(1981)
Leaving home.
It is a recurring motif in Robert Plant’s life: leaving home or, at least, leaving the past behind him, fractures that sometimes only become apparent with hindsight but that are resolute regardless.
By the time the Honeydrippers came off the road, the news that Led Zeppelin had irrevocably split was already six months old, a terse statement delivered on December 4, 1980, following the band’s first-ever meeting as a Bonhamless trio at the Savoy Hotel in London. “We wish it to be known that the loss of our dear friend and the deep respect we have for his family, together with deep sense of undivided harmony felt by ourselves and our manager, have led us to decide that we could not continue as we were.”
For the optimists among the band’s following, this was open-ended enough to suggest that the surviving trio could carry on if they wanted to. Maybe not as Led Zeppelin (and certainly not as XYZ). But they could.
It quickly became apparent, however, that they wouldn’t.
With the Honeydrippers now in abeyance, Plant and guitarist Robbie Blunt alone returned to the studio at Jennings Farm to work up what would become the singer’s official return to action. His mojo, as they say, had risen again: the Honeydrippers tour had reawakened his love of playing music, and now he was rekindling his love of making it.
The radio was constantly playing, tuned to the BBC’s Radio One and pumping out the records that would define 1981. The Specials’ “Ghost Town,” an eerie soundtrack to the urban riots that turned so many English cities, including nearby Birmingham, into virtual no-go areas for a few weeks that summer. The dying breath of the old punk hierarchy, as the Clash and the Jam turned to tunes far removed from the raw adrenaline of their earliest recordings. And a new sound, synthesizers bleeping and burbling their way out of what, during Plant’s own apprenticeship in the rites of rock ’n’ roll, had seemed nothing more than a dead-end novelty, the supplanting of musicians with electronics and machines.
Fueled by influences that the average over-thirty might never have heard of, encouraged by a sudden and dramatic crash in the cost of synthesizers and drum machines, the New Romantics were suddenly headline news. Bands that in many cases could scarcely even be called a band: one voice, one machine, and a seemingly endless succession of piping keyboard confections whose innate pop sensibilities were only amplified by their makers’ penchant for ambitious haircuts and performance art. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. A Flock of Seagulls. Soft Cell.
Of course Plant had no intention of traveling down the same musical paths as them. With the best will in the world, he was scarcely going to butt heads with the new darlings of the teenybop world, even if he was once spotted checking out local boys Duran Duran when they played a Birmingham club one night. But he picked up a Roland drum machine, and with Blunt’s guitar raw beside him, he began picking at the bones of some fresh song ideas.
It wasn’t going to be easy. He and Plant knew one another inside out, an instinctive understanding that even the best intentioned newcomer could not hope to equal. Even when their songwriting process had been interrupted by drugs and sundry other distractions, and relations between Plant and Page became “a bit twitchy,” as Plant described it to Q magazine in 1988, it remained a comfortable place. The pair understood each other. “To start again with anyone else was a very, very odd feeling.”
But it was a feeling Plant welcomed, the sound of a door being closed behind him as he stepped into a new room. The sound of leaving home, which he amplified with the insistence that anything that even suggested Led Zeppelin should be thrown out of the window. Even his vocals were placed under the fiercest scrutiny. His voice, of course, was his voice, and there wasn’t much he could do to change that. But there was still a handful of trademarks that were indelibly associated with the past—the power-yelp that reviewers liked to describe as a “banshee-like wail,” for example. With all but the most essential exceptions, that sound was banished from the room.
Plant wanted to begin again. Newly shorn hair gave him a very different appearance from the Valhalla-bound warrior of recent renown, and his listening habits reinforced the break. He even told Q magazine’s Tom Hibbert, “I . . . hadn’t played or listened to a Zeppelin record for two years,” and admitted that the prohibition would have lasted even longer if his daughter’s boyfriend hadn’t riled him up one day, insisting that there was an error in “Black Dog”—“a bar of 5/4 in the middle of some 4/4. . . . I pulled the record out and plonked it on. I said, ‘Listen, you little runt, that’s no mistake.’”
The pair worked on, with LeFevre sitting in to add his own thoughts and notions to the percolating brew, and Plant was ready to begin embellishing their skeletons by introducing a Moog Synthesizer to the brew. Or so he said. But he returned from his shopping trip with a keyboard player too.
Gerald “Jezz” Woodroffe was one more in that seemingly bottomless supply of Birmingham musicians to whom Plant always seemed to gravitate. The son of a 1940s-era jazz musician, back in 1975, he’d toured the world with Black Sabbath as onstage keyboard player on their Sabotage tour, and he was on hand for their Technical Ecstasy album too. Now he was invited out to Jennings Farm, to the home studio that Plant had recently named Palomino for daughter Carmen’s horse that was stabled next door, and he swiftly found himself slipping into place.
Plant, he told Martin Popoff of Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles in 2004, was leading “a kind of spiritual quest,” working to find a way out of the Zeppelinesque pastures that he knew critics and fans alike would be expecting, yet without abandoning the personal musical principles that had, of course, been so much a part of that band’s output. In other words, he needed to continue sounding like Robert Plant, without falling back on the sound that Robert Plant was known for. And “the nucleus of all of that,” Woodroffe explained, “was Robbie and me and Robert. And it was a very special time. We were very close and we were having the most fabulous fun.”
Again, the specter of past Paul McCartney drifts unbidden into the room, working up his music in a barnyard studio while his wife and children, family and friends, float in and out. Plant worked in similar surroundings, watched by his son Logan Romero, getting on for three years old; his daughter Carmen Jane, now fifteen; and a new face, a neighbor, Jason Bonham, also fifteen and already a remarkable chip off the paternal block. Bonham had been playing drums since he was four, and at ten he was filmed for Zeppelin’s movie, The Song Remains the Same, playing away on a scaled-down drum kit. Now he was replacing the Roland machine, rolling in after class each day on the back of a school friend’s scooter.
Not that the drum machine sat idle. One of the earliest songs Plant wrote, and then completed with his “band,” was a tribute to Jason’s father that he was adamant would be as far from the drummer’s public image as possible. Where Bonham played frenetic, a force of nature, an unstoppable, pile-driving leviathan, “Fat Lip” was guided by the ruthless syncopation of technology.
Other new songs, however, reached for the most organic origins, a rushing rumble that might have been spread across a mere eight numbers but nevertheless felt as though every step moved another mile from the waiting world’s preconceptions. Because, Plant knew, even those folk whom he considered his closest allies in the music business, Peter Grant, Ahmet Ertegun, and Atlantic’s London chief Phil Carson, weren’t at all certain whether they approved of what he had to offer, even after they heard the finished album. He didn’t simply have to convince the public. He had to convince his own people.
The demos had been taken as far as they could go. It was time to start recording in earnest, and Plant began gathering a fresh coterie of players around the nucleus of Blunt, Woodroffe, and himself. An old friend, Andy Sylvester, was in the picture for a short time, but by the time the party moved to Rockfield Studios, a live-in setup parked within the green of Monmouth in Wales, Cozy Powell had been recruited to the drum seat, while the bass was handed to Paul Martinez, a gloriously rugged-looking player whose career dated back to the mid-1960s and a stint with the Downliners Sect.
A couple of years with Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera led Martinez to a flash of notoriety when Fleetwood Mac’s management hired them to tour America under the name of Fleetwood Mac, after falling out with the real thing. Horrified headlines and legal action followed, and the group returned to the UK with a new name, Stretch, promptly scoring a massive hit with the song they dedicated to Mick Fleetwood, the caustic “Why Did You Do It.”
Stretch broke up, and session work consumed much of Martinez’s late 1970s, a period that included a stint through the very last days of a band whose first steps had been witnessed by Robert Plant himself.
Late in 1976, while Zeppelin were rehearsing at the Cabin, a studio space in West London’s Fulham neighborhood, in preparation for their next American tour, Plant’s attention was caught by the sound of a band playing in the smaller space downstairs. The Adverts, he’d already surmised, were one of the groups pioneering the punk rock movement that was just getting traction on the national media, but which sounded to him more like a throwback to the frenzied adrenaline that he’d started out with. He and Jimmy Page walked down the corridor, stuck their heads round the door, and when nobody told them to fuck off out again, stepped inside to listen to them play.
Much to the Adverts’ surprise.
“I like to see new bands, see what they’re doing, how good they are,” Plant explained later. And a few weeks after that, after catching another punk band, the Damned, in concert, he laughed when he was asked by New Musical Express what their performance reminded him of: “You ask me if it reminds me of when we started out, but it doesn’t. It reminds me of when we were rehearsing this afternoon.”
Three years later, the Adverts were on the verge of collapsing, might already have done so had they not had a new album and a British tour to complete in late 1979. Drummer and guitarist-less, vocalist TV Smith cast around for replacements, and recruited both Paul Martinez (switching from his natural bass for the occasion) and Martinez’s brother Rick. Now Paul was on his way to Rockfield, as Plant was putting the finishing touches to his band.
Cozy Powell’s recruitment to the line-up was never intended as a permanent relationship; “I just went along to see how things were going, and they asked me to play a few tunes,” Powell explained in a 1994 interview. In fact, unreleased tapes from the Rockfield sessions contain alternate and rough takes of no less than five of the songs that would ultimately appear on the finished LP, including the B-side “Far Post,” “Mystery Title,” “Worse Than Detroit,” “Like I’ve Never Been Gone,” and “Slow Dancer,” plus a number of other jams. Powell had not been recruited merely to play, however. He was brought in to provide another familiar face.
Another Birmingham boy, Powell had been friends with Plant for a long time, and that October, early into the album’s gestation, the pair appeared together on Tiswas, a gloriously anarchic Saturday morning kids’ TV show, in which a Phantom Flan Flinger flung flans at guests and audience alike, a dog named Spit spat, and positively nobody was immune from abuse and assault.
Plant arrived as hostess Sally James was reminding viewers of the questions posed in the previous week’s competition, one of whom demanded to know, “What was Led Zeppelin called before they became Led Zeppelin?”
Speaking through a mouthful of breakfast cereal and complaining about the early hour, Plant feigned a moment of memory loss before getting the answer right the first time. He read the names and addresses of the winning competitors and then sat quietly munching his cereal until it was time for the first game of the day: a round of Pass the Pie, which pitted him against Cozy Powell and two little girls who may have looked a mere eight or nine years old, but one of whom was really, according to the voiceover, 146 and renowned as the first woman ever to climb “Everest the hard way . . . up the inside.” Plant, meanwhile, was introduced as “a former farmer who used to punch cows. But he gave it up because the cows started punching back.”
It was a simple game, a little like Pass the Parcel only with a pie. The music plays and the competitors pass the pie between themselves. The music stops, and the pie is thrust into the face of the next person in the line. Powell got the first taste and was eliminated from the game; Plant got the second. The 146-year-old mountaineer eventually won the game.
As for what had brought the pair of them together in the first place, Powell was just about to tell all to Sally James when Plant—all traces of his pie face now removed—reappeared, and flanned him in the face again to keep him from finishing his sentence. Neither was Plant intending to be any more revealing about his future plans, preferring instead to advertise one of his other fascinations.
“I’m playing right wing for one of the most fantastic [soccer] teams in the Kidderminster League,” he declared, at which point the Phantom Flinger emerged and flanned him. The sight of Robert Plant sitting quietly—face, hair, and clothes spattered with shaving cream—is one that lived with his fans for a long time.
“Good-pie to Robert,” Sally James smiled.
Goodbye, too, to Cozy Powell, whose departure from the sessions appears to have been as amicable as his arrival. In his stead, Plant turned to Bad Company’s Simon Kirke, as much out of love of his playing as for the convenience of Kirke’s contractual standing—Bad Company were signed to Zeppelin’s own Swan Song label. For whatever reason, though, things just didn’t work out, and finally another of the names put forward on the media’s wish list of replacements for John Bonham was called in. Genesis’s Phil Collins apparently turned up at the studio, played through the entire album in under three days, and then went home again. Six of his performances would make the finished album, only two of Cozy Powell’s.
Once management and record companies became involved in the process, and such touchy areas as publishing rights became a bone of contention among Plant’s advisors, the mood of the sessions began to deflate. Hitherto, Plant ran the band on the most democratic lines he could, turning to Blunt and Woodroffe for basic arrangements, then conspiring to add his own vocals when the band was down at the pub. It kept things fresh, but it also allowed him to try out some of his own ideas without anybody there to witness any failures. But then came time to play the music to the outside world: that aforementioned cabal of his closest industry confidantes, not one of whom saw its merits.
For Phil Carson, Plant was selling himself short by so wholly abandoning the sound for which he was known—an insistence that surprisingly overlooked the fact that it was very hard to say what a typical Led Zeppelin song sounded like.
For Peter Grant, the notion of Plant getting together with a bunch of, for the most part, no-name friends was equally absurd. As Page had proven when he tried tempting Plant with XYZ, the singer could have his pick of superstar bandmates, and the emergence on the American circuit of acts like Asia, whose 1981 launch was greeted with rabid sales in the AOR market, had left every mainstream rock manager eyeing his charges and wondering which could be press-ganged into a similar concern. Or so Grant later confessed: “I did think Robert should have come back big, and his next few albums proved that because they were nowhere near as successful as they should have been. But he had this idea in his head of starting out from scratch, or as close to scratch as he could, and it was something that he and I were never going to see eye to eye on.”
Plant and Grant had often been at loggerheads in the past, the singer painfully aware that when it came to discussing Led Zeppelin’s accomplishments, management habitually credited them to Jimmy Page; Grant and the guitarist had, after all, been close ever since Page began working for producer Mickie Most, Grant’s then-employer, back in the mid-1960s. Together since that time, they had developed a friendship and an understanding that was always going to place Page in the spotlight to the exclusion of any other musical partners.
Plant, on the other hand, believed there was more to Zeppelin’s success than the presence of a gifted guitarist. It was Grant’s involvement in the XYZ project that had proved the final nail in that idea’s coffin, regardless of the nature of the music. No way would Plant have acceded to Grant handling the new band’s career, and while their rift never became public—either before or after Zeppelin’s demise, or even following the manager’s death on November 21, 1995—it was always simmering below the surface. When Grant stepped up to offer his own opinions on Plant’s new music, the singer simply shrugged them off.
Plant’s former bandmates were no more supportive, however, with John Paul Jones delivering the supremely sniffy verdict: “I thought you could have done something a little bit better than that, old chap.” Plant thanked him for his opinion and left. With Jones, too, Plant realized, his status was as low as it could be. In 1987 he told Guitar World’s Steven Rosen, “Yet again, I was just the singer of the songs.” Because he had always been backed by virtuoso musicians, the assumption was that he could not exist without them.
Plant was out to prove that he could. With “Burning Down One Side,” a Stonesy groove colliding with an armored assault and a Blunt guitar solo as sharp as pins. With “Moonlight in Samosa,” a yearning ballad that still rates among his most heartfelt performances ever. With the tripwire danceability of “Pledge Pin,” riding Raphael Ravenscroft’s sultry sax; with the haunted, harp-ridden barrage of “Worse Than Detroit,” a song that rewrote Chuck Berry’s “Memphis” with laughing intent; and with the near-anthemic “Like I’ve Never Been Gone,” a song you could say rolled the years back a shade, but only to remind us what a great voice for bluesy laments Plant has always possessed. A straight line drawn between “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” and “Like I’ve Never Been Gone” would need no other common ground than the passion of Plant’s performance.
The seven-minute epic “Slow Dancer,” too, if one was so disposed, could be said to look back a little, a reminder of the Arabic motifs that inspired “Kashmir” (from Zeppelin’s sixth album, Physical Graffiti) but delving deeper into those inspirations by returning to a tape Plant had picked up while holidaying in Morocco in 1972, veteran Egyptian singer Umm Kalthum’s “Leylet Hob” (Night of Love). With Blunt weaving exquisite, expressive shapes around that song’s swirling guitar riff, Plant certainly did nod back to past fascinations, but only to state that they remained current ones as well.
True, the album did not maintain its standards throughout, particularly as the needle tracked through the middle of what, in those vinyl days, was called side two. But the closing “Mystery Title” dispelled any doubts, another funky mover that shook and shattered across five-minutes-plus of hyperactivity and brought Pictures at Eleven to a most satisfactory halt.
Yet it was not going to be an easy journey, getting the music out to Plant’s audience. Almost immediately after that first meeting, Grant set about retaliating against Plant’s stubbornness by recommending that Swan Song, to whom the singer was still contracted, hold back on even releasing the record. It was a stance that Phil Carson, too, threw his weight behind.
Plant was in no mood to back down though, and if the businessmen opposed him, other musicians immediately understood where he was coming from. (Phil Collins, himself no stranger to taking an established band name and completely subverting its musical direction as he helmed Genesis’s shift from extended prog epics to sharp pop electro, was just one of those who were adamant that Plant had long since earned the right to dictate his own career.) And they were the ones that Plant listened to.
There would need to be compromise. Plant’s original intention of releasing the album under an anonymous band name, as opposed to his own, was the first casualty. A democratic financial arrangement with co-conspirators Blunt and Woodroffe, too, was abandoned. But so were the last threads binding Plant to Led Zeppelin, as Peter Grant was eased out of the managerial picture, and Pictures at Eleven, as Plant titled his solo debut, made its way onto the schedule for a June 1982 release. To Plant’s supreme gratification, and the certain discomfort of those self-appointed experts ranged against him, it marched into the Top 5 on both sides of the Atlantic and earned a boatload of rave reviews, most of them congratulating Plant for doing the one thing that his label begged him not to.
It didn’t sound like Led Zeppelin.
For a few months after its release, visitors to Jennings Farm were greeted by framed copies of the best reviews, hung around the walls to remind Plant of his triumph. And assailed, when Plant had the record player on, by the music that he’d established as the touchstone for all that he wanted to accomplish in his reborn career. The music of his teens. Without necessarily playing the blues, he was a bluesman again.