Robert Plant remains grateful for everything Led Zeppelin brought him – but he’s relieved that he’s long grown out of that phase of his life.
Despite speculation surrounding the band’s 2007 reunion, Plant says it was always going to be a one-off as far as he was concerned, and he’s much happier living a less exposed life in an English village with a population of around 800.
“Tuesday night is bingo night,” Plant tells the Times. “You might win £25. Wednesday is misery corner at the local pub, where all the musicians who never quite made it on the Birmingham scene moan about their lot.”
He adds: “I’ve been a quasi big shot for so long [but] in Worcestershire nobody gives a fuck. The most they say is, ‘All right, Bob – still doing a bit?’ ‘Well, I won five Grammys with Alison Krauss…’ ‘What’s a Grammy?’”
He compares the experience to living in Austin, Texas with Patti Smith in the early 2010s: “We up the street and cars would be crashing into each other.” That, and his passion for English soccer, were among the reasons he left. “Eventually I had to say: ‘Patti, I think Wolves are playing Arsenal on Saturday. I’ll see you soon.’”
Turning to his motivation for leaving the big time in his past, Plant comments: “Someone said, ‘Why does he turn his back on the majesty of Led Zeppelin? Why is Person A representing the power and the glory, while Plant goes to bingo in the Welsh borders?’”
He doesn’t name Jimmy Page, who’s clearly the person he’s referring to, but he continues: “I’m so lucky to have grown into this guy instead of gritting my teeth and trying to keep something going. It felt like the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the king says, ‘One day, lad, all this will be yours.’ And his son says, ‘What, the curtains?’”
Countless larger-than-life fables surround Led Zepellin’s giant era, of which Plant says: “You learned that it was better not to refute any of the stories and just get on with it, because whatever Led Zeppelin was, it was definitely not glamorous.”
He adds: “My life is so much better for having worked with Jimmy Page, but you do have to deal with a very different personality. I know Roger Daltrey pretty well. He’s on the road at the moment, solo, and he’s free. I’ve been free for years.”
One thing that’s been missing from the 78-year-old’s recent output is new music. “I really want to write,” he explains. “But what we have going on around us right now is so vast, with a helplessness about everything and a national sense of panic in America, that my words have nothing to do with anything at all and it would just be trite.
“I want to entertain, sing as well as I can, crack jokes, send myself up and make people feel good. At this time in my life, that’s everything. That and getting out of bed.”
