Liverpool started the ball rolling.
Now the Midlands is ready to take over.
DENNIS DETHERIDGE IN THE FIRST ISSUE OF
MIDLAND BEAT, OCTOBER 1963
ROBERT PLANT I feel an affinity with the Black Country. I’m fascinated by local history and I love the humour. It’s very locked into the spirit of the region, that little circle to the west of Birmingham.
BARNABY SNOW (director of documentary film about the Black Country) They have a certain cultural identity in the Black Country, but they don’t like to blow their own trumpet about it. They see themselves as people who were at the core of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, because it’s all based on a coal seam that was mined out in the nineteenth century. They regard themselves as really more of a rural community that became industrialised but never became like Birmingham, which they don’t like to be confused with.
MAC POOLE (Midlands drummer and friend of John Bonham’s) The Black Country is where all the shit was. If I didn’t start my dinner by a particular time, the plate would bounce across the table because of the stampings not far away. There were places we would walk past as kids and we wouldn’t look in because we thought the devil was there – great big ovens with all this fire, blokes handling great big lumps of steel and chucking them under hammers. And this was going on twenty-four hours a day. Furnaces everywhere, all open, white molten metal, men with no teeth in leather aprons. At thirty-five they looked like they were sixty.
ANDREW HEWKIN (painter and friend of Plant’s) There was an old local joke about your parents being in the iron and steel industry: “My mother irons, my father steals.”
GLENN HUGHES (singer and bassist with Trapeze, Deep Purple and Black Country Communion) In the Midlands you had half of Zeppelin, a couple of guys in Purple, Judas Priest, Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne. I really think there was a defining Black Country sound, a Brummie Midlands sound, whether it’s Winwood, Plant, myself, Rob Halford as singers, or Bonham as a definitive industrial massive-sounding drummer with a bricklayer vibe going on.
TREVOR BURTON (rhythm guitarist in the Move) Birmingham was a different place back then. It was a very industrial city and we were pretty tough people. You were factory fodder. And an amazing load of bands came out of that. It was a way out of going into a factory. I was making £15 a week, and that was twice as much as my dad was making in a factory.
BILL BONHAM (organist in Robert Plant’s pre-Zeppelin band Obs-Tweedle) In the Midlands, a lot of people couldn’t climb out of it because all we had to play there were the pubs. The musicianship was incredible. We were a really tight little society. But you still had to go down to London and pay to play or play for nothing. It was very hard to get people to come up and listen to you.
NICK KENT Look at Manchester in the Sixties and you’ve got Herman’s Hermits and the Hollies. You look at Birmingham and you’ve got Steve Winwood, Denny Laine, the Moody Blues and so many more. If you’d seen the Move in 1967, they were one of the best groups that ever existed. Ironically, the band probably most identified with Birmingham – as the supposed birthplace of heavy metal – was Black Sabbath, the least musically talented of all of them.
Jim Simpson, unofficial godfather of Brum Beat, Birmingham, April 2010 (Art Sperl)
JIM SIMPSON (founder of Big Bear Records and veteran of Birmingham music scene) People don’t remember what came out of this place. Maybe they could scoot down to London too quickly. We were always told that London knew best, so quite a few bands went down there and made very cheesy records. Baby Birmingham hasn’t proved the most elegant place to live. Musicians who were successful here very quickly seemed to get out of town. But the fact is we produced a lot of really great players and bands, more than our fair share. The bands we had were tough and rough, and they didn’t aim at the charts as neatly as those silly Liverpudlians with fringey haircuts and stupid collars on their jackets. There’s a kind of false modesty in this part of the world: “Let’s go on stage and play some more rubbish.” Secretly we expect somebody to go, “No, it’s great!” But nobody ever does.
ROY WILLIAMS (engineer for Robert Plant) It’s the accent. There’s no getting around that. It’s not as simple as that, but it’s a big part of it.
RAY THOMAS (flautist and singer in the Moody Blues) There were about two hundred and fifty groups. Half thought they were Cliff and the Shadows and the other half thought they were the Beatles.
TONY IOMMI (guitarist in Black Sabbath) You’d see all the local bands at Alex’s pie stand, the Fleur de Lys. There’d be five or six bands with all their equipment, and you’d all end up chatting at two o’clock in the morning.
DAVE HILL (guitarist with Slade) There was always a Johnny and the Somebodies kind of group. Or it was the Montanas or the Californians, who were like the Beach Boys of Wolverhampton.
GLENN HUGHES There were so many bands breaking out of the cabaret circuit, playing the working men’s clubs up and down the country, especially in the north and north-east, five sets a night. The Montanas were the biggest band in the Midlands that had a Top Fifty hit in America. To me, they were like the first real local pop stars, the singer with the dark glasses. That whole Midlands scene was five sets a night, playing whatever was in the charts.
MAC POOLE The first band that kicked through the dust clouds was the Applejacks in 1964. And they did it by pure fluke, diverting the record company from going to see other bands and instead going to Solihull Civic Centre to see them. One day Al Jackson of the Applejacks is cutting our hair in Birmingham and he says they’ve got a record deal. Five heads all turned round and went, “I guess you won’t be cutting hair much longer.”
JIM SIMPSON There must have been three or four hundred pubs in the area that put music on. The lower-level gigs were in the suburbs, where you cut your teeth, but there were four or five big ones like the Queen’s Head in Erdlington. If you weren’t doing doubles on Saturdays, your agent wasn’t doing his job right. There were five just on the Ma Regan circuit, and they’d probably use six bands on a night and certainly four. If you played two of them on one night, you got £25.
JOHN CRUTCHLEY (guitarist with Plant’s pre-Zeppelin band Listen) Ma Regan looked after the Handsworth Plaza, the Oldhill Plaza, the Ritz at King’s Heath, and later the Brum Cavern, which was the last one. If you passed the audition you could turn professional, because you were playing four to five nights a week at three different venues. It was nice and steady work. You’d start off at, say, the Handsworth Plaza, then go to the Ritz at King’s Heath, and finally nip over to Oldhill after that. All the bands loved Oldhill, because it had a revolving stage and that gave you a little more time to set up your equipment.
TONY IOMMI On the Ma Regan circuit you very rarely came up with your own stuff. If you started playing something nobody knew, you were out very quickly.
DAVE HILL I remember turning professional and growing my hair long and doing the Regan circuit. We were semi-professional and then we turned professional. When you packed up your job you had to go further afield than Wolverhampton. You had to go up north and down south on the odd occasion – same as the Beatles. They went to Germany, and we went there and all.
ROBBIE BLUNT (Kidderminster guitarist and Plant side man in the Eighties) Everybody wanted to be in a band. If you had a drum kit you were automatically in, even if you couldn’t play. Every village hall had a band playing in it. It was when the Mod thing started, which was its own musical revolution, and we all got into the blues.
DAVE PEGG (bass player with Fairport Convention) The Shadows were gods and we all learnt to play from listening to their records, but the transition from the Shadows to, say, Buddy Guy happened very quickly. All of a sudden you didn’t play any of that shit any more. All of a sudden you were fifteen and you were into R&B and the blues and that was it. It happened so quickly.
Rufus Thomas – and Robert Plant’s Listen – at Ma Regan’s Ritz Dance and Social Club, July 1966 (Courtesy of John Crutchley)
ROBERT PLANT With the blues, you could actually express yourself rather than just copy; you could get your piece in there. Only when I began singing blues was I able to use the medium to express what was inside me, my hopes and my fears.
ED BICKNELL (former manager of Dire Straits) Robert has the greatest knowledge of black blues of any white person I’ve ever met. I once took part in a blues quiz with him that culminated in a competition to come up with the name of the archetypal blues singer, and he came up with “Blind Peg-Leg Loser”. At which point we decided to retire for the night.
ROBERT PLANT My love was always that whole “Devil Got My Woman” thing – the accidental blues heroes. For me, the way to start the day is to listen to Son House with no guidance, no nothing at all.
ROY WILLIAMS Robert’s first gig was playing washboard with Perry Foster in the Delta Blues Band.
KEVYN GAMMOND (guitarist in Plant’s pre-Zeppelin group the Band of Joy) Perry was a local guy. He would chauffeur Howlin’ Wolf around and take him to a tailor’s like Burton’s and say, “Mr Burnett would like a new shirt,” and they could never find a collar big enough.
ROBERT PLANT Perry came from not far away, and he was an incredible eight-string guitarist. Instead of playing it the normal way, he used to play it like Big Joe Williams with it half on his lap. He was a horrible bloke at times but he was a real white blues man, and when I was fifteen I immediately fell under his spell. My dad used to drop me off at the Seven Stars in Stourbridge and we used to wail away on “Got My Mojo Working”. That was really the initiation. I was at school at the time, and it was really hard to combine the two and keep a compatible relationship with schoolmasters and parents at the same time as doing what I really wanted to do.
PHIL CARSON (head of Atlantic Records in the UK) Sorry to blow this for you, Robert – and he certainly is a man of the people – but his father was a civil engineer and they lived in a nice house.
KEVYN GAMMOND Robert’s dad was a lovely man, but he wasn’t happy about his son not going down the conventional career path.
ANDREW HEWKIN We used to go to parties at Stourbridge Arts College with the Winwood brothers and all that lot. There was always this big bloke in the corner with a harmonica about two inches long playing the blues. We would say, “Who is he? All he does is sit in the corner and play the harmonica.” He had the corkscrew hair and you couldn’t see his face. In the Midlands there was definitely a lack of good-looking guys, so if you were reasonably good-looking you did all right. Robert fell into that category, as did all the guys that ended up in Traffic. There were all these bands playing at Stourbridge Town Hall – five shillings on a Wednesday night – and Robert was itching to join one of them. All this stuff was coming over from America. It was mainly soul, but Robert was seriously into the blues.
PAUL LOCKEY (bassist in Plant’s pre-Zep Band of Joy) Robert, you know, even in those days, eighteen, nineteen years old, people were taken aback. He’d walk into a party and all the women would be just standing there going, “Ahhh.” They were always really taken with Robert – even my wife! All the girls were just fascinated and the guys were too, in a different sort of way.
ROY WILLIAMS Nobody particularly liked him round here. It was, “That bloody Planty, cocky bastard.” He was very up-there and witty, but also very grounded. If he hadn’t been that kind of character, he wouldn’t have been able to grab hold of his gig with Zeppelin.
ANDREW HEWKIN I took a room at 1 Hill Road, Lye, and then Robert took a room there. He just sort of hung around with everybody at Stourbridge Art College. I don’t know what he did for work. Nobody ever asked him; nobody ever asked anybody anything.
KEVYN GAMMOND Fresh ideas and new approaches happened even in little towns like Kidderminster and Stourbridge, all within a sort of ten-to-fifteen mile radius. Roger LaVern was the keyboard player on “Telstar” but everyone else was a nameless nobody. He was the only one who’d ever made it from Kiddy.
JOHN COMBE (Kidderminster music historian) Robert used to have a scooter and he used to hang around with the Mods in Stourbridge.
ROBBIE BLUNT One of the greatest things round here was the Thursday night “Big Beat Sessions” gigs at Kidderminster Town Hall. You had all the biggest bands coming through, and my dad used to drop me off with five bob.
SATEVE MARRIOTT (lead singer with the Small Faces) Percy Plant was a big fan. He used to come to the gigs whenever we played in Kidderminster or Stourbridge. He was always saying he was going to get this group together. He was another nuisance. He kept coming into the dressing room, just another little Mod kid. We used to say, “That kid’s here again.”
ROBERT PLANT In England there was much more of a blue-eyed soul thing than there was in America. There was Rod Stewart, Steve Marriott. Stevie Winwood was amazing, and coming from the same area as me he was probably the most eloquent and stylish and tasteful of all of us.
DAVE PEGG It was the Spencer Davis Group, really, that did it, because they had so many hits. You couldn’t see Steve Winwood without going “Wow!”
TONY SECUNDA (manager of the Move and the Moody Blues) You knew that group was going to make it, the first time you saw them. Everyone knew it. So when they did, there was an entire city-full of earwigs walking round saying “Told you so” to each other.
DAVE PEGG It was very difficult to be a band that could make it in Birmingham. The Move did it, for sure, and the Spencer Davis Group. The Spencer Davis Group had Steve’s unique talent, so it was only a matter of time before somebody of that age cracked it, but the Move had the benefit of Tony Secunda. Most of the other Midlands groups didn’t really happen, so you’d get somebody together with a band and then he’d go because he got a chance of playing with a big London group.
BILL BONHAM If Robert had moved down to London, I think it would have happened for him earlier. But his parents were dead against him doing music and refused to help him in any way. So he had no money and no support system and he had to stay with people.
JOHN COMBE The famous story is that Robert had a huge bust-up with his mum and dad and he slept in a transit van that he parked in a lay-by here in Kidderminster.
ROBERT PLANT Blues gave me my first band titles – my first band was the Black Snake Moan, after Blind Lemon Jefferson, and the second was the Crawling King Snakes after a brilliant John Lee Hooker track. [The King Snakes] … was a little bit more of the commercial sound then – a bit more “Daddy Rolling Stone” and hopping about the stage with the mic stand in the air.
ROBBIE BLUNT I was watching Fireball-XL5 on the TV, having me beans on toast, and Robert came and dragged me off to do a gig up at one of the Ma Regan venues. It may have been the Crawling King Snakes. The usual guitarist was a real cool dude called Maverick, but he used to go missing. I really didn’t know what I was doing. Robert said, “Just look good and move about a bit.”
ROBERT PLANT I was sixteen years old and singing at the Plaza Ballroom in Oldhill. There was a guy with quite an arrogant air to himself, very cocky, standing watching me. He said, “You’re pretty good, but you’d be a lot better if you had a drummer like me.” I thought, “Nobody says that sort of thing to me. Don’t they know who I might one day end up being?” That was the first moment that [John Bonham and I] ever communicated at all. We tried it out and he joined the Crawling King Snakes for a while. And it was the beginning of a fantastic exchange of energies between us over the years – not always particularly smooth but always pretty dynamic …
MICK BONHAM (younger brother of John Bonham) Me and John were very much alike. Somebody would only have to look at you or say something wrong and then we wanted to fight the world.
DEBBIE BONHAM (younger sister of John Bonham) John got his influence from Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, because my mum and dad used to play those bands all the time. They loved the Tommy Dorsey band and Glenn Miller and Harry James and Frank Sinatra. And that’s what John used to play to in the shed till the neighbours would come round and start banging on the door to my mum: “Tell him to turn it down!”
ROY CARR He liked those powerhouse jazz drummers. The same with Keith Moon, who was a big fan of Gene Krupa and even used to mimic the way Krupa leaned over his drums when he played. Bonzo wanted to get sounds out of his drums as opposed to just bashing them.
JOHN BONHAM In The Benny Goodman Story, Krupa came right out into the front. He played drums much louder than they’d ever been played before – and much better. People hadn’t taken much notice of drums until Krupa came along.
BILL HARVEY (drummer replaced by Bonham in the Blue Star Trio in late 1962) [John] was very adaptable. On top of that, he was self-taught, which made a heck of a difference because you could pick things up – you didn’t have to rehearse too much. The one thing that marked him out at that stage was his kick-drum technique, which absolutely flabbergasted all of us, the way he could do these triplets with the bass drum. I asked him once how he did it and he said, “Oh no, I’m not gonna tell ya, but I’ll tell you what I have done: I’ve took the leather strap off the bass-drum pedal and I’ve put a bike-chain on instead.” And of course all the bass-drum pedals now are chain-driven. To my mind he was the first one that ever did it.
BILL FORD (bass player with the Senators) At this stage in 1963, the Senators still had an unreliable drummer and were let down by him on a number of occasions. [He] let us down again one night when we had a double gig. [He] played drums on the first set at the first gig at Perry Hall, Bromsgrove. During the break, he shot off in his car to fetch his mate, who he said could play the drums. He came back twenty minutes later with this lad named John Bonham. We started the second half and it was as if someone had stuck rocket fuel in our drinks. We went down a storm and John joined us as our drummer there and then. With this final line-up we played regularly at many of the Birmingham venues and pubs.
JOHN BONHAM (speaking in 1975) We used to have so many clubs we could play around Birmingham in those days. Lots of ballrooms too. All those places have gone to the dogs – or bingo.
ROY CARR There was a certain style of drummer in the Midlands: Bonzo, Bev Bevan, Don Powell, Carl Palmer, Bill Ward – they all seemed to be very aggressive. I mean, Bevan was really a monster drummer.
MAC POOLE As a drummer you were having to get louder to compete with the guitarists turning up with bigger amps. Most of the Midlands drummers were attacking the guitarists, they weren’t sitting back. We were determined to be heard, and it was that attitude John took through Zeppelin to the rest of the world.
BEV BEVAN (drummer with the Move) My first recollection of John was him coming to see me when I was with Denny Laine and the Diplomats back in 1963, and [then] Carl Wayne and the Vikings in 1964, just before we started the Move. I was the loudest drummer in the area at the time.
DENNY LAINE (singer with the Diplomats and the Moody Blues) John used to watch me and the Diplomats at the Wednesbury Youth Centre. Years later, he stayed at my house, and though I couldn’t remember any of the original material the Diplomats did to save my life, he could. We got a bit drunk, and he started singing “Why Cry”, “A Piece of Your Mind” and others we did. He knew all the words and everything.
JIM SIMPSON In Locomotive we called John “Bonnie”, though we may have called him Bonzo as well. He could have walked into any band in the world and felt comfortable. He’d have smiled and said, “Who’s gonna count me in?” He was very calm, nothing would faze him. I had to sack him two or three times. We all loved him, but he was utterly outrageous – or maybe just boisterous. We got banned from several places because of him. He took his shirt off and stood on his drum kit at Frank Freeman’s School of Dancing in Kidderminster. Frank said to me, “You were very good tonight, Jim, but we’re never going to book you again with that drummer.” John could always sense when he was near to getting the bullet, because he would bring things from his mother’s store to cheer the band up – packs of cigarettes or a bottle of whisky. We’d all go, “Oh, we can’t sack him now.”
DAVE PEGG John lived in a caravan in the garden of his parents’ shop, the general store at Astwood Bank. He was always very generous with the Benson and Hedges, which I hope Mrs. Bonham never finds out about.
ROBERT PLANT John was so good, everyone wanted him in their bands. You knew your relationship with John was going to change when he decided to get the drums out of the van to clean them. Because you’d never see him again: “I just wanna clean me drums, mate,” and that would be the end of that – he’d be off with somebody else for a couple of months.
TONY IOMMI He used to be in a different band every other bloody week. We used to play at the Midland Red Club in Birmingham, and he would be in one band. The next week we’d play there again and he’d be in another band.
He had the names of the groups on his drum case, and the last one would be crossed out and the new one written in. He must have had fifteen names on that case.