In the aftermath of Led Zeppelin’s reunion show in December, there seemed to be only one logical course of action for the band’s surviving personnel. Now that they had played so well together, what could possibly stop them from touring? Almost six months later, at this more low-key affair, the answer – in the form of the fiddle-playing country-bluegrass star Alison Krauss – could be found staring Plant in the face, as the two reprised their million-selling Raising Sand collaboration.

Over two hours, it all amounted to the fact that Plant is a man in love – not with Krauss (though, at times, you had to wonder) but with the many dark shades of American roots music. In the hands of a lesser singer with a bigger ego, this show might have ended up as an exercise in musical tourism. But his desire to serve the songs’ beauty was visibly apparent.

For Killing the Blues, their voices merged like two exit wounds from a single broken heart. On Through the Morning, Through the Night, he stepped back and saw what the rest of us saw – Krauss’s voice gently drawing all the sweetness and bitterness from Gene Clark’s original and exhibiting it before us. And then the violin solo. If Plant had the smitten air of a privileged fan, who could blame him?

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BACKGROUND

• Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

• New country for old men

• Robert Plant & Alison Krauss: Raising Sand

• The odd couple

• Top Five Gigs: Paul Weller

The mood of egalitarian bonhomie was fine, but – even if Plant seemed eager to play down his part – all eyes returned to his leonine mane and impressive hip action. Indeed, it was his presence on Emmylou Harris’s Green Pastures and Bon Temps Rouler – a vocal cameo from the guitarist and Raising Sand producer T-Bone Burnett – that stopped the evening from straying too eagerly on to grandma’s back porch.

Snaking upwards from a single, elemental beat, When the Levee Breaks sounded as close as notes and chords ever got to a severe weather warning. Dedicated to the late Sandy Denny, a second Zeppelin song, Battle of Evermore, saw Krauss and Plant trading lines before the band’s clattering upswell released something deep within the 59-year-old singer.

Eyes scrunched shut, he picked up his mike stand, jabbed the lyric into submission and, finally, located some common ground between his old life and his current one. You can take the man out of Led Zeppelin, but there’s a part of Robert Plant that will forever be Led Zeppelin – and this evening was none the worse for it.

Wembley Arena, London, May 22 2008

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