Robert Plant: A Life (25 page)

“I immediately found out that I missed a partner,” Plant later told David Fricke of
Rolling Stone.
“Robbie [Blunt] had the toughest job of all. He is a great guitarist and he didn’t want to have to step into Page’s shoes. As much as I was proud of the fact that he had his own style, I missed the volatile showmanship that was second nature to Jimmy. Page’s performance was stunning. Suddenly, I was holding the whole thing together on my own.”

The tour climaxed in the U.K. that winter, John Paul Jones getting up with them at Bristol’s Colston Hall, Page appearing again on the second of their two-night stand at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. There was a triumphal air to these shows, putting the seal on a memorable couple of years for Plant.

Had he been a less complex man he might then have rested easy, but he was never stilled. Although outwardly he most often seemed calm, almost beatific, something churned inside that drove him on.

“Robert’s birth date puts him perilously close to being a Virgo,” reflects LeFevre. “It makes for a very interesting cross between an extrovert Leo who wants to be taken at face value, and a more private man who has to keep everything organized for the sake of his own sanity.

“He is very generous but also unbelievably tight. At the end of that tour, he wanted to buy me a gift as a thank you for everything. Rex King, who was with us on the crew, told him he knew exactly what to get, and went out and bought this Rolex watch for three grand. Robert almost choked when he found out how much it was going to cost him. He still gave it to me, though, and I’ve worn it every day since.”

“He can be a really nice guy,” adds the rock photographer Ross Halfin. “I shot him on that tour for a music paper and I remember being in awe of him, but to begin with he was charming. Then we came to do the pictures. He’s a big guy and he got right in my face. He said, ‘Do you know how to take a Robert Plant picture?’ I said no. He prodded me in the chest and said, ‘Quickly.’ It really threw me, because he turned so quickly.”

Soon enough, the forces that warred within Plant would destroy the peace that this new band had brought him.

14

SEA OF LOVE

He’s the kind of person that likes to get on with life . . . and with the babysitter.

Plant and his band finished their first tour together in Japan in February of 1984. In the period between them coming off the road and starting work on his next record, Plant began a relationship with his ex-wife Maureen’s younger sister, Shirley. She and Maureen were very much alike, both of them striking looking and vivacious.

As if these waters weren’t muddied enough already, at that time Shirley was married to Plant’s farm manager, John Bryant, and the couple had been living on the Jennings Farm property. Bryant also played guitar in a local band, Little Acre. Plant had first taken an interest in them in the mid-’70s and tried then to help them get a record deal, but without success. In more recent times he had once again become a familiar face at their gigs.

“A nicer bloke than John you couldn’t wish to meet,” says John Ogden, a local journalist and sometime member of Little Acre. “They were a really nice couple, he and Shirley, and I was shocked when I heard they’d split up. She was a smashing girl and a great-looking one, too, no doubt about it.

“Robert had known John for a long time. He was Robert’s sort of gofer, the guy that looked after the farm side of things, what little bit of farm there was. Robert never really did any farm work, not like Bonham. They were all living on the same premises. Shirley was there all the time and Maureen had moved out after the divorce.

“When Shirley left him for Robert, I’m not even sure that John quit his job straight away. I don’t know that he and Robert had a huge bust-up, or that it was more of a slow, crumbling affair. The fact of the matter is, Robert likes women and he never had any trouble getting them. If he saw a woman that he wanted, it was job done.”

Led Zeppelin insiders had been gossiping about Plant and the Wilson sisters for years. Pleading anonymity, one of the band’s former roadies insisted to me that it was no surprise when Plant took up with Shirley after his divorce. “In any case, when you’ve seen Robert shagging his way through 16,000 women, there’s nothing very shocking about another, whoever it is,” he concluded.

“That situation had been in the background from when I first met Robert, three years beforehand,” says Jezz Woodroffe, then keyboardist in Plant’s band. “All of us knew it was going to happen—we were watching it develop. How did we react? It was just something else that was going on, like lots of other things. Shirley was lovely. I saw a lot of her, of course. She was around all the time for the next couple of years.”

In the long run, the relationship did not shatter Plant’s family. Maureen would eventually move back into Jennings Farm and raise the kids there. Plant bought another property just up the road from them. They remained a close-knit group. When asked about this, Plant would simply observe that Christmas get-togethers at his house were always interesting affairs.

“There you go!” says Benji LeFevre, laughing. “Fucking hell—what can I say? Despite everything, I think Robert has a great sense of family. His weakness, though, is women—and his dick. I once saw a cartoon that reminded me of him. It was a picture of a guy with an erection. There was a speech bubble coming out of his dick that said: ‘I love you.’

“Then again, it might not be his weakness. It may be that the rest of us haven’t got as much courage as he has. He’s the kind of person that likes to get on with life . . . and with the babysitter.”

It was in the middle of this convoluted atmosphere that Plant began work on his third record. Having now found his feet as a solo artist he was of a mind to do something different again, pushing himself further from his comfort zone. He had continued to take an interest in the electronic music of the time and was taken in particular with Depeche Mode, the synth-pop band from Basildon in Essex.

To work alongside LeFevre on the record he bought in a new engineer, Tim Palmer. Then twenty-two years old, Palmer had no experience with recording rock bands, having cut his teeth with such electro-pop acts of the period as Dead or Alive and Kajagoogoo.

“I hadn’t even engineered many drum kits at that point,” he says. “But Robert told me he was more interested in modern keyboard sounds and that he thought I could help him in that regard.”

The sessions started early that spring at Marcus Studios in Bayswater, West London. There were two new recruits to the original band—a nineteen-year-old backing singer named Toni Halliday and a drummer, Richie Hayward.

LeFevre had sought out Hayward and flown him in from the States as a surprise for Plant. A virtuoso, Hayward had been the engine-room of Little Feat, once hailed by Jimmy Page as his favorite group and one of the great bands to come out of California in the late ’60s. Their music was a tantalizing gumbo of rock and soul, blues and funk, gospel and boogie. Pretty much everything, in fact, but electronic pop.

“Richie was a brilliant drummer,” says Woodroffe, “but he hated technology. Robert bought him an electronic kit and every time he hit it, he’d laugh. We had loads of arguments about it.”

That summer, Plant and the band moved back to Rockfield Studios in South Wales. The rift that had opened up between them continued to widen, Plant pushing his bold agenda harder, finding allies in Woodroffe and Tim Palmer, but with the others continuing to resist it.

“Aside from me, most of the people that played on that record hated it,” Plant told me. “I just wanted to get the past behind me. I didn’t care about glory. I wanted to have another bash at singing songs and coming from a different angle. Yet despite the fact I did some decent stuff I don’t think I ever really achieved what I was looking for.”

“We started to rehearse at a little hotel just down the road from the studio,” recalls Woodroffe. “It had a gym that had all these weights and stuff in it, and I set up my keyboards in there. At that time I got hold of every new electronic gizmo that came out. I was encouraging everybody to get involved in that, and so was Robert. But Paul Martinez wasn’t interested and Robbie Blunt hated it. It turned into mine and Robert’s album, with the others playing on it.”

There was still the occasional moment of light relief. The band would troop off to the village pub each night, and there Plant proved to be more amenable to having his past exploited.

“One night, we came across these Led Zeppelin fans in the bar,” says Tim Palmer. “There was one particular girl who kept going on about wanting to listen to what we were doing. In the end she came back with us to the studio. When we politely asked her to leave she didn’t want to go. So I gave her some headphones, and she stood up on a flight case and danced as we cut the backing tracks. To top it off she took all her clothes off.”

The album was finished, though, with a sour mood hanging over the band. Blunt, in particular, had taken against the new direction.

“Robbie just wasn’t into it,” says Woodroffe. “He’d rather go and sit in his car and listen to the cricket on the radio. It destroyed the band in the end. Robbie didn’t want to play on the stuff, and he and Robert were arguing all the time.”

“Robert had this bee in his bonnet about needing to feel that he was being contemporary,” adds LeFevre. “Plus, everything was emotionally confused—it was going on at the same time that he was taking up with Shirley.

“He was beginning to grow away from the idea of the band being ‘us.’ The last time he’d invested in that, it had gone disastrously wrong. I think he was deciding that he was never going to let that happen again. That it would be all about him from now on and that he was going to stay in control.”

When they were in Japan in February of that year, Atlantic Records’ boss, Ahmet Ertegun, had pitched Plant the idea of doing a record of American songs from the ’50s. The following month Plant flew out to New York to make it, breaking off from preproduction work on his own album. Although he told none of his current band, Robbie Blunt included, he intended reviving the Honeydrippers name for this project. As a further stab to Blunt, an original Honeydripper, he had also asked Page to play on the record.

“I knew that he was going to New York, but not what for,” says LeFevre. “I hadn’t previously experienced anything like that with Robert. I guess that, in the wanderings of his mind, things might then have already been changing.”

“It was done kind of as a promise to Ahmet, because he always said I knew too much about American music to leave it at that,” Plant told me. “I could sing, I could croon. It was a deal made in a bathhouse in Tokyo one night for a laugh. I wouldn’t want to hang my hat on it and say that it was an important move. It was a bit of a hoot, that’s all.”

The record was cut in a single day at Atlantic’s studios in New York. Joining Page on guitar was his fellow Yardbird, Jeff Beck, and also Nile Rodgers from Chic, the lineup being completed by a band of top session musicians.

Five songs were recorded. Among these was Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman” and “Young Boy Blues,” written by Phil Spector and blues singer Doc Pomus and originally performed by Ben E. King. DJs in the U.S. began playing another track, the more soothing “Sea of Love,” a U.S. Number One for the crooner Phil Phillips in 1959 and chosen by Plant because it was one of his mum’s favorite records. Plant’s version also became a Top 5 hit in the U.S., helping to turn its parent record into an unlikely smash.

Jokingly titled
Volume One
, since Plant had no intention of making a second instalment, the Honeydrippers’ EP was released at the budget price of $5.98 in November 1984. It fast went on to sell more than two million copies in America, not bad going for such a lightweight confection.

Plant’s next album,
Shaken ’n’ Stirred
, was an altogether different beast. Where the Honeydrippers’ record had been as familiar as a pair of old slippers, this was harsh and alien, as bold as it was challenging. Its sound was jagged, with each track rising up through a throb of synthesisers and punctuated by Blunt’s jabbing guitar and the clatter of Richie Hayward’s drums. Through the static, the odd Plant lyric did come into sharp focus, and these seemed to pick at his emotional scabs. The reference to grieving on “Little by Little” suggested his son Karac or Bonham, or both. “Pink and Black” begged to be read in the context of his tangled love life: “I know I used to run around, now I’m sure I’ll settle down,” he confessed. Yet it was the record as a whole that perhaps best reflected Plant’s state of mind at the time—made up as it was of many fractured pieces, some fitting together, others jarring and unsettled.

At this time Jimmy Page had formed a new band with ex-Free and Bad Company singer Paul Rodgers, calling it the Firm. Their self-titled debut album emerged at the start of 1985 and ploughed a familiar blues-rock furrow, although it never sniffed at magic. The album was a modest success and Page went on the road to support it. He made a second record with the Firm the next year,
Mean Business
, but by then Page appeared to have flagged and it failed to spark. At the time of that first record Plant offered Page and his new band the faintest of praise, and expressed surprise at how traditional both sounded.

“Jimmy is primarily a musician,” he told Mat Snow of
NME
. “I motivate and point my finger and create a fuss among people. Pagey liked the idea of being considered a man of mystery. He got some kind of enjoyment out of people having the wrong impression of him. It’s not up to me to start saying that the guy plays cricket.”

“I spent that ten years with Zeppelin just developing a guitar style,” Page pleaded to me. “Let’s face it, when Zeppelin was no more, that was my thing. I never wanted to change the way I played—I felt comfortable. That trademark is always going to be there.”

But if there was an element of gloating on Plant’s part it was soon stopped. When it came out in May 1985,
Shaken ’n’ Stirred
baffled his audience, notching barely a third of the sales of each of his previous records. The album’s failure was magnified by the tour of North America that followed.