The most emotional album Jimmy Page released with Led Zeppelin: “Pure anxiety”
You might take one listen to the work of Led Zeppelin and immediately think of them as having been a straightforward rock and roll band, not singing about anything that set them apart from the rest of the crowd.
However, while their image and attitude certainly always suggested that they were only writing about copious amounts of womanising and drinking, two unfortunately essential ingredients in the classic recipe for hard rock lyricism, Robert Plant was occasionally dipping into various different territories that helped to diversify the band’s output significantly as they moved on.
There were times where the band found themselves working in the realm of high fantasy, with the lyrics of songs like ‘Ramble On’ taking inspiration from JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novels, even if unintentionally, while ‘Achilles Last Stand’ is rooted in a fascination that Plant developed in Greek mythology, both of which take a vastly different approach to their earliest and most raucous outings.
On top of this, there are the more emotionally resonant pieces of work that the band released, which certainly became more of a prominent feature as they developed as a band, wishing to display a sense of maturity, as many bands are required to do as they move on.
While there were very few signs that this would become the case on their first handful of self-titled albums, by the time the band were releasing records such as Houses of the Holy and Physical Graffiti, they were focusing on much deeper topics, their place in the world, and zooming in on existentialism.
By the time it came to making their seventh album, Presence, in late 1975, things were even darker, and in terms of the themes that Plant was choosing to explore, he was navigating the band down an even more emotionally resonant route due to some personal circumstances that had arisen.
Shortly before the sessions for the album, Robert Plant was involved in a serious car accident that meant he was confined to a wheelchair, only able to do a fraction of what he was usually able to. Plant knew that his road to recovery was going to take a long time, and it prohibited the band from ever taking Presence on the road where they had previously been flourishing, and according to Jimmy Page, it ended up being one of the hardest records they ever made due to the emotional toll it took on the members.
“Presence was pure anxiety and emotion,” Page explained in a 2006 interview with Rolling Stone. “We didn’t know if we’d ever be able to play in the same way again. It might have been a very dramatic change, if the worst had happened to Robert. Presence is our best in terms of uninterrupted emotion.”
It’s perhaps not their finest work, which is understandable, but it is certainly the most crushing to listen to, especially with the additional context of Plant’s injury hanging like a dark cloud over it. Arguably, Led Zeppelin would never be the same again after the accident, with them only ever releasing one further album in In Through The Out Door before drummer John Bonham’s death, and the posthumously scrambled together Coda, which officially marked the end of the band. Presence, it seems, was the beginning of the decline.
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