About

more information about Robert Plant

Robert Anthony Plant (born 20 August 1948), is an English rock singer and songwriter, famous for his membership in the English rock band Led Zeppelin as the lead vocalist, as well as for his successful solo career. He recently released a folk based album with folk singer Alison Krauss.

Early Career

Plant was born in West Bromwich, then Staffordshire, in West Midlands, to parents Robert C. and Annie C. (Cain) Plant, but grew up in Halesowen, formerly Worcestershire, now part of the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley. He left school in his mid-teens and developed a strong passion for the blues, mainly through his admiration for Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Willie Dixon, Robert Johnson and early rendition of songs in this genre. He abandoned training as a chartered accountant after only two weeks to attend college in an effort to gain more GCE passes and to become part of the Midlands blues scene.

His early blues influences included artists such as Robert Johnson, Bukka White, Skip James, Jerry Miller and Sleepy John Estes. Plant did various jobs while pursuing his music career, one of which was working for the major British construction company Wimpey in Birmingham in 1967 laying tarmac on roads. He also worked at Woolworths in Halesowen town for a short period of time. He cut three obscure singles on CBS Records and sang with a variety of bands, including The Crawling King Snakes, which brought him into contact with drummer John Bonham. They both went on to play in the Band of Joy, merging blues with newer psychedelic trends. Though his early career met with no commercial success, word quickly spread about the "young man with the powerful voice".

Led Zeppelin

In 1968, the guitarist Jimmy Page was in search of a lead singer for his new band and met Plant after being turned down by his first choice, Terry Reid, who referred him to a show at a teacher training college in BirminghamÑ where Plant was singing in a band named Hobbstweedle. Page explained:

Plant and Page immediately hit it off with a shared musical passion and after Plant joined the band they began their writing collaboration with reworkings of earlier blues songs, although Plant would receive no songwriting credits on the band's first album, allegedly because he was still under contract to CBS Records at the time. Plant brought along John Bonham as drummer, and along with John Paul Jones, who had worked with Jimmy Page as a studio musician, Led Zeppelin was formed in 1968.

Led Zeppelin's self-titled debut album hit the charts in 1969 and is widely credited as a catalyst for the heavy metal genre. Plant, however, has commented that it is unfair for people to think of Zeppelin as heavy metal, as almost a third of their music was acoustic.

In August 1975, he and his wife Maureen (m. 1968-1983) were seriously injured in a car crash in Rhodes, Greece. This significantly affected the production of Led Zeppelin's seventh album Presence for a few months while he recovered, and forced the band to cancel the remaining tour dates for the year.

In July 1977 his oldest son Karac died of an infection when Plant was engaged on Led Zeppelin's concert tour of the United States. Karac's death later inspired him to write the song "All My Love" in tribute, featured on Led Zeppelin's final studio LP, 1979's In Through the Out Door.

These events had a major effect on Plant, and represent a turning point in Led Zeppelin's music, as In Through The Out Door featured a lighter and more progressive sound under the direction of John Paul Jones, with fewer of the hard-rocking numbers the band had been known for. Plant has told an interviewer "I had a couple of bad knocks which, no matter what happens, will always have taken their toll on me. I know that my kind of vision, or the carefree element I had, disappeared instantly when I had my automobile accident in 1975. That kind of ramshackled 'I'll take the world now' attitude was completely gone."

Solo Career

After the breakup of Led Zeppelin in 1980 (following the death of John Bonham), Plant pursued a successful solo career beginning with Pictures at Eleven in 1982, followed by 1983's The Principle of Moments. Popular tracks from this period include "Big Log" (a Top 20 hit in 1983), "In the Mood" (1984), "Little by Little" (1985), "Tall Cool One" (a #25 hit in 1988) and "I Believe" (1993), another song written for and dedicated to his late son, Karac. In 1984, Plant formed a short-lived all-star group with Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck called The Honeydrippers, who had a #3 hit with a remake of the Phil Phillips' tune, "Sea of Love", along with a lesser hit with "Rockin' at Midnight." Plant avoided performing Led Zeppelin songs through much of this period.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Plant co-wrote three solo albums with keyboardist/songwriter Phil Johnstone. Now and Zen, Manic Nirvana, and Fate of Nations (featuring Maire Brennan of Clannad). It was Johnstone who talked Plant into playing Led Zeppelin songs in his live shows, something Plant had resisted, not wanting to be forever known as "the former Led Zeppelin vocalist." Plant first collaborated with Jimmy Page post-Zeppelin in the studio on the 1988 Page solo effort, Outrider. He later collaborated with Page on the 1998 album, Walking into Clarksdale, which features all original material from the pair. Starting at the close of 1999, Plant performed at several small venues with his folk-rock band, named Priory of Brion.

n 2002, with his then newly-formed band Strange Sensation, Plant released a widely acclaimed collection of mostly blues and folk remakes, Dreamland. Contrasting with this lush collection of often relatively obscure remakes, the second album with Strange Sensation, Mighty ReArranger (2005), contains new, original songs. Both have received some of the most favorable reviews of Plant's solo career and four Grammy nominations, two in 2003 and two in 2006.

As a former member of Led Zeppelin, along with Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, Plant received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005 and the Polar Music Prize in 2006. Plant still actively tours. His sets typically include recent, but not only, solo material and plenty of Led Zeppelin favourites, often with new and expanded arrangements. A DVD titled Soundstage: Robert Plant and the Strange Sensation, featuring his Soundstage performance (filmed at the Soundstage Studios in Chicago on 16 September 2005), was released in October 2006. An expansive box set of his solo work, Nine Lives, was released in November 2006, which expanded all of his albums with various b-sides, demos, and live cuts. It was accompanied by a DVD. All his solo works were re-released with these extra tracks individually. In 2007, Plant contributed two tracks to the Fats Domino tribute album Goin' Home: A Tribute To Fats Domino, "It Keeps Rainin'" with the Lil' Band O' Gold and "Valley Of Tears" with The Soweto Gospel Choir.

With Alison Krauss

Since 2007, Plant has been recording and performing with bluegrass star Alison Krauss. A duet album, Raising Sand, was released on 23 October 2007 on Rounder Records. The album, recorded in Nashville and Los Angeles and produced by T-Bone Burnett, includes performances of lesser-known material from R&B, blues, folk, and country songwriters including Mel Tillis, Townes Van Zandt, Gene Clark, Tom Waits, Doc Watson, Little Milton Campbell and the Everly Brothers. The song "Gone Gone Gone (Done Moved On)" from Raising Sand won a Grammy for Best Pop Collaboration With Vocals in 2008. The album has been successful critically and commercially, and was certified platinum on 4 March 2008.

Further reference to Fairport Convention occurs in October 2008, when it is reported that Plant has collaborated on a new album by original Fairport vocalist Judy Dyble, due for release early 2009.