Robert Plant 2020 October

[Applause] welcome robert thank you nicely distanced at the end of the piano so i'd like to go back as we do with many of our guests down the time tunnel where music begins for you what's the first music you ever heard there was this sort of haze behind me of uh ballad english balladeers the bbc wasn't very kind to youth culture in those days but um every now and again on two-way family favorites on a sunday lunch time some servicemen in cyprus would send messages back to mom and dad and request a song and i think it was maybe um hand dog i think elvis i mean that's the kind of lock in yeah it was an opiate something happened when i heard the sound of that record it certainly made me put my stamp collection to one side for a bit you'd heard elvis did you go to gigs did you what did you do here put something pretty plain in the pub what did did you could you do gigs yourself my dad's brother and his wife were maybe 11 years younger than my father so they they were really still into and they were great dancers and they took me to a few shows so the i saw a cliff a couple of times and those really nice package tours that came through to wolverhampton gomont so here's a bill i mean opening the show was mickey most than the most men the rolling stones did their first package tour and then you had um beautifully rich jerome green and the duchess and little richard supporting bama lama bamalu we're all on the same bill and then the evil is closing the show blimey that's bigger than one of our nannies yes all in all in the wolverhampton government all in the wolverhampton government yeah and it's i remember going to the stage door because i didn't know about stage doors but my artist said maybe we'll see them leaving cuff how many times have i seen a stage door since but not from that side and so i saw little richard come out the door into his car and he looked like he'd come from a man from mars because he'd got the makeup on i hadn't finished my french homework and i was there in the cold war hampton nightclub there's something going on here i don't know about but it's quite intriguing you talked about seeing the blues and discovering the blues could you go and see blues people yeah i might be old but what i saw like all old guys you say you know i saw i saw booker white and skip james and the wolf i saw a little water uh it was uh memphis slim sunny terry brown mcgee and all that stuff it was at birmingham town hall and the thing is it was a hot it was a hallowed environment people were just hanging suspended for this sound the british performer who bought a lot of the blues people over who you went to you were talking about chris barber yeah crucial he was like the door which sort of opened a lot of people's understanding of all of that music definitely and the thing is because he got the clue because of his link and his love of new orleans music that sort of meld down right at the bottom of the delta in louisiana the kind of hitch between new orleans blues and and the kind of jazz feel was all about rhythm you know and that's perfect for dixieland at all i saw him about a year so ago in worcester uh and he was flogging his cds out front and he must have had 10 different cds it broke the bank for me i tried to get an mu discount did he give you one no no no but he took the leg off a chair i mean he was so enthusiastic about stuff and um his points of reference you know brilliant yeah and the burden of people so we've got a clip to see chris playing there and he told me once that when the sister rosetta tharp came over first came over with her electric guitar she said here's all my parts for the mirrors of music from lucky millander's big band and he said but i can't when none of us can read music she said well that's great knock and i and they just toil right through the air if only we had it now yeah anyway there we are yeah um but so you were talking about you listening to elvis on the radio and being drawn into that world and going and seeing the blues when did you realize that it was something that you could actually do yourself and connect with people singing well i didn't realize it at all that basically we had a group at school and um by this time everybody was killing actually desecrating chuck berry tracks i mean it was the world's worst rhythm sections in the world where young kids in england trying to play that backbeat thing that chuck had going so the school was banned in the year that i was in the singer got sick and um they had a gig somewhere near derby swaddling coat the rink swaddling coat and um they said well you come to the gigs a lot you know these songs i said yeah i know they said well we hear you singing all the time sing so i did so i started playing a local dance hall where the beatles had come through and people like that didn't and i was off so you said loved it straight away really yeah well i mean i love john lee hooker and jimmy reed you know i like that city blues it was very confident and who would know that you know um that like songs like boom boom the hooker stuff it got into the top 30 in the uk i mean it wasn't just about some secret society it was like people loved the spring and the sex of the the whole lilt of that music the next person you've chosen is a person from the blues world which is otis rush well talking about the country blues thing as before you know skip james and john estes people like that and out of that obviously there was a big movement into chicago into the urban areas yeah well you were talking as well how you then you were taking from the blues doing your first gigs and realizing it was quite a challenge and learning all the maybe some of the the tricks of the trade or whatever it would be when you look back what do you think the main factor of your huge success was i think the three people behind me really to be honest i think if you can get three guys to play with vindication the way that jimmy jonesy and bonzo did i could write sort of lyric and melody and stuff and try and figure out where i fit it in a lot of the time even though i've written a lot of songs one-on-one with jimmy it was a matter of there was so much color in what they did and it again really that we were always developing and and um that didn't always suit the critique but it's it has to suit the the individual player because if you create one whole lot of love how many do you need you know so we were always moving always developing sometimes it goes on forever sometimes it doesn't i mean but that's that was what it was all about it was really exciting i mean it was it was sometimes it was brilliant sometimes it was not but it was exactly what it should have been it must have given you the opportunity beings of being like sort of a tremendous success all over the world particularly in america to see a lot of the blues artists you'd admired yeah i felt really it's a very strange feeling for us in zep we could go to see the bobby bland orchestra playing at the burning spear and seeing junior wells playing at the checkerboard lounge you found people playing in their own environment yeah and then they were playing it for real bobby bland was insane i remember bonzo got up and played somehow he was invited to get up and play and he did further on up the road and uh turn on your love light what a great evening led zeppelin drama gets up with with bobby blue plant i mean what a thing that must have been great and the thing is he really did the job because the guys were playing with him it wasn't rock he was playing you know yeah yeah the next person you've chosen is lucinda williams what have you chosen and why have you chosen well cinder we've become all of us in my gang over the last few years have become really good friends with lou and her stable of chums and we played together quite a lot in the last 12 18 months i have been in one of the most sort of popular rock and roll groups in the world ever and i've just thought well i've done that thanks so much i'm gonna not do anything else now but you've you're constantly experimenting constantly finding new music constantly working with interesting people going around the world and discovering great music in fact there's an album coming out of lots of your different work and you do a podcast as well where you where you go into the details of things yeah bottom line is my first solo recordings were 1966 but when led zeppelin came to an end i knew i couldn't try and create another zeppelin i just had to do this stuff which would be as um as ever i wanted it to be so i teamed up with guitarist robbie blunt and we put a band together and started to record and i got a call from phil collins and he said john bonham was the inspiration behind my playing and uh i'd like to come and play with you and play for you so he played on the first two albums and it was great i was off and so i didn't think about those songs because i'm busy thinking about the next thing i want to do how can i change the way i approach a song or whatever it is and the idea of putting these songs together and taking them out of context everything lives in a different light so eleven solo albums the next person you've chosen well alifakarturi um the the whole deal of uh bringing west african music to a bigger audience a bigger critique i think really single-handedly at the beginning of all this justin adams who my brother went to mali and he'd been working with a french band called lojo and the connections took him in uh 71-72 there in the atlas mountains so i felt very comfortable there and i i can speak some a deal of french i started learning moroccan arabic and i started feeling really like the whole place suited me really good what more could we want than to be invited to go to the festival of the desert 60 kilometers north of timbuktu ah just get on the busy wolverhampton and um the person you've chosen is a another natural person i think i was fortunate to be on the same bill with jason ispel some months back it was a particularly good night with lucinda in her band and this guy who i uh i'd heard a couple of cuts on the radio but uh over overseas and um very interested in him his songwriting is very uh poignant he's a very important guy for the future of um telling the story of america and telling the story of americans i think i think he's uh he's a great talent and i was really amazed very moved by his his work and i can't wait to see him again but when you say great songwriter what do you think it is that makes him great as a songwriter is it his words well he's he's bringing some stuff home uh which you could wrap it up in satin and silk and put a little bow on it but he goes to the right to the point in this particular song and i think it's just great immediate you can feel slightly uncomfortable by lyrics sometimes you certainly got to be aroused woken up occasionally especially with the way things are panning out over there if not over here as well so in a moment we'll see jason nisbel the digging deep album i'm listening to a lot there's so many different facets to it you can keep coming back and finding something new in it so it's wonderful that's that thank you for choosing the superb selection that you have made available for us here this afternoon thank you for joining us robert plant thank you very much always a great pleasure to see you and sing along with you yeah great

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Keywords: Robert Plant Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant, Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant 2020 interview

Id: YVWoD6ObCZw

Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020