The song remains the same, but Robert Plant is always moving forward

Robert Plant welcome to cue thank you so I think what we're gonna do today is we're gonna listen to some music together some of it music you've made and some of it you haven't made I'm excited to play something for you I'm gonna start out with music you have made this is from your new album carry fire take a listen to this [Music] so Robert you can really hear the many chapters in your passport on this record I think you know you British folk influences on this I hear Fairport in this I hear southern blues I hear jump blues I hear it like psychedelic music I hear middle-eastern music I hear North African music I hear trip-hop in there as well it is fair to say that this the theme of this record in some ways is is crossing borders musically and in person not at all there's no theme it's just a personality that we possess as a group of musicians who've all come up through to be together from different areas of music different threads and you know different arteries of music really yeah I mean there's a lot of things going on there but it's all part of everything that we do so more less everything that we play even if we go back and visit the glorious past whatever it is we just mess with it and turn it into our inherent now recognizable characteristic music now in the last 38 years since John passed away I've done a hundred different things with a thousand different people and and every time I've gone on these little adventures I've tried to make it as bright and sparkly as possible so that everybody is really totally transfixed with what we're trying to do and the thing about this combination of people is there's a joy about it so when you hear that there you talk about all those things that it is well basically it's just getting it out and it's jaunty and the lyric is it's it's precocious and it's great because it's an audacity to say lay down and sweet surrender you know really I should be talking about something else altogether now but I like the idea of it because it it resonates with me as a guy and the music and the whole thread and the weave between us all is very very natural and it is everything we've worked together in in West Africa we've been all over the planet and we brought loads of stuff to the table and it's not as if we're trying to I mean once upon a time about ten years ago when pre working with Alison Krauss yeah it was considered that we were kind of very very tough world music oh yeah which is crazy yeah I mean it's a bit of a weird word name for music - isn't it well yeah but it's no worse than folk this misery everywhere I think you should have a good time not keep going on about how it doesn't work but you were traveling young - you went to Morocco when you were how young young young enough to be changed overnight for life how pay me a picture of what it was like when you got there he was like 20 - oh right yeah well bear in mind that where I'm from the west side of the European landmass so there's a lot of movement that is between people's all the time so by the time I was 22 I played in France a lot Holland Belgium I'd seen North African culture in another place but I'd never seen it in its own place and that was the thing it was just a spectacular to see the whole deal about going into different cultures even if you go from here from from Toronto to say I don't know Richmond Virginia or New Orleans or Newfoundland where I'm from this you know yeah really a fishing community on the coast of the country with its own ballads and songs yeah I think very different you know yeah so really so the shifts are the shifts but when you get to a country like Morocco that's always been struggling with itself as far as the rest of the Arab world goes because it's it's maintaining maintaining by design its own kind of independence from all our other stuff and you know I just melted into the streets I melted into every doorway that was playing yet another piece of dramatic music from umm Kulthum or from the music of Cairo the orchestrated stuff or from some amazing it sounded like a bunch of Tuareg building a shed in the back of somewhere and that was stuff from in the high atlas so by the time we'd got to presence in Led Zep I was writing lyrics to things like Achilles last and praying to get back to that and to get away from this extreme sort of consumer culture that we're all in and where the mighty arms of Atlas hold the heavens from the earth I wanted to go back to that because there's a piece in the middle of the marketplace and believe it or not that you ain't gonna find many places and you have since then hey I mean all the time yeah I mean you constantly you've stayed out of the pent houses of the world the most part well I don't know what they were built for maybe they were built for somebody who's running a weird show just south of here yeah but goodness knows you know everybody kind of has to take on some personality which they're not immediately born to if you go into that other zone well that's what a Twain set isn't it that travel is fatal to bigotry and Prejudice yeah yeah it's a good it's a very wholesome idea but it's true now he had if we had a good look at a good brain old Mark Twain yeah he did a couple of good lines every now and then yeah I want you to take a listen to something else this is from 1969 [Music] so that's the liquidator Harry J Allstars yeah the unofficial theme song of your beloved soccer team right well as a matter of fact we got a promotion to the Premier League this year and congratulations yeah no no I can just tell you that we were taken over by Chinese owners oh and they brought in a Portuguese super agent right who's brought all these guys who were I mean it was a derisory hoot from the rest of the soccer world in in the UK because they said these guys from Portugal late they'll never last an English winter so they did more than that so where we stand and sit the whole of our stadium sings [ __ ] in the winter you know we're [ __ ] in the winter as we beat people five nil and yeah but this song is outlawed by the West Midlands Police Force because of its profanities I should point out so this is the wall either team is the Wolverhampton Wanderers yes the Wolves why is it out loud because there's a couple of profanities that we sing along with which relating to the team who lived just eight miles away where this blood and snot can we can we play that for you two [Music] [Applause] today so that's that's the rival team wire who are west brom why should they mostly f off oh because they're just um well they they ground is known as the creme right you know and they're known as the shite and it's because they're too close to us we can't breathe yeah because they're their brothers and we're all black countries it's that thing the never-ending great tribal thing which if we could get rid of it we probably have a better world sure but we don't have I sometimes wish we had that in Canada a little bit a bit of a singing tradition in the stands you know of yeah it's a beautiful thing to hear or there's so many great songs now because you know we're considered to be so bad rubbish and now it's golden time you know how long that'll last I don't know you still play right it's on a Wednesday if I'm lucky yeah yeah you know with you with all my mates in the school gym yeah in the village like your old buddies well I'm not not that old yeah you know what I mean your friends from days of your friends of days of now yeah yeah but we don't do walking football you still gonna move a bit but I fortunately I can get tagged when I start getting a little bit antiquarian they don't go easy on you because you're Robert Plant no they know me right so whoever that other guy is that guy's is talking to you perhaps I might be that other guy now yeah or I could be the guy back there that must be nice or a melange there must be nice though whatever it is it's it's working for me this isn't almost this is another track from Kerry fire take a listen to this [Music] it's carving up the world again a wall and not a fence from Robert Kline's new album carry fire I like the song a lot yeah it's not I mean it's getting a lot of attention I think because of the walnut' advantages which is which is a line from from one of Donald Trump speeches that I heard him say but it's about a lot more than that yeah you kind of go you kind of go through history about all the many times that we as humanity have sort of held ourselves in what Walt ourselves instead of bridging what made you want to write a song like this well it's evident everywhere but you know it's take the Narragansetts you know the Indians down on New England and stuff yeah when they brought out the turkey and the corn for the Puritans who were escaping religious persecution from England it didn't take long before this great amalgam of humankind became avaricious and the first thing that the the the Europeans did was they started putting picket fences up and and building houses and of course native culture on you know in this continent subcontinent was absolutely bemused by the idea of actually anything being solid and lasting mmm so it's always been a way of saying this is ours or at the same time keeping stock in but you know if you have stock so it's just culture and what it does to other coaches so what happened to the Greeks what happened to the Egyptians what happened to the Romans yeah Visigoths came they were bigger stronger more powerful what happened it's always about crunching people and so it's it's a timeless sad underbelly of you know of humankind it's an interesting time to talk to you about it cuz you were live in an Austin for a while I know Austin is not is different than a lot of the rest of Texas but it still it's still in the same wears leather shorts yes with the line down and down in the south and then you're back in the UK now which is dealing with with the after-effects of brexit I mean these things must be on your mind sure yeah but I mean I don't have any I don't need hardly have an opinion yeah bad brexit because it's all puffy everything's puffy the very fact that it worked the vote went the way it did was because um the I don't think it was a in any way to anyone's advantage not to give the the populace the real idea of what's going on nobody would really know what the upside and downside of this thing could be ultimately like in about 18 months time or whatever it is but there will be an upside in the downside and they reckon it'll be a graph that was deep to be a deep trough and then it'll lift and become whatever it is and we we use these you know comparisons of Norway how it deals with the rest of the world and all that sort of thing there's all these things going on and over there and there's miss information and then there's the personality complexes with various people in the government it's a it's a when you go back to UK and you see how it works between us all there as an island race and then you see the kind of individuals in Europe and you see what's happening in Italy and what's happening in Hungary in Poland and stuff like that you you know this it's just more mess yeah but how you go through that is it's it's anybody's guess but does it feel yeah I know me neither does it does it feel like a time of upheaval dokes I know when you're when she would say when your band was starting out in the late 1960s there was I mean Nixon was in power you had that you had the civil rights movement you had the Vietnam war with another time of sort of great social upheaval does it feel like that to you well I'm an antiquarian now you know I'm an old guy so I'd look not an octogenarian I'm waiting for that actually I think that it doesn't smell of wee-wee yeah when I get there but whatever it might be right now I'm flexing my triceps if I can find them still but I think really in the late 60s all over everywhere there was you know there was a riot going on and the youth culture the subculture was making itself heard in very direct terms and there was a huge movement everywhere here as much as there was in San Francisco really to change the corruption and the whole dominance of you know right-wing fascist control of societies and I don't know how that pans out now here I don't know whether or not because of the way that contemporary communications have changed and that the the great world of you know the whole isolation of each individual in their own little world space your phone guy do you have a phone and I certainly do yeah but you know that's how I know I know who we may have signed this week for our soccer team as the logo to the website but back then there was no Facebook there was no but you know it was there was a there was an alternative culture which was alive and well and operating together people were on the move together which was you know people will o on about it but I've had great fortune in the way I've chosen to do what I do so I've spent a good time around people outside of the rock thing yeah all the time yeah so I can say that I did a land producer to last a year last winter with Emmy Lou and Steve Earle and the cotton kids and Joan Baez came and played with us and you know it could be like a bunch of old fogies and beatniks yeah and we're the milk carton kids yeah yeah and I'm seeing them next week how good are they really hung out with those guys a couple of times yeah we play a few festivals together yeah I'm sure you had to go into detox afterwards yeah we had a we had a couple of big mouths yeah yeah we're doing Rio Seco next week and so are they the day before I say I say hello for me yeah well so so the thing is there was you could enunciate you could put words together and people would take it or leave it there was a great thing with the beginnings of FM radio where it was FM radio came alive because it had an audience and the audience wanted some reaction they wanted something to be a part of the carnival the weave between peoples in different towns and cities that would it was a Clarion you know really and that was really good it also meant that for bands who've played for like like the dead you were talking about or Blue Cheer or somebody like that they could play for hours and hours and nobody would they just play the whole album which would be 22 minutes long it'll flip it over and play there was no concern about being sponsored by the US Army or something no no you could kind of do whatever you want yeah yeah so that was different you know and it was good because we were all on the same bus unless you were listening to Bobby Goldsboro right yeah honey it was it honey oh honey yeah a great song oh no not a great we're gonna use this interview a Robert Plant as a chance to give [ __ ] - Bobby Goldsboro and and honey I want to play another song needs a tree how big it's grown yeah yeah yeah not a great not a great song no this is um you you do this song with the pretenders with Chrissie Hynde of the pretenders it's originally by Ursula Hickey but I want to play the version you grew up with this is Ritchie Valens [Music] how beautiful is that eggs done and then this is the version from your record [Music] [Music] Rober client that's bluebirds over the mountain from your carry fire record is it fair to say that through all the traveling you've done all the people you met all the influences that you have had over the years at the core of everything you do is still that 50s rock and roll that music that you grew up with well it's so tree I'm listening to her there and she's doing it and matter-of-fact thinking about it that would have been one song that if it had bit got any play on the radio anywhere might have been a song that people could have sung along with at festivals yeah you know because it's so it's all about simplistic melody there so that is and yeah it's true that we were talking about it on the way over here in the middle of all the kind of grind and grunge and extended diagonals that I like to play with rain I do the more outside influences yeah I like to put in it some kind of sweet melody mm-hmm you know as you can see it's having a resounding effect yeah I know I can tell you still love it you know yeah absolutely yeah do you still listen to it at home got it that old music I listened really to everything yeah yeah on the average a balanced cut the Buddy Holly courtesans well you know yeah some of the early Holly and the hill stuff with Bob Montgomery is great there's stuff that he did it's it's strange really because I demanded from our age and that we can play in Lubbock Texas on the next leg in September yeah because I went there years ago and it's Holly's birthplace and you can just go straight across into New Mexico to Clovis where he cut his records and his early recordings he was just if you take away all the stuff that you know is the the glitter of his stuff yeah because you can hear something too often you know but if you go and dig in his sense of the and you would never believe what a wild cat he was I mean I I know some stories about him and I got from Little Richard once upon a time which I mean it was great stuff great songs great playing and these are the kind of stories that you can have to tell me when the microphones are off is that that kind of no I'm gonna wait I'm gonna use them in my book you played you you've been digging back into some older material these days you play hot dog recently hmm that was the first song I learned on the banjo when I was 15 years old because I only knew I knew your band so well and he Led Zeppelin so well and I was one of the I'm trying to not let it be known but I was I had the t-shirts and the whole thing and all the records and I watched the song remains the same on DVD that I made my dad buy me and stuff like that you know and what I'm sorry about yeah it didn't it didn't look as good on me no I and I found myself hearing the oh brother where art thou soundtrack and realizing oh my god Norman Blake and all this stuff this is what bluegrass is but I didn't really know how to play any of it so I knew there was a Led Zeppelin bluegrass II country song yeah yeah and I and I learned to play a hot dog and it was my band's first song we ever played live well you know the thing about door was I think we were quite we were absolutely dumbfounded by the idea of British punk having some kind of revelatory gift that put us into the shadows because we had been raised on stuff that was far wilder than you know never mind the bollocks it was like we were capable of never mind ritchie valens but there's so much wild rock and roll that we were raised on yeah not the glitzy stuff no far away from Neil Sedaka and all that but so that's why we did things like I'm wearing and tearing an ozone baby on that record yeah because we knew we knew how to make that [ __ ] up and really but we were so busy trying to write eight-minute epics about crossing the Atlas Mountains that we'd forgotten all about maybe the Phantom on dot records in 1959 singing love me for the best part of one minute 43 seconds right did you did you run into Chrissie Hynde the pretenders these people who were making punk rock in London in the time and the Damned in bands like that did you see them around well you know the biggest band in the world and they were playing clubs no no it didn't work like that we were / right really I'm Jimmy and I went to a couple of punk clubs to see the Damned because they were when Niccolo produced that album with fan club and new rows it was just that was brilliant stuff because it had substance and it also had a melody he had so much Drive about it that was where things needed to go I quite understand that close to the edge you know by yes might be difficult for a seventeen year old kid in a bedroom to deal with or even a 77 year old kid yeah because it's take it or leave it but Dad The Damned fan club was just amazing so we used to go and see them and then Lydon would ride on the floor before me sort of faking this adoration and sort of so it was very difficult not to raise my foot and and nickimja cake and but anyway it all goes round and round and round and you know he asked me for the lyrics for Kashmir when he was in pill emoji it's what it is I love very stuff I love hearing you sing with women - I loved hearing you sing with Chrissie and it reminded me of how much I loved when I heard you sing with Alison for the first time with Alison Krauss yeah well we did a lot of stuff extraneous of that which was pretty good you know what do you mean well there were TV shows that we did we did crossroads town in America yeah which was great because I did the boy who would who wouldn't so corn and she did black dog on her own and stuff it was very valid yeah it was very and it was very early on it was I don't know whether we'd started raising sand but everything about it generally was either comical or petrifying ly nerve-racking for me to sing with such sort of structure because I'm so used to being up the front and singing whatever I want to sing Waylon you can get up in the front and kind of wail man yeah but you can't do that with Alison because you've got to hold these parts I think that's what I loved about my favorite track on there the raising sand record was was your version of really Sally song of killing double kill and yeah that's tough song to sing had to have been because I'm so used to you with with all respect to you I'm so used to Black Dog Robert Plant you know oh yeah I'm like it's the compare and contrast my favorite Robert Plant Nell's crash song is killing the blues my favorite Led Zeppelin song is since I've been loving you yeah like they could not be two more separate ways of you expressing yourself vocally you know no but I mean that's what I do I'm you know if I did the same thing all the time I'd be in a band that's doing really well yeah but I want to talk to me more about that subtlety I'm more I'm more interested in why why singing subtly can be sometimes harder well take the rain song in step that was really if you think about it I was 23 I suppose Jimmy was 50 no 27 or whatever it was we were working in all sorts of areas and you cut your cloth accordingly so you know it would be a pretty dumb move to try and make everything have a big you know impact riff on and stuff like that and that kind of puffy chest job you gotta get down into into really where emotions take you and so all the way through cept there's been that sort of dynamic contra Tom and that carries on all the way through anybody's life if they're singers you know I hears [ __ ] but I'm in restaurants and and I hear people doing fly me to the moon or something like that they're all of me yeah and there's great great singers people who got the most amazing chops from Mel Torme do you know Sarah Vaughan and amazing singers and you can only do so much with a song if it's stuck in that place and as a singer if you have to get stuck in that place because that's where it's at for your audience you know it's a safety zone that's unacceptable is the one that's why I'm playing at the farmers market in the minute I want to play some things off a laptop right now I want to show you some things we're gonna together we're gonna try hope that no one text me anything embarrassing while I when I show this to you so this is from a few years ago you can stay there you can see there on my covering an overview so this is from the Kennedy Center Honors when when Hart did a heritage stairway to heaven that I know have a look I love the choir come what a contrast [ __ ] out [Music] [Applause] I'm chasing something [Music] I love David Letterman over there too okay so what was going through your [Music] what was going through your mind when you were watching this how much had been lost and how this great glorification was so far away from the initial intention of the song and current and the way that time modifies and these are occasions which celebrate you know the connection between music and people and its effect which is great but I thought this environment was like so far out and so it was just like what am I doing here and what's happened to the song right and isn't it beautiful but did I like it for the last previous 20 years no also it was it was a little bit of a rediscovery of your own music no no it was just that all those different feelings coming at the same your moved individually yeah I mean I mean floods it's a good job they didn't play the lemon song but you know the thing is it's like what the hell has happened to everything and how beautiful was that in its first something first conceptually to achieve a song to take it from start to finish in that sort of almost symphonic build even with the fact it gets faster you know it's great intentional sort of drama and all that is super but it's kind of them I'd gone so far away from the whole idea of bow ties and evening dress and celebrating Led Zep like that yeah because we were we were the guys that weren't allowed into bars because they didn't like the look of us and we were given the keys to the city of Memphis Tennessee by the mayor at 7 p.m. on stage and under house arrest at 10 p.m. right so so there you are being being celebrated as not the establishment but what it doesn't matter if the establishment can be really good look at Robert De Niro yes doing a great job using the establishment as a Clarion you know twice I've said that today I sort of had that word what's your relationship with the song now with stairway now uh I don't know it's like a relative of mine somewhere yeah you know you know he's there but he's by the sea somewhere I got his hands behind his head and he's lying back in the sand going love me what I always loved about it was always our last dance at our school dances so it was seven minutes you got to dance with that person you had your eye on you know okay yeah Oh mine was the liquidator my mom's was I asked her about that the other day I said well you know what was your stairway to heaven when you went to when you're at the school dance she said a whiter shade of pale oh no see it's all about drama and melodrama and you know some other stuff yes yeah length yeah I got another video to show you one more Oh fantastic yeah yeah yeah [Music] kick down there she really has it down to a yeah whoa can you believe she can play like I said I mean there's loads of them that she does so this is I should point out this is yo-yo kasama a eight year old girl from Japan playing along with good times bad times from the first Led Zeppelin record what'd you think it was that made I mean she's really nailing some really complicated music there hey that's not easy to do no no no and the thing is yeah I love when you I love when you can see her smile at the music that yeah yeah that's great isn't it really well I know where she can get a good job that didn't bring some sort of teachers with the mom and dad yeah that's amazing isn't it really yes you see so many references with kids because let's face it John's right foot is just the most spectacular right foot in the history of popular music in the last 60 years I think because he bothered to play those licks with the bass drum he didn't have to do that but it's part of him I mean we had the band a joy before that before step mmm it was insane some nights what we would do would mime sort of sort of ad-lib vocal [ __ ] and all that sand him doing that he was just amazing and continued to be so all the way through because he was influenced by so many different players and you know when I first met him he was in a kind of beat group but he was also the singer mostly as well so I mean I you know how was his voice was brilliant yeah yeah he was a really good singer yeah in fact toward the end of our time together he used to say oh I don't play the drums anymore we only gonna play the same old [ __ ] she said he said I want to sing you play the drums I said okay yeah I'll do that the other guys we know go up the front and start singing heavily brothers songs yeah and I'd try and be Simon Kirke yeah it was very funny what do you think but what does it say to you that she's 8 years old in Japan and in the sense of joy over her face you can't you can't fake that kind of thing you know she still loves Led Zeppelin she still loves but that's inordinately your really difficult thing to yeah yeah there are one or two drummers who became singers apart from John yeah who you put them behind the drum kit and they they could can't do that that's just really really neat and that was the first kind of poppy song that we wrote in Zeppelin really mm-hmm from there on it was Daniel all the way what is it what does it say to you that there's eight-year-olds who still are moved by Led Zeppelin that there are 15 year olds still move by Led Zeppelin in 2018 what's that what I'm gonna do with anything I know but most times you know most of times you know a lot of people listen to Chopin you know it's just you know yeah yeah but look it's access hmm easy access and right now what happened to Rock happen to rock whatever happened to black music from you know from Earth I suppose where should we go from Billie Holiday through to Nina Simone's through to Mavis Staples suitor one of us happened to everything is all everything's on the move so if you want to I think when that Viking film came out there the last year and they put immigrant song on it yeah yeah whatever it's called I know what you're talking about yes yeah I got it because immigrants are worth or rhaggy yeah yeah so that was one of the names of the Icelandic football team to their channel in Argentina but we played we played in Argentina and in Iceland and we got the plane on the way back yeah I started working the lyrics to that song and immigrant song and on you go the drums on that isn't spectacular but when that came out in the movie suddenly in a whole new world or downloads and well that's dreams bang yeah there it is however many million versions or you know downloads of that streams and and in most of the kids didn't know who it was mmm-hmm so it's access yeah you know but it's also meaningful to them I mean like but I mean if you can hear it every day yeah if you could play music of substance from any era and play it often enough it becomes as this microphone that's going on there it's going down yeah you said something to me earlier interesting you said sometimes you can hear a song too much sometimes you and I haven't found that with a lot of util with a lot of your music I love a lot of you music it's played an awful lot on the radio a lot of you music it's played an awful lot at school dances at stadiums in movies it it doesn't seem too great on anybody it's does that be great you know despite the long long long and winding road it's like how many times you got to hear it's like the songs good mmm but you know so of one final question what do you think bonza would say what would John Bonham say if he saw that video I think he'd be amazed I think he'd be so chuffed because mm-hmm excuse me when when we he and I went down and became part of the yardbirds in the beginning yeah we were both from the same place and we were both a little bit grubby and as time went on and he got himself a room that he could put a jukebox in he used to set it up and he used to play stuff like let me see the spinners and you know some great Motown and black sold stuff like that and poor little Jason had a tiny weeny baby kit and had to have it set up right next to the jukebox and Seana play rubber rubber band man or something like that and say now get it right oh man Jason you know I'm it was all good the good nature should have and Jason had really work on getting it right and that's exactly what this girl's did somebody said listen to this do you like this and get it right that's great I think it also say that's really hard to do incredibly huh that's harder to do than rubberband yeah rubber plant it's such a pleasure to meet you fine thank you same to you a bit of a trip but nice to meet you yeah well you can do any trip you like really I know I did Yeah right Robert plants new album carry fire is out now

Channel: q on cbc

Views: 115,312

Rating: 4.9317122 out of 5

Keywords: Robert Plant, Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant interview, robert plant 2018, robert plant interview 2018, led zeppelin 2018, cbc q, tom power interview, interview

Id: mW3O04kOo3k

Length: 39min 54sec (2394 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 22 2018