We all know what happens to old rock stars lucky enough to survive the risks of their hedonistic existence into middle age. They retreat to their country piles behind high security gates, venturing out only to pick up awards or to croak their way through their greatest hits in over-priced concerts at giant football stadiums.
On his new album, Led Zeppelin’s former vocalist Robert Plant has written a song about the pitfalls of living on former glories. “My peers may flirt with cabaret, some fake the rebel yell,” he sings in a line that may well include a not-so-subtle dig at those sexagenarian rockers Rod Stewart and Sir Mick Jagger. “Me, I’m moving up to higher ground, I must escape this hell.”
Plant enjoys many of the trappings of mega-rock stardom, with a large country home close to the Welsh border and a smart townhouse in a Primrose Hill square in London. But he’s been seeking the higher ground since Led Zeppelin broke up in 1980, after the death of drummer John Bonham. “I didn’t want having been part of that great group to be the only laurels in my whole life,” he says reasonably. “I was only 32 and I thought f**k! All that stuff’s happened and it went by in the twinkling of an eye. I had to do something new and put that behind me.”
That was a quarter of a century ago and he’s been struggling to shed the burden of his past ever since. He made some solo records in the 1980s that have not stood the test of time nearly as well as Led Zeppelin’s explosive catalogue, and in the 1990s he briefly got back together with the band’s guitarist, Jimmy Page. But now he may finally have achieved some kind of closure on the past with The Mighty Rearranger, by some way his most satisfying album since Zep were trampling the competition underfoot.
In their pomp Led Zeppelin were the wildest, loudest and most debauched rock band in the world. They took more drugs and had more groupies than any of their rivals — and also sold more albums than any British group before or since, save the Beatles. At 57, Plant still looks the part. His long hair and snakeskin boots would seem preposterous on a dentist or an estate agent, yet his demeanour is defiantly anti-rock star.
We meet in his London home and he’s warm and friendly and chats knowledgably about the old blues artists whose pictures adorn his walls and about his more recent passion for world music. Many rock stars pay lip-service to “getting back to their roots”. Plant has actually done it.
It’s been seven years since we saw him playing stadiums with Page. Since then he’s been lying low, singing with the pub band Priory of Brion and making just one record, an enjoyable but unchallenging album of covers.
He’s never regretted his decision to walk away from the big time. “I knew I had to get back to playing clubs and remembering what that pulse was all about,” he says. “To say goodbye to the large arenas I played with Jimmy was a very purposeful move. I just didn’t think there was anything left for me to project to the back of an ice hockey arena any more.”
Plant describes his new record as “a group of statements from a guy who didn’t think he had anything left to say”. In the end, he found plenty and the lyrics range from mature observations on his own past to commentaries on the post-9/11 world. It’s a record on which all his diverse interests and influences collide, often with surprising and sometimes glorious results. Rock and blues riffs are mixed with Arabic and African elements, and he’s effusive about the new sounds he has found in world music.
He’s been a regular visitor to North Africa since the early 1970s. But two years ago, he travelled to a festival in the Sahara Desert and the experience represented some kind of epiphany. “I saw in the desert something I’d been looking for all my life — unhampered, unimpaired expression without any of the rewards and trappings or gamesmanship that we associate with the Western music industry,” he says.
“What we have to go through as musicians here is so affected by ego and trends. Even if you don’t play the game you are aware of it. But these guys are singing songs that might be thousands of years old. It’s a world away from trying to get on the Radio 2 playlist. They’ve got all the craft of the storyteller and the dream-weaver and it was amazing to me to be part of it.
“Led Zeppelin selling 200 million albums was just chance and ridiculous. But what I saw and heard out there in the desert was big magic.”
Led Zeppelin were also magic to their fans and Plant offended many of them — not to mention Jimmy Page — when he failed to turn up in Los Angeles in February for the presentation of a lifetime achievement award to the band at the Grammies. Yet Plant chose to remain at home, rehearsing with his new band, the Strange Sensation. “What can you do? I couldn’t be in two places at once,” he shrugs.
What he is doing now is more important to him than celebrating the past. It isn’t that he has disowned Led Zeppelin, he says, just that he prefers to live in the present. “It was wonderful and I was the golden god,” he says. “But this veneration of one period of one’s life is pointless. It’s great to look back and smile. But middle-aged self-congratulation is very dangerous.”
When a once significant artist returns with a strong record after a long period out of the limelight, it’s inevitable that it will be described as a “comeback”. But Plant rejects the suggestion. “I don’t think I’m going forward, backwards or sideways. I’m not back in the ring slugging it out because I don’t think there is any ring,” he says.
Yet presumably he must be proud of the record, or else why put it out? “Without being cocky, I know it’s an achievement,” he concedes. “But to put it out there and have everybody saying, ‘He’s returned to form’ . . . I really don’t know if I want that. If they say, ‘Look, he’s regained his crown’, then who had it last? It’s a bit like pass the parcel, isn’t it?” What is undeniable is that The Mighty Rearranger is a potent statement by someone who has done it all but still retains both the desire and energy to come up with something fresh. That’s rare enough to make it one of the most interesting releases of the year, and if anyone from Franz Ferdinand, Keane or Snow Patrol is still creating music half as adventurous as this in 30 years time, we will be lucky indeed.
Plant admits to being curious to see how the album will be received. Not that he’s going to lose any sleep if the record goes nowhere. “I hope there’s an audience out there,” he beams happily. “But if there isn’t, I’m going straight back to the desert.”
The Mighty Rearranger is released by Sanctuary on May 2
