The song remains the same – but also different

A tough act to follow, Led Zeppelin. And as you’ll read in the latest Ultimate Music Guide, just because you were Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, the band’s main songwriters, didn’t mean that you found it easy.

For Robert Plant, in the first place it meant retrenching in the past: gathering some bandmates from 15 years ago, and songs even older than that. The mission? To shake out the cobwebs round Britain’s university venues with a band he called the Honeydrippers. Jimmy Page meanwhile hit the rehearsal rooms with Chris Squire from Yes, and plans for another supergroup.

Plant’s willingness to deviate from the accepted path has characterised his music since, making his own way – falteringly at first – and then more confidently charting his course through a solo career made from the base elements of folk, psychedelia and world music. Page solo recordings have been fewer and more widely scattered, as he has dedicated much of his creative life since to preserving  the Zeppelin legacy. It’s something that even 30 years ago, he was talking about as his “life’s work”. 

Zeppelin, of course, remained in the pair’s DNA. In the magazine, we cover the live reunions both well-intended, casual, and completely jawdropping (like the one in 2007 which we review inside). We also review in depth the recordings the pair made together that pre-dated that reunion. There’s the superb No Quarter, the pair’s completely original take on the MTV Unplugged format, which brings Zeppelin songs to a new type of existence in the company of North African musicians. 

Then there’s Walking Into Clarksdale which showed the pair’s willingness to embrace new surroundings, by making an album with the legendary record engineer Steve Albini who died earlier this year. As Steve told me some years ago when we spoke for Uncut, there was a pretty unique set of circumstances involved in trying to make a record with the pair following Led Zeppelin, but that ultimately it was a nice problem to have. 

“Every couple of days, Robert Plant would turn up with a sheaf of records that he had just bought, and force Jimmy to listen to things he thought were intriguing,” he told me. “You could tell, they were genuine, committed, lifelong music fans and they were interested in making this record a collaboration. 

“Having said that,” he continued, “they do have more money than God, and they live like pre-revolutionary French royalty, and I don’t think anyone has ever said “no” to them. People have asked me what those guys were like, and I have to say I don’t know what kind of people they are, they’ve lived unique existences since they were teenagers. At any time, they could, on the spur of the moment, decide to buy an island. How can you evaluate what kind of a person someone is in those circumstances?”

Follow that. And enjoy the magazine. Get yours here!