAs were growing louder.
There were still highlights, of course. On August 11, 1999, Priory of Brion appeared at the Cropredy Festival, the annual get-together organized by Dave Pegg and Fairport Convention, which dated back with so much serendipity to what was meant to have been Fairport’s last-ever concert . . . but turned out to be one of Zeppelin’s instead.
Fairport had already announced their decision to fold, and were going out with a bang, first playing Zeppelin’s August 1979 Knebworth bonanza and then helicoptering back to their home turf for a final farewell party there. Which proved so successful that it became a tradition. Once a year, Fairport would come back from the grave and put on a show for the faithful. It was Zeppelin, for whom Knebworth was intended simply as an overture to another year of gigging, who never came back from that August afternoon. So now the boot was on the other foot. It was Plant who was performing at Fairport’s show.
But Cropredy was an exception, a night of excitement and triumph, shared with friends as well as bandmates. More often, and increasingly as the summer turned to fall, Plant would come offstage feeling as though he was back on the same carousel that Priory of Brion was supposed to have freed him from, and he acknowledged that it would have been easy to fall back into enjoying the ride as well.
He would not, after all, be the first ’70s megastar to undergo what his audience called a complete musical transformation and then ride the waves back to the top. Three years earlier, Ritchie Blackmore turned his back on his reputation as the rock god behind Deep Purple and Rainbow to form a new group with his wife Candice, dedicated almost exclusively to the folk and renaissance music that had always hung so heavily in his personal musical background. Like Plant, he eschewed the conventional live circuit, preferring Renaissance fayres and romantic ancient castles; like Plant, he refused to give in to the hordes that descended to demand “Smoke on the Water” and “Strange Kind of Woman.” Now, two or three albums into their career, Blackmore’s Night were establishing themselves as a solid, reliable draw.
And that was the difference. Although they did go into Rockfield to cut a handful of demos, Plant had no intention of making albums with Priory of Brion. And he had no wish for them to become a solid, reliable draw. So he began to withdraw instead.
Priory of Brion saw out most of their scheduled dates: a short Greek visit in late November followed by a final burst of concerts at home. But a string of Scandinavian shows were written off in early December, and when Priory of Brion convened for their last three gigs of the year—in Crewe, Derby, and Wolverhampton (Plant resplendent in his Wanderers “Pride of the Black Country” scarf)—it was with the knowledge that these were the last gigs they’d ever play. Other shows, penciled in for the following spring, would be handled by another band entirely: Plant’s next project, Strange Sensation.
It would be easy to argue that Priory of Brion were very hard done by. Strange Sensation—reunions with Charlie Jones and Porl Thompson, plus drummer Clive Deamer and keyboard player John Baggott—played their first shows in Scandinavia, making up for the Priory of Brio gigs that were wiped out in December. And the new band’s first album was essentially comprised of the old band’s core repertoire.
All three of Plant’s fellow bandmates had had to give up their day jobs in order to undertake the adventure, and while not one of them would have done things differently given the choice, still they were effectively out on their ears, abandoned before the project could reach the next level. But they also knew what they were in for when the ride began. The fact that it was just a ride—that Plant had no intention of building his career around them and that Priory of Brion had always had a very finite existence. That it had even lasted as long as it did, and risen as high on the live circuit as it did, was an eventuality that none of them had expected—and that Plant had never desired, either.
Still label-less, despite manager Curbishley’s insistence that he could walk into any record company in the world, Plant decided to finance the new record himself. He would make it, Curbishley would shop it. That way, nobody would be under any misapprehensions about what they could expect from him. Nine years had elapsed since his last solo album, and he had no intention of rolling them back at the behest of a label that still wanted Led Zeppelin. Or even “Big Log.” There was a reason why, when the album was released in July 2002, Plant called it Dreamland.
There would be some new compositions on board—four in total, all written with his new musicians: “Win My Train Fare Home,” “Dirt in a Hole,” “Last Time I Saw Her,” and “Red Dress.” But their form would be dictated by the rest of their surroundings: “Morning Dew,” “Hey Joe,” and “Darkness, Darkness”; Bob Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee”; Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren”; Bukka White’s foreboding “Funny in My Mind (I Believe I’m Fixin’ to Die)”; and Skip Spence’s eerie eulogy “Skip’s Song,” a tribute to the artist who, via Moby Grape, had proven such an inspiration to the teenaged (and, indeed, the adult) Plant.
It was a downbeat album, featuring songs of loss and reflection, of the blues in all their guises. None of the songs were especially obscure. “Song to the Siren,” indeed, had become something of a touchstone for an entire generation that would still have been kids when its composer passed away in 1975; rediscovered a decade later by the Cocteau Twins, in the guise of the This Mortal Coil collective, “Song to the Siren” now epitomized sorrow and shadow, mourning and melancholy, and the challenge for Plant as he went back to the song was to conjure a version that could stand alongside not the original but its reinvention. He succeeded, for the same reason that he was likewise able to breathe new life into “Hey Joe,” another song that had been hammered so definitively into place (by Hendrix) that anything but a photostat would leave the purists howling. Because he was content to let them howl.
Plant chose his collaborators wisely. Both Baggott and Deamer had emerged within the Portishead collective that all but singlehandedly blueprinted the trip hop scene of the early 1990s, a swampy ocean filled with slow beats and shifting shadows that stripped melody back to its sparsest rhythms and then rebuilt from there. Plant did not want to travel in that direction. But still his “Hey Joe” was a reinvention, sonically and stylistically—shards of sound and shattered chords crashing above and beyond familiarity, half-heard echoes that shivered in the mix and then retreated back before others came to take their place.
“Song to the Siren” went the other way entirely. A guitar that echoed nothing so much as the Spartan picking with which Jon Mark once accompanied the ’60s Marianne Faithfull was Plant’s sole accompaniment through the first verse. And when strings rose up to serenade the second, still Plant’s vocal felt isolated, alone, as though he sang with no awareness whatsoever of the musicians that soared around him.
Other players slipped in: BJ Cole on the pedal guitar that added its voice to “Song to the Siren” and guitarist Justin Adams, who loaned gimbri and darbuki to the sound of the sessions. Plant also forged one more link in his long and still utterly coincidental habit of revisiting the Adverts’ family tree. Backing vocalist Ginny Clee had recorded and toured with their singer, TV Smith, in the ’80s—and was a major Lord of the Rings fan as well. “It was my Bible,” she told her website. “Acid can do that.”
Together, this was the team that breathed yearning desperation into “One More Cup of Coffee” (always one of the most foreboding moments on Dylan’s Desire album back in 1976, but restated now by the sheer fragility of Plant’s vocal), the team that ensured that the fear and resignation with which Priory of Brion imbibed “Darkness, Darkness” was at last cast in stone. “That was a very influential song way back in the old days,” Plant used to say as he introduced it live, and clearly it still was.
Once again, Plant was striking out afresh from within the cocoon of his distant past, discovering and rediscovering tensions within his own musical tastes, then following them. He fell in love with Emmylou Harris’s Wrecking Ball album, and certainly elements of that album’s unique Daniel Lanois–produced styling found its way into Plant’s own collaboration with co-producer Phill Brown (yet another TV Smith veteran—he produced 1983’s Channel Five album) as Dreamland came together. He started listening to bluegrass—the sonic polar opposite of the symphonic pastures that Lanois created, but a match for the hybrid that was coalescing in his mind, a lush soundtrack gouged through with the sounds of rural Appalachian folk. He discovered, too, a new voice that worked within that particular field—an Illinois singer named Alison Krauss—and she was not the only fresh sound to be turning his head.
Promotion for the new album got off to a rocky start, however. On May 1, 2002, Plant and the band were scheduled to appear at the Primo Maggio Festival in Italy on a bill with Oasis. That same day, Wolverhampton Wanderers were playing Norwich City in one of the most decisive matches of their recent history, the semifinal of the end-of-season play-offs, to determine whether or not Premiership football would come to Molineux next season. Wolves were down 3–1 from the first leg; nothing less than three unanswered goals would see them through. And Plant knew where he needed to be. The festival date was cancelled and he took his regular place at the stadium instead.
Wolves won, but the 1–0 was not enough. And as Plant told FourFourTwo in 2002, he was so enraged that he spent great swathes of the match screaming abuse at Norwich player Iwan Roberts. “I started shouting, ‘Roberts, you prick!’ almost as if I was saying, ‘Come on—eject me!’ You can get banned for using language like that now.” Reflecting on half a century spent following the team through hell, high water, and every other obstacle that history has thrown at him, he admitted, “That might be my only way out.”
Worse was to come. In the other play-off game, local rivals Birmingham emerged triumphant, while West Bromwich Albion, too, had a successful season. “Seeeething,” Plant hissed when it was all over. “That’s how I’ve been these past few weeks.” Of course he got over it; soccer fans have a built-in resilience that allow them to forgive all manner of failings, even those committed in the wake of a season that Wolves should have walked. They were ten points clear at the top at one point. They ended up thirteen points behind the eventual leaders, in third.
But there’s always next year, and in May 2003, Wolves did finally make it, beating Sheffield United 3–0 in the play-off final. Plant, of course, was there to watch them, and there too for the adventure that followed, as Wolves mixed it with the big boys for the first time in twenty years.
Five months before that momentous afternoon, however, Plant took his own journey into the unknown. In January 2003, off the road from a tour that had consumed much of the past six months, he and Justin Adams joined the crew of the BBC children’s show Blue Peter on a flight to what was popularly referred to as the most isolated music festival in the world: the Festival au Desert in Essakane, near Timbuktu, Mali.
A celebration of North Africa’s musical heritage, set deep within the desolate splendor of the Sahara Desert, the festival was into its third year, although this was the first in which it received more than cursory attention from the West; aside from Plant, the French band Lo’Jo were also on the bill, with their percussionist Matthieu Rousseau, bassist Nicolas Meslien, and guitarist Skin Tyson lined up to accompany Plant and Adams. Yet his own performance was not even close to the forefront of Plant’s mind or imagination. The Sahara, the most breathtaking backdrop to any concert he had ever played or attended, and the music of its people, the most haunting, personal sound he’d ever heard, swept all of his own thoughts out of his mind.
Plant was mesmerized—so much so that he returned home obsessed with the idea of relating all he experienced there in the form of his next album. Timbuktu had exposed him to some of the most captivating, vibrant, and affirming music he had ever experienced. In every sense of that word. Music that affected his every sense, every thought, every dream. And that was the sensation and the effect that he and Adams were now working to combine with their own music. Some of it was their own variation on remembered themes, some borrowed directly from rhythms and patterns that he had encountered in Africa. All, however, would be imposed onto and into his rock ’n’ roll, to create a fusion that, he confessed to writer Barney Hoskyns in Tracks magazine, left him “a little lost for words.”
Home was now a farm close to the favorite vacation spot of his childhood, the town of Machynlleth in Snowdonia. It was close, too, to Bron-Yr-Aur, the cottage that alchemized Led Zeppelin III, and it was there that this new project was breeding and brooding. “It’s a beautiful place,” he assured Hoskyns, and the atmosphere that it engendered had certainly proven conducive to the music. A new album, he was sure, would be released the following year. In the meantime, to follow the success of Dreamland and pave the way for the new sounds, at least in titular terms, there was Sixty Six to Timbuktu, a two-CD selection that was half conceived as a journey through what he considered the best of his solo career, and half as a stamp collection filled with gems and rarities. “There was so much stuff of mine that had never seen the light of day. If anyone were to say to me, ‘Well, your solo career has been a bit patchy, and you’ve been a bit schizoid with the way it’s danced around,’ I would say, ‘Absolutely so, and merrily so.’”
He likened himself to a cultural dervish, simply whirling from place to place, a New York punk rocker one week, an Arthur Alexander tribute the next; Africa in one breath, Ibiza in another. And that is the impression that he wanted people to take from the new CD, because it’s the impression that he himself took. “I know that historically, and in quality of material, there’s no way I could ever touch the legacy of Led Zep. However, I am having a good time with my life, and these are the sorts of things that I think were quite a hoot.”
Early singles, Band of Joy demos, odd collaborations, outtakes, and oddities—Sixty Six to Timbuktu then ended in Timbuktu itself, with a soaring “Win My Train Fare Home,” recorded live at the festival. The new album, meanwhile, continued to gestate, taking on the stately shape that would emerge as 2005’s Mighty Rearranger. And already, Plant was looking even further ahead.
His investigation of his new-found fascination with bluegrass received a major fillip when he headed off on vacation, hiring a car and traveling through the regions that called the music home with a pile of CDs to keep him company. So when he received a call from the music cable network VH1, inviting him to appear on CMT Crossroads, he agreed . . .
on one condition.
Plant was no stranger to VH1. Back in June 2002, he appeared on the network’s Storytellers program, an hour-long concert in which performers interspersed a set of favorite songs with stories about each song. Ray Davies and David Bowie were among the artists who had previously turned in excellent installments, and Plant’s contribution matched either of them. CMT Crossroads was a very different proposition. Aired on VH1’s country music affiliate, it offered the opportunity for top country stars to perform alongside rock ’n’ rollers—sometimes to devastatingly hybrid effect, other times to mute embarrassment—and when Plant’s involvement was first announced, more than a few outsiders shuddered and considered this the most poorly schemed-out proposal yet. Particularly when his collaborator was named. It was Alison Krauss.
Their first conversation was not promising. Plant called, and was surprised at how quiet she was, even as he waxed rapturously about her music and his hopes. What he didn’t realize was that she was putting her three-year-old son to bed, lying alongside him as quiet as she could be. Which is difficult when you have a rock god ranting eighteen-to-the-dozen in your ear. “Alison wasn’t really saying anything and I thought, ‘Fucking hell, she’s got those Quaaludes I’ve been looking for!’” Plant laughed later, in Q magazine. “I’ve been married before, so I know what it’s like to have a woman mumbling at me.” Even when he suggested she write down his phone number, Krauss demurred. She didn’t have a pen, she told him, and she couldn’t get up to find one.
Plant persevered, however, and once she told him the reasons for her silence, he knew he’d learned his first lesson. Never call her at bedtime. Because the rest of the time, she was as excited at the proposal as he was, and when he suggested they think about making a record together, she leapt aboard that notion too.
On November 3, 2004, with Plant and Justin Adams intending to fly to Cleveland to appear at a tribute to Lead Belly at the Severance Hall, Krauss agreed to appear alongside them to perform “In the Pines” (a song granted a fresh lease on life a decade previous, when Nirvana included it in the Unplugged performance) before they both took the stage with Los Lobos for “Pretty Little Girl with the Red Dress On.” Plant and Adams alone performed “Alabama Bound”; he and Los Lobos aired “Gallows Pole.” But it was his union with Krauss that made the greatest impression on him. “It was an amazing night,” he recalled for the BBC documentary By Myself. “I’m stood next to a beautiful woman who can sing like an angel and knows exactly what she wants. I thought, ‘That’s got to come back again.’”
Other witnesses agreed. “The ex-Led Zeppelin frontman was at the center of some of the evening’s greatest moments,” declared the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s review the following day, while Plant’s own emotions surrounding the event were made very clear as he stood onstage, surveying the two thousand or so souls in attendance: “This is a great way of saying some kind of protracted thank you for all those great songs.”