Robert Plant, musician
"I can’t be a panto artist, I’m not a ‘Best-Of’ type of guy. And if that’s the only way to turn a dollar, or waste your time, y’know, I’d go back to tarmac laying. I once tarmaced the drive of Mandy Rice-Davis’ school…”* – Robert Plant interviewed on BBC Radio WM, April 2005.
Robert Anthony Plant was born in August 1948 in West Bromwich. Staffordshire and grew up in the nearby town of Kidderminster. Leaving school at 15, he avoided a career as a chartered accountant and joined various bands in the Black Country, such as The New Memphis Bluesbreakers, The Black Snake Moan, The Delta Blues Band and The Crawling King Snakes. He worked by day for a construction company, laying tarmac on roads. In 1968, Jimmy Page and Peter Grant came to see him perform at a teachers training college outside of Birmingham and Led Zeppelin was born.
The cover of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, released in 1971, was a photograph taken in Smethwick, near Windmill Lane. This view no longer exists, even the high rise flats have recently come down. The album was unofficially untitled, though it’s referred to as Four Symbols, ZOSO. Most people just call it Led Zeppelin IV.
One song on the album, ‘Stairway to Heaven’, went on to be the most-requested rock song of all time. Still is being played an estimated 4,200 times per year, it is also the biggest-selling single piece of sheet music clocking up an annual average of 15,000 copies. In 1982, a consumer protection committee of the California State Assembly held a hearing into the potentially malign influence of the song. Paying far too much attention to the old adage ‘the devil is in the detail’, several experts claimed that ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ when played backward, contains hidden messages including ‘Here’s to my sweet Satan.’
That’s what you get for putting runes on the album artwork and inscribing an Aleister Crowley quote into the runoff matrix of the vinyl. Still a great record though, Robert! It was the kind of record that gained you the nodding respect of your mates’ older brothers at the youth club. In some parts of the Black Country, the novel line “Do you fancy coming back to my space for a coffee and Led Zep” was apparently an invitation to sexual intercourse.
(Nothing to do with the opening lyrics of ‘Black Dog’ , the record’s blistering opening track: Hey hey momma said the way you move gonna make you sweat gonna make you groove…)
Robert continues to perform and make music and be seen about the Black Country. Robert Plant, a Wonder of the West Midlands, we salute you.
*Footnote: Mandy Rice-Davis was a Birmingham girl involved in the Profumo scandal of 1963, when the Minister of War in the Tory government resigned after lying to Parliament about his involvement with a teenage topless dancer and call girl who was also seeing a KGB agent and Soviet Naval attache. http://www.vanityfair.com/
