Robert Plant: A Life (2 page)

© Redferns

1

THE BLACK COUNTRY

Bloody hell, Rob did a fantastic Elvis impression.

Robert Anthony Plant was born on August 20, 1948 in West Bromwich, in the heart of England’s industrial Midlands. His parents were among the first to benefit from the new National Health Service—the grand vision for a system of universal free health care set out by Clement Attlee’s Labour government upon coming to power in 1945 that had been made a reality the month before their son’s birth.

Plant’s father was also named Robert, like his father before him. A qualified civil engineer, he had served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. Before the war he had been a keen violinist but the responsibilities of providing for his family took precedence over such things when he returned home. He retained, however, a love of classical music. His other great passion was cycling and he would often compete in local road races. He was by all accounts a decent, straightforward man, no more or less conservative in his outlook than other fathers of the time.

Father and son found a shared bond in football. Plant was five years old when his father first took him to see a local professional team, Wolverhampton Wanderers. Sitting on his dad’s knee he watched as the players came out from the dressing rooms and onto the brilliant green pitch, those from Wolves in their gold and black strip, and felt euphoric as the noise of the thousands-strong crowd consumed him. His father told him that Billy Wright, the Wolves and England captain, had waved up to him as he emerged from the tunnel that day.

His mother was Annie, although people often called her by her middle name, Celia. Like most households then, it was she who ran the home and put food on the table. Plant would inherit his mother’s laugh, a delighted chuckle. She called him “my little scoundrel.” The Plants were Catholics and raised their son within the strictures of their religion. Later on they would have a second child—a daughter, Alison. But Robert was to be their only son, and as such it was he who was the receptacle of all their initial hopes and dreams.

From an early age, Plant can remember music being brought into the family home. His grandfather had founded a works brass band in West Bromwich and was accomplished on the trombone, fiddle and piano.

“My great-grandfather was a brass bandsman, too,” he told me. “So everybody played. My dad could play, but never did. That whole idea of sitting around the hearth and playing together had gone by his generation. He went to war, lost his opportunities, and had to come home and dig deep to get them back, like so many men of the time.”

The town in which the young Plant spent his first years was two miles by road from the sprawling conurbation of Birmingham, England’s second city. Locals called the regions to the north and west of Birmingham the Black Country. This was on account of the choking smoke that had belched out from the thousands of factory chimneys that sprung up there during Britain’s industrial revolution of the 19th century. Writing of these acrid emissions in
The Old Curiosity Shop
, Charles Dickens described how they “poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light and made foul the melancholy air.”

By 1830 the Black Country’s 130 square miles had been transformed into an almost entirely industrial landscape of mines, foundries and factories, a consequence of sitting upon the thickest coal seam in the country. The rush to heavy industry brought not just bricks and mortar, but also the creation of new canal and rail networks, enabling the Black Country to export its mineral wealth to the far-flung corners of the British Empire.

They were still hewing coal out of the Black Country earth in the 1950s, although the glory days of the mines had passed. Iron and steel were worked intensively in local factories until the 1980s, glass to this day. The anchors and chains for the RMS
Titanic
’s first—and last—voyage of 1912 were forged in the Black Country town of Netherton, and the ship’s glass and crystal stemware was fired and molded in the glassworks of nearby Stourbridge.

In keeping with their austere beginnings the people of the Black Country pride themselves on being hard workers; tough and durable, they tend in general toward a stoical disposition and a droll sense of humor. Their particular dialect, which survives to this day, has its roots in the earliest examples of spoken English and is often impenetrable to outsiders. Habitually spoken in a singsong voice it conveys nothing so much as amusement and bemusement. There is an old saying around these parts: “Black Country born, Black Country bred, strong in the arm and thick in the head.” This was how they went out into the world.

Two of the most prolific gunfighters of the Wild West, Wes Hardin and “Bad” Roy Hill, who between them killed seventy men, had their roots in the Black Country town of Lye, their families leaving from there for the promised land of America and their own subsequent infamy. The ancestors of Wyatt Earp, the Wild West’s great lawman who wrote his name into history at the O.K. Corral in 1881, hailed from Walsall, less than four miles from where Plant took his first steps.

When the Second World War came the region was inextricably tied to it. Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister at the time of its outbreak who had misguidedly attempted to appease Adolf Hitler, was born into one of Birmingham’s great political dynasties. Although the war was eventually won, its aftereffects lingered on into the following decade. The rationing of foodstuffs such as meat and dairy continued in Britain until 1954. At the time of Plant’s childhood, West Bromwich and the Black Country, like so many of the country’s towns and cities, still bore the scars from six years of conflict. As a center for the manufacture of munitions the area had been a prime target for German bombs. Throughout Birmingham and the Black Country were the shells of buildings and houses blasted into ruin. It was an everyday occurrence to find the tail end of bombs or shards of shrapnel littering the streets.

“The whole area was still pretty much a bomb site in the early 1950s,” recalls Trevor Burton, who grew up in Aston to the northeast of Birmingham’s city center, and who would later cross paths with Plant on the local music scene of the 1960s. “The bomb sites, these piles of rubble and blown-out houses, they were our playgrounds.”

The 1950s would bring great change to Britain. At the start of the decade few Britons owned a TV set; those who did had just one channel to watch—in black and white. The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on June 2, 1953 led to an upsurge in TV ownership and by the end of the decade 75 percent of British homes had a set. The ’50s also witnessed the opening of Britain’s first motorways—the M6 in 1958 and the M1 in 1959—establishing faster, more direct road links between cities such as London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester. Such progress brought the world closer to Britain, making it appear more accessible.

Yet at the same time Britain’s role on the global stage was diminishing. The Suez Crisis of 1956, during which Britain tried and failed to seize back control of the Suez Canal from Egypt, hastened the end of Empire. The United States and the Soviet Union were the new superpowers, Britain being relegated to the role of junior partner to the Americans in the decades-long Cold War that was to unfold between those two nations.

The national mood in Britain, however, was one of relief at the end of the war in Europe and of hope for better times. This began to be realized from the middle of the decade, by which time the nation’s economy was booming and wages for skilled labor were increasing. A rush by the British to be socially upwardly mobile left a void for unskilled workers that was filled by successive governments with immigrant labor from the Commonwealth. With these workers populating its steel mills and foundries—and now its car plants, too—Birmingham and the Black Country soon ranked among the country’s most multicultural areas. To the already healthy Irish population in Birmingham there would be added vibrant communities drawn from the Caribbean, India and Pakistan.

In 1957, so pronounced was the collective sense of affluence and aspiration that Harold Macmillan, the Conservative prime minister, predicted an unprecedented age of prosperity for the country. “Let us be frank about it,” he said, “most of our people have never had it so good.” The British people agreed and elected Macmillan to a second term of office in October 1959.

The Plant family embodied the rise of the middle classes in Macmillan’s Britain. As a skilled worker, Robert Plant, Sr. could soon afford to move his wife and son out from West Bromwich to the greener fringes of the Black Country. They came to leafy Hayley Green, a well-heeled suburban enclave located fifteen miles from the center of Birmingham.

Their new home was at 64 Causey Farm Road, on a wide street of sturdy prewar houses just off the main road between Birmingham and the satellite town of Kidderminster. It was a neighborhood of traditional values and twitching net curtains, populated by white-collar workers. Unlike West Bromwich, it was surrounded by countryside. Farmland was abundant, the Wyre Forest close by and Hayley Green itself backed onto the Clent Hills.

Situated near the end of Causey Farm Road, number 64 was one of the more modest houses on the street. Built of red brick, it had a small drive and a garage, and from its neat back garden there was an uninterrupted view out to the rolling hills. For the young Plant there would have been many places to go off and explore: those hills, or the woods at the end of the road, or over the stiles and across the fields to the town of Stourbridge, with its bustling high street.

It was during this period that many of Plant’s lifelong passions were first fired. The Clent Hills and their surrounding towns and villages were the inspiration for the landscape of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the writer of
The Lord of the Rings
trilogy and
The Hobbit
having grown up in the area in the 1890s. Plant devoured Tolkien’s books as a child, and time and again in later life would reference the author’s fantastical world in his lyrics.

In the summer the Plants, like so many other Black Country families of the time, would drive west for their holidays, crossing the border into Wales. They would head for Snowdonia National Park, 823 square miles of rugged uplands in the far north-west of the country. It was an area rich in Celtic folklore and history, and this, together with the wildness of the terrain, captivated the young Plant.

He was entranced by such Welsh myths as those that swirled around the mountain Cadair Idris, a brooding edifice at the southern edge of Snowdonia near the small market town of Machynlleth, which the Plants would often visit. It was said that the mountain was both the seat of King Arthur’s kingdom and that of the giant Idris, who used it as a place of rest from which he would sit and gaze up at the evening stars. According to legend anyone who sleeps the night on the slopes of Cadair Idris is destined to wake the next morning as either a poet or a madman.

At Machynlleth Plant learned of the exploits of the man who would become his great folk hero, the Welsh king Owain Glyndŵr. It was in the town that Glyndŵr founded the first Welsh parliament in 1404, after leading an armed rebellion against the occupying English forces of King Henry IV. The uprising was crushed five years later, and Glyndŵr’s wife and two of his daughters were sent to their deaths in the Tower of London. Glyndŵr himself escaped capture, fighting on until his death in 1416.

But for Plant there would be nothing to match the impact that rock ’n’ roll was to have upon him as a child. Like every other kid who grew up in postwar Britain he would have been aware of an almost suffocating sense of primness and propriety. Children were taught to respect their elders and betters. In both the way they dressed and were expected to behave they were molded to be very much like smaller versions of their parents. Authority was not to be questioned and conformity was the norm.

The musical landscape of Britain in the ’50s was similarly lacking in generational diversity. Variety shows, the big swing bands and communal dances were popular with old and young alike. As that decade rolled into the next, the country’s clubs heaved to the sounds of trad jazz, making stars of such bandleaders as Chris Barber, Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball, who played music that was as cozy and unthreatening as the social mores of the time. In the United States, however, a cultural firestorm was brewing.

Elvis Presley, young and full of spunk, released his first recording on the Memphis label Sun Records in the summer of 1954. It was called “That’s All Right,” and it gave birth to a new sound. A bastardization of the traditional blues songs of black African-Americans and the country music of their white counterparts, rock ’n’ roll was loud, brash and impossibly exciting—and it arrived like an earthquake, the tremors from which reverberated across the Atlantic. Behind Elvis came Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent and others, all young men with fire in their bellies and, often as not, a mad, bad glint in their eyes.

In 1956 the mere act of Elvis swivelling his hips on TV’s
Ed Sullivan Show
was enough to shock America’s moral guardians. It was also instrumental in opening up the first real generational divide on either side of the Atlantic. Elvis’s gyrations acted as a rallying point for both British and American teenagers, and as an affront to their parents’ sense of moral decency.

In the English Midlands rock ’n’ roll first arrived in person in the form of Bill Haley. In 1954 Haley, who hailed from Michigan, released one of the first rock ’n’ roll singles, “Rock Around the Clock.” He followed it with an even bigger hit, “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” When, on his first British tour, he arrived at Birmingham Odeon in February 1957 the city’s teenagers queued all around the block for tickets. At the show itself they leaped out of their seats and danced wildly in the aisles. It mattered not one bit that, in the flesh, Haley had none of Elvis’s youthful virility.

Laurie Hornsby, a music historian from Birmingham, recalls: “The man who was responsible for going down to Southampton docks to meet Haley off the ship was Tony Hall, who was the promotions man for Decca Records in London. He told me that he stood there at the bottom of the ship’s gangplank, and down came this old-age pensioner hanging onto his hair for grim death. Hall thought, ‘My God, I’ve got to sell this to the British teenager.’ But sell it he did.”