Robert Plant: A Life (24 page)

Plant continued to work off the grid, both Grant, his nominal manager, and his record label, Atlantic, being left in the dark about his new project. In the summer of ’82, he moved base to Monmouth in rural South Wales, there hiring out Rockfield Studios, a residential facility set within miles of open countryside.

Different musicians came and went. Andy Silvester returned on bass, until his confidence failed him and Paul Martinez, a seasoned session man, stepped in. Bad Company’s Simon Kirke tried out on drums, but didn’t click. Two tracks were recorded with Cozy Powell, who’d drummed with the Jeff Beck Group and most recently in ex-Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore’s band, Rainbow. The rest were done with Phil Collins of Genesis, who completed his parts in just three days.

“To begin with there was no idea of doing a record or putting a band together,” insists LeFevre. “Robert was just interested in pushing this thing further to see where it went and what it felt like.

“Eventually, it turned into the making of the first album and then it became a real fucking gas. It felt like a socialist situation, where everyone was equal. Of course, everyone was aware that Robert was funding it, but that wasn’t the point. It genuinely felt as if it was all about the music.”

“Certainly to start with, Robert kind of let us get on with things,” says Jezz Woodroffe. “The main structure for most of the songs came from Robbie Blunt and me. When we’d got a basic arrangement, Robert would develop it from there. Though I never heard the finished vocals—he’d always sing them when the rest of us were off down the pub.”

The finished record,
Pictures at Eleven
, did sound like a fresh start, one divested of Zeppelin’s heaviness, both musically and in terms of the emotional baggage that had been carried through the band’s last two albums. If anything, it was too well mannered. It now sounds very much of its time, clean and neat but with no hidden depths.

Plant’s singing was assured and unburdened, although he cut loose just the once, on “Slow Dancer.” The album’s best track, this was also the one that most echoed Zeppelin. An intense, exotic swirl, its driving guitar line was lifted from an Arab song, “Leylet Hob” (“Night of Love”). This had been most notably sung by the famed Egyptian vocalist Oum Kalsoum, a tape of which Plant had picked up in Morocco in 1972 and carried around with him ever since.

Once the record was finished, Plant at last reached out to Peter Grant and Phil Carson, who ran Atlantic Records in the U.K. He invited the two men up to Rockfield to hear
Pictures at Eleven
. It was a tense occasion, with neither man showing much enthusiasm for the music or the musicians that Plant had surrounded himself with.

“Phil Carson wasn’t particularly happy about Robert’s new direction,” recalls Woodroffe. “He was always telling us to go back to that Zeppelin sound, because he knew the kind of money that it generated. He was a supermarket manager before he went to Atlantic. I remember him telling me that if he could sell beans, he could shift records.”

“I think that Peter said something to the effect of, ‘You’d better just pay these guys off, because you’ve got a career here,’ ” says LeFevre. “He wanted Robert to be in a supergroup situation and not playing with unknowns, because then they’d all make lots of money.

“Robert’s reaction to that was two-fold: ‘I take your point,’ and, ‘No, this is my thing.’ I think it’s true to say that Robert’s respect for Peter had diminished during the previous five-year period, and for obvious reasons. The camp had been split and Peter had come down on one side more than the other. It had always been, ‘Jimmy’s done this, and Robert’s sung on it and written the lyrics.’ Robert didn’t want to go back to that, because he’d tasted a bit of freedom and intellectual satisfaction outside of the machine.”

Grant and Carson were reluctant for the record to come out and there was a standoff. Carson contacted Ahmet Ertegun in New York, asking him to intervene on their behalf. Plant told me years later that he felt as if Grant were trying to sabotage his solo career before it was begun. He turned to Phil Collins for advice and was urged to stand his ground.

“I had a meeting with Ahmet, Peter and Phil Carson,” he told me. “I went into the room and said, ‘I’m going to do this on my own now and if anybody here doesn’t take me seriously, then all we’ve known between us is over.’ The doors had been flung open and I wasn’t going to hang about.”

In reality, the resolution wasn’t that clear cut. When Plant returned to Rockfield, it was evident things had changed. Beforehand, he had contemplated calling the project the Band, or something similar, to suggest that this was a meeting of equals. That was now forgotten and
Pictures at Eleven
would be released as a solo record under his own name.

Robbie Blunt and Jezz Woodroffe had also been led to believe that there would be an even split in the publishing monies for songwriting, a potentially lucrative arrangement. This, too, was no longer the case.

“Up until that point it had been, ‘This is a co-operative and we’re going to share everything,’ ” recounts LeFevre. “Then all of a sudden it wasn’t. Everybody went, ‘Uh? That’s not what we were talking about last week.’ Yes, he was funding it, and he was the star and without him none of it would have happened for them. But it put a sour taste in everyone’s mouth.”

It also brought an end to Plant’s professional dealings with Grant. Yet he remained fiercely proud of the record itself. He took a tape of it to play to Page at his house in Windsor. It was an emotional meeting and one pregnant with meaning, the last cutting of the ties—and in the very place that Zeppelin had come to such a dreadful stop.

Page had been working on a soundtrack to the sequel to the dismal vigilante movie,
Death Wish
. He was otherwise living in a land of shadows. As much as Plant had been emboldened, Zeppelin’s passing had left him bereft. Plant also sent a copy of
Pictures at Eleven
to Jones.

“He said, ‘Well, ah, I thought you could have done something a little bit better than that, old chap,’ ” Plant told Steven Rosen of
Guitar World.
“So I said, ‘Well, thank you.’ And yet again, I was just the singer of the songs.”

Plant floated the idea of taking his new band out on tour but was talked out of it. He didn’t have anything like enough new material and he was unwilling to fall back on Zeppelin’s songs. He instead decided to get on with a second album.

Before doing so, he took off with Maureen and the children for a holiday in Morocco in the spring of 1982. It was a bittersweet time for the couple, the last trip they’d share as man and wife. They had clung to each other through the hardest of years, but doing so had exhausted their relationship and the wreckage resulting from Karac’s death was still between them.

Pictures at Eleven
was released on June 28, 1982 and charted at Number 5 in the States and went three places higher in the U.K. It was also positively reviewed, Plant later claiming that he had framed the most glowing notices and hung them up around Jennings Farm.

“I’d cut off my hair and hadn’t played or listened to a Zeppelin record for two years,” he told Tom Hibbert of
Q
. “It would have been longer, but my daughter’s boyfriend, who was in a band, started telling me that part of ‘Black Dog’ was a mistake, because there was a bar of 5/4 in the middle of some 4/4. Well, my dander was up at that, so I pulled the record out and plonked it on. I said, ‘Listen, you little runt, that’s no mistake.’ ”

Work began on Plant’s second album in Hereford, a picturesque English city 16 miles from the border with Wales. There, Plant rented his friend Roy Harper’s rambling 15th-century house. The only new addition to the ranks was Barriemore Barlow, who had previously been a member of prog-rockers Jethro Tull and was sharing drumming duties with Phil Collins.

From Hereford the party moved on to the Mediterranean island of Ibiza in the summer of 1982. Phil Carson had a home on the island and hooked them up with the Australian owner of a luxury hotel, Pikes. The whole place was let out to them, the band setting up their gear around the hotel swimming pool.

“I put a tarpaulin up over the yard, the weather was beautiful and we had as much fun as making the first record, if not more,” says LeFevre. “We were playing music outdoors and going out to bars at night. The juices were flowing. It was a fantastic period, a rebirth in a lot of ways.”

There was, though, a marked shift in Plant’s demeanour. He took a tighter grip on the reins, leaving no one in any doubt as to who was calling the shots. It was as though he had suddenly realized he could run things as Page had done in Zeppelin. He proved to be just as demanding as his former band mate, and no born diplomat.

“He can be incredibly intense and very, very controlling,” says LeFevre. “He winds people up the wrong way. He knows what he wants but he doesn’t know how to put it across to other people terribly well sometimes. Same with that great historical knowledge of music he has—he uses that in some fairly inappropriate ways, too.

“There was one particular guitar solo that Robbie Blunt was trying to do. Robert made him play it over and over again. In the end Robbie was exhausted and totally bemused. Robert said to him, ‘Don’t you think you should use a Gibson Les Paul?’—which is what Jimmy played. Robbie played a Fender. I had to intervene and tell Robert that we’d already got more than enough down on tape.”

“I’m only dominant when I don’t like what’s going on,” Plant insisted to John Hutchinson of
Record
magazine, after the album’s release. “If Jimmy and I had disagreements, we would curse each other to everyone else but be very polite to one another. With these new people, it’s extremely difficult. Because my track record is a little daunting for anyone that is going to step into that situation with me.”

None of these tensions were betrayed on the finished record.
The Principle of Moments
was a further step removed from the tumult of Zeppelin, being more refined and sedate than its predecessor, even if its slick production has aged no better.

“Robert had this thing about trying to be modern, which we all used to take the piss out of him for,” says LeFevre. “I was forever saying to him, ‘Why don’t you sing some blues-based rock songs, man?’ ‘No, no, I don’t want to!’ ”

One song did stand out. Written at Roy Harper’s house on a Sunday afternoon, “Big Log” was built around a simple, nagging guitar figure, closer in feel to the Police than Led Zeppelin. It would give Plant his first hit single and helped propel
The Principle of Moments
into the Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic in the summer of 1983, repeating the success of
Pictures at Eleven
. Atlantic put the album out on Plant’s new vanity label, Es Paranza, there being no suggestion now that this was anything but a vehicle for its star.

It was against this backdrop that Plant’s marriage to Maureen came to an end. He did not join the family on holiday that year, asking his former assistant, Dennis Sheehan, to take care of things in his place.

“We went to the island of Madeira,” recalls Sheehan. “I took Maureen, Carmen, a friend of Carmen’s from school, and Logan. I didn’t get into any kind of conversation with Maureen, but I realized that they were in the middle of splitting up and that this was the defining break. We didn’t do very much. I hired a car, but it’s not the most exciting place.

“I suppose I was there to be a father to the kids and to make sure Maureen was OK. I guess Robert felt that as I was a family man myself and having children, I’d be responsible enough to look after them and also be discreet.”

The divorce was finalized that August, the same month that Plant began his first solo tour. He wasn’t alone in that respect. Both Jezz Woodroffe and Robbie Blunt were also going through divorces.

“All of us were on a different planet to the one we were on when the band started,” says Woodroffe. “I had a home and a family, and in one year I was only there for two weeks out of fifty-two. How could anyone have a normal relationship in those circumstances? Did we help each other? Not really. Because we all had our own set of things going wrong.”

Going on tour was a relief, a welcome distraction. They started out in North America, selling out twenty-three arena shows, including dates at Zeppelin’s old stomping grounds, New York’s Madison Square Garden and the Forum in Los Angeles. Plant and his band, with Phil Collins on drums, traveled on an old Viscount turboprop plane. A sense of bonhomie pervaded, and the shows were tight and rapturously received, with Plant confident enough in his own songs to shun Zeppelin’s.

“It was almost like a spiritual quest,” recalls Woodroffe. “It felt like we were all walking five feet off the ground. The plane went about 60 mph—it was like being on a bumblebee. We had one near miss on it. Flames flashed out of one of the motors just as we were taking off. No one noticed but Robert. He didn’t say anything to the rest of us, he just ran for the exit door.”

This drama was short-lived and the plane took off a few minutes later. But then, the tour as a whole seemed to be blessed.

“I saw the very best of him on that tour,” says Woodroffe. “He was all that he’d been before but in a different way. He had this amazing vocal talent but also the brains to know how to apply it.”

“It felt like Robert had shrugged off the mantle of being a rock god,” says LeFevre. “It made him seem more down to earth and also he became re-engaged with his talent. I think he’d been disengaged from it in the latter years of Zeppelin. Nothing was as intense as it had been. He was happier.”

For all that, on the road, and especially in the States, Plant found he couldn’t shake off the specter of Zeppelin. It was always there, still resonating, still exerting a deep and primal power.

“Page came to see the show at Madison Square Garden and Robert asked him to get up and do the last number with us,” says Woodroffe. “He walked on and the place just blew apart. He hadn’t done a thing—just stood there with Robert. What we’d done for the preceding two hours was completely and utterly forgotten.”