Robert Plant: A Life Read online

  In 1957, so pronounced was the collective sense of affluence and aspiration that Harold Macmillan, the Conservative prime minister, predicted an unprecedented age of prosperity for the country. “Let us be frank about it,” he said, “most of our people have never had it so good.” The British people agreed and elected Macmillan to a second term of office in October 1959.

  The Plant family embodied the rise of the middle classes in Macmillan’s Britain. As a skilled worker, Robert Plant, Sr. could soon afford to move his wife and son out from West Bromwich to the greener fringes of the Black Country. They came to leafy Hayley Green, a well-heeled suburban enclave located fifteen miles from the center of Birmingham.

  Their new home was at 64 Causey Farm Road, on a wide street of sturdy prewar houses just off the main road between Birmingham and the satellite town of Kidderminster. It was a neighborhood of traditional values and twitching net curtains, populated by white-collar workers. Unlike West Bromwich, it was surrounded by countryside. Farmland was abundant, the Wyre Forest close by and Hayley Green itself backed onto the Clent Hills.

  Situated near the end of Causey Farm Road, number 64 was one of the more modest houses on the street. Built of red brick, it had a small drive and a garage, and from its neat back garden there was an uninterrupted view out to the rolling hills. For the young Plant there would have been many places to go off and explore: those hills, or the woods at the end of the road, or over the stiles and across the fields to the town of Stourbridge, with its bustling high street.

  It was during this period that many of Plant’s lifelong passions were first fired. The Clent Hills and their surrounding towns and villages were the inspiration for the landscape of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the writer of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit having grown up in the area in the 1890s. Plant devoured Tolkien’s books as a child, and time and again in later life would reference the author’s fantastical world in his lyrics.

  In the summer the Plants, like so many other Black Country families of the time, would drive west for their holidays, crossing the border into Wales. They would head for Snowdonia National Park, 823 square miles of rugged uplands in the far north-west of the country. It was an area rich in Celtic folklore and history, and this, together with the wildness of the terrain, captivated the young Plant.

  He was entranced by such Welsh myths as those that swirled around the mountain Cadair Idris, a brooding edifice at the southern edge of Snowdonia near the small market town of Machynlleth, which the Plants would often visit. It was said that the mountain was both the seat of King Arthur’s kingdom and that of the giant Idris, who used it as a place of rest from which he would sit and gaze up at the evening stars. According to legend anyone who sleeps the night on the slopes of Cadair Idris is destined to wake the next morning as either a poet or a madman.

  At Machynlleth Plant learned of the exploits of the man who would become his great folk hero, the Welsh king Owain Glyndŵr. It was in the town that Glyndŵr founded the first Welsh parliament in 1404, after leading an armed rebellion against the occupying English forces of King Henry IV. The uprising was crushed five years later, and Glyndŵr’s wife and two of his daughters were sent to their deaths in the Tower of London. Glyndŵr himself escaped capture, fighting on until his death in 1416.

  But for Plant there would be nothing to match the impact that rock ’n’ roll was to have upon him as a child. Like every other kid who grew up in postwar Britain he would have been aware of an almost suffocating sense of primness and propriety. Children were taught to respect their elders and betters. In both the way they dressed and were expected to behave they were molded to be very much like smaller versions of their parents. Authority was not to be questioned and conformity was the norm.

  The musical landscape of Britain in the ’50s was similarly lacking in generational diversity. Variety shows, the big swing bands and communal dances were popular with old and young alike. As that decade rolled into the next, the country’s clubs heaved to the sounds of trad jazz, making stars of such bandleaders as Chris Barber, Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball, who played music that was as cozy and unthreatening as the social mores of the time. In the United States, however, a cultural firestorm was brewing.

  Elvis Presley, young and full of spunk, released his first recording on the Memphis label Sun Records in the summer of 1954. It was called “That’s All Right,” and it gave birth to a new sound. A bastardization of the traditional blues songs of black African-Americans and the country music of their white counterparts, rock ’n’ roll was loud, brash and impossibly exciting—and it arrived like an earthquake, the tremors from which reverberated across the Atlantic. Behind Elvis came Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent and others, all young men with fire in their bellies and, often as not, a mad, bad glint in their eyes.

  In 1956 the mere act of Elvis swivelling his hips on TV’s Ed Sullivan Show was enough to shock America’s moral guardians. It was also instrumental in opening up the first real generational divide on either side of the Atlantic. Elvis’s gyrations acted as a rallying point for both British and American teenagers, and as an affront to their parents’ sense of moral decency.

  In the English Midlands rock ’n’ roll first arrived in person in the form of Bill Haley. In 1954 Haley, who hailed from Michigan, released one of the first rock ’n’ roll singles, “Rock Around the Clock.” He followed it with an even bigger hit, “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” When, on his first British tour, he arrived at Birmingham Odeon in February 1957 the city’s teenagers queued all around the block for tickets. At the show itself they leaped out of their seats and danced wildly in the aisles. It mattered not one bit that, in the flesh, Haley had none of Elvis’s youthful virility.

  Laurie Hornsby, a music historian from Birmingham, recalls: “The man who was responsible for going down to Southampton docks to meet Haley off the ship was Tony Hall, who was the promotions man for Decca Records in London. He told me that he stood there at the bottom of the ship’s gangplank, and down came this old-age pensioner hanging onto his hair for grim death. Hall thought, ‘My God, I’ve got to sell this to the British teenager.’ But sell it he did.”

  By the time Elvis burst onto the scene Plant was a primary-school boy. Tall for his age, he was blessed with good looks and a pile of wavy, blond hair. He might have been too young to grasp the precise nature of Elvis’s raw sex appeal but he was immediately drawn in by the untamed edge to his voice and the jungle beat of his music. From the age of nine he would hide himself behind the sofa in the front room at 64 Causey Farm Road and mime to Elvis’s records on the radio, a hairbrush taking the place of a microphone.

  He soon progressed to the songs of Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. Each weekend he and his parents would gather around the TV set to watch the variety show Sunday Night at the London Palladium, and it was on this, in the spring of 1958, that the ten-year-old Plant first saw Buddy Holly & the Crickets. That year Holly also came to the Midlands, playing at Wolverhampton’s Gaumont Cinema on March 7 and, three days later, giving an early and later evening performance at Birmingham Town Hall.

  By then Plant had begun to comb his hair into something that approximated Elvis’s and Cochran’s quiffs, much to the chagrin of his parents. He was also digesting the other sound then sweeping the U.K., one that made the act of getting up and making music seem so much more attainable. Its roots lay in the African-American musical culture of the early 20th century—in jazz and blues. In the 1920s jug bands had sprung up in America’s southern states, so called because of their use of jugs and other homemade instruments. This music was revived thirty years later in Britain and given the name “skiffle.”

  Britain’s undisputed King of Skiffle was Lonnie Donegan, a Glaswegian by birth who had begun playing in trad jazz bands in the early ’50s. Having taught himself to play banjo, Donegan formed a skiffle group that used cheap acoustic guitars, a washboard and a tea-chest bass. They performed American folk songs by t
he likes of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. Starting in 1955 with a speeded-up version of Leadbelly’s “Rock Island Line,” Donegan would go on to have twenty-four consecutive Top 30 hits in the U.K., an unbroken run that stretched into the early ’60s.

  Donegan’s success, and the simplicity of his set-up, prompted scores of British kids to form their own skiffle groups. One of these, the Quarrymen, was brought together in Liverpool in the spring of 1957 by the sixteen-year-old John Lennon. For his part, Plant was still too young and green to even contemplate forming a band. But in skiffle, as in rock ’n’ roll, he had located a route back to black America’s folk music, the blues. It was one he would soon follow with the tenacity of a pilgrim.

  The thing that Plant thought about most on the morning of September 10, 1959, however, was not music but how little he liked his new school uniform. There he stood before his admiring mother dressed in short, gray trousers and long, gray socks, a white shirt, a red and green striped tie and green blazer, with a green cap flattening down his sculpted hair. At the age of eleven, and having passed his entrance exams, he was off to grammar school.

  But not just to any grammar school. Plant had secured a place at King Edward VI Grammar School for Boys in Stourbridge, which had a reputation for being the best in the area. For his parents, his attending such an establishment would incur extra expense but would also impress the neighbors. The school had been founded in 1430 as the Chantry School of Holy Trinity and counted among its alumni the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson. A boys-only school of 750 students, it was so steeped in tradition that first years were introduced in the school newspaper beneath the Latin heading salvete, the word used in ancient Rome to welcome a group of people.

  On that first morning Plant and ninety or so other new arrivals were lined up outside the staff house in the school playground. Surrounding them were buildings of red brick, including the library with its vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows. The masters in their black gowns and mortarboards came out and assigned each of them to one of three forms. Those boys who had excelled in their entrance exams and were considered to be future university candidates were gathered together in 1C. Plant was placed in the middle form, 1B.

  The school operated a strict disciplinary code, one that was presided over by the headmaster, Richard Chambers. A tall man who wore horn-rimmed glasses, Chambers had a hooked nose that led students to christen him “The Beak.” Behind his back he was also mocked for a speech defect that prevented him from correctly pronouncing the letter “r.” But Chambers mostly engendered both respect and fear.

  “He was extremely strict, a sadist really,” recalls Michael Richards, a fellow student of Plant’s. “If you got into trouble, he would call your name out in assembly in front of the whole school. You would have to go and stand outside his office, and eventually would be called in. He would reprimand you for whatever you’d done and then whack you across the backside four times with a cane. Then he’d tell you to come back after school. So you’d have all day to think about it and then you’d get the same again.”

  In many respects Plant was, to begin with at least, a typical grammar-school boy. He collected stamps and during the winter months played rugby. Although the school did not play his beloved football—indeed footballs were banned from the playground—he would join groups of other boys in kicking a tennis ball about at break times, using their blazers as makeshift goalposts. In his second year he was nominated as 2B’s form monitor by his tutor, a role that gave him the giddy responsibilities of cleaning the blackboard and trooping along to the staff room to notify the other masters if a tutor failed to arrive for a lesson.

  What marked him apart was his love of music and the manner in which he carried himself. Going about the school he would typically have a set of vinyl records tucked under his arm—and these, often as not, would be Elvis Presley records. He even took to imitating Elvis’s pigeon-toed walk.

  “Bloody hell, Rob did a fantastic Elvis impression,” says Gary Tolley, who sat next to Plant in their form. “He was Elvis-crazy, but early Elvis, not the Elvis of G.I. Blues, when he’d started to go a bit showbiz. He was very into Eddie Cochran, too. He had the same quiff. When you see all those pictures of Cochran looking out from the side of his eyes at the camera, that was Robert.”

  Plant and Tolley, who was learning to play the guitar, soon became part of a clique at school that was based around their shared interest in music. Their number included another classmate, Paul Baggott, and John Dudley, a budding drummer. They prided themselves on being the first to know what the hot new records were and when the likes of Cochran or Gene Vincent would be coming to perform in the area.

  “Not blowing our own trumpets, but we were all popular at school,” recalls Dudley. “The other kids sort of looked up to us, because we knew a little bit that they didn’t. Robert was a nice guy, but a bit full of himself. He was quite cocky. He’s always been like that. The Teddy Boy era had died by then, but he made sure that he’d got the long drape coat and the lot. A lot of people thought he was arrogant because he’d got that sort of body language about him.”

  “Rob was very good looking and he always seemed to be at the center of whatever was going on,” adds Tolley. “He had something. Charisma, I suppose. In those days, the Catholics would have a separate morning service to everybody else and then come in to join us for assembly. Robert would walk into the main hall with his quiff and his collar turned up, and you could see all the masters and prefects glaring at him. He wore the school uniform but somehow he never looked quite the same as everybody else.”

  Plant and Tolley would become good friends. Outside of school they went to the local youth club to play table tennis or billiards, and Plant would bring along his Elvis and Eddie Cochran singles to put on the club’s turntable. Plant had also picked up his father’s love of cycling, and he and Tolley would go off riding around the Midlands on a couple of stripped-down racing bikes.

  “Robert’s dad knew someone at the local cycling club and I can remember going to a velodrome near Stourbridge with Rob, riding around and around it and thinking we were fantastic,” says Tolley. “He’d come to my house a lot and always turn up at mealtimes. If we were going out cycling for the evening, he’d arrive forty-five minutes before we’d arranged. Inevitably, my mum would say, ‘There’s a bit of tea spare, Robert. Would you like it?’ ‘Oh, yes please, Mrs. Tolley.’ ”

  “He’d be around our house for Sunday tea,” says John Dudley. “He was always very polite. He’d ask my mum for jam sandwiches. If you’re going to put people into a class, his mum and dad were a class above mine. My father worked on the railways. I believe Rob’s father by then was an architect. They lived in a better house than we did. Rob was never from anywhere near an impoverished background.”

  For as long as their son maintained his academic studies Plant’s parents tolerated his love of rock ’n’ roll, although his father, who mostly listened to Beethoven at home, professed to being mystified by it. In 1960 they bought him his first record player, a red and cream Dansette Conquest Auto. When he opened it he found on the turntable a single, “Dreaming,” by the American rockabilly singer Johnny Burnette. With his first record token he bought the Miracles’ effervescent soul standard “Shop Around,” which had given Berry Gordy’s nascent Motown label their breakthrough hit in the U.S.

  A future was beginning to open out for the eleven-year-old Plant. It was one now free from the specter of being required to spend two years in the armed forces upon leaving school, Macmillan’s government having abolished compulsory National Service that year. It did, nonetheless, still lie beyond his grasp, as was emphasised when his mother insisted he trim his quiff and he glumly complied.

  2

  THE DEVIL’S MUSIC

  There was us, academic whiz kids in total freefall.

  By the time Plant entered his third year at grammar school in 1962 music had usurped his other interests. To begin with he was to be frustrated in his search t
o find something else that brought him the same sense of feral abandon he had felt upon first hearing Elvis. It was entirely absent from the TV light-entertainment shows of the time and his radio options were limited to one station, Radio Luxembourg. On that, at least, he came to hear Chris Kenner, a black R&B singer from New Orleans, and this nudged him further down his path.

  “When I was a kid there was nothing to latch onto,” he told me. “In the middle of everything, all these comets would occasionally come flying over the radio. But think about the difference between here and America. In America you just turned that dial five degrees on the circle and you were into black radio.

  “We Brits, we’re monosyllabic when it comes to music. When people say we took the blues back to America, it’s such bollocks. Because John Hammond, Canned Heat, Bob Dylan, Mike Bloomfield, Elvin Bishop . . . all these people were already playing it. Their vision and awareness of music is so much greater than ours. All this stuff was going on, and being British I was only exposed to tiny bits of it. There wasn’t a great deal of attention being paid to the stuff that lit me up.”

  Half a million black American servicemen were drafted overseas during the Second World War and it was they who first brought blues records into Britain. In time these records found their way into specialist shops and were picked up by collectors. Old 45s and 78s, they were by men and women with such evocative names as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Memphis Minnie and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Their songs documented the entire span of the black American experience, from the chains of slavery and grinding poverty to the pleasures of liquor and the love of a good—or bad—woman.

  This was folk music in its most raw and pure form, the ground zero for the twelve-bar stomp of rock ’n’ roll. For Plant, as for countless other British kids at the time, it was all that he was looking for. Ironically, it would be an Englishman who opened up the floodgates for him. His interest sparked by rock ’n’ roll singles and odd nuggets captured from the radio, he picked up a book titled Blues Fell This Morning, first published in 1960 and written by Paul Oliver, a scholar from Nottingham. Oliver related the history of black American blues in an entirely dry, academic manner, but this did not deter Plant. He had an ordered mind and began noting down each of the records Oliver referenced in his book. He was to have a further Eureka moment when he found out that a shop in Birmingham stocked these records, and more besides.