The “most impressive” single performer Robert Plant ever saw
To this day, Robert Plant remains peerless as one of the most versatile voices, not just in rock, but in all music, and it was a complete chance he would enlist with Led Zeppelin.
Once Jimmy Page decided he wanted to start a band, he started looking for a lead singer, a task he thought would be easy but wound up being incredibly tricky. Everybody he knew in London seemed to already have something going for them, and as a result, he was told to head down to Birmingham, where rumours were spreading about a vocal powerhouse making waves.
At the time, Page was going to simply reinvent The Yardbirds, but give them more of a versatile sound, embracing multiple genres, ones that he had mastered while working as a session musician for different artists around the country. He needed a singer who would be able to deliver such a stellar sound, and in looking for one, stumbled upon Plant. Page was so blown away by his future frontman’s voice that he assumed there must be something wrong with his personality, as that was the only way to explain why he wasn’t bigger.
“When I auditioned him and heard him sing, I immediately thought there must be something wrong with him personality-wise or that he had to be impossible to work with because I just could not understand why, after he told me he’d been singing for a few years already, he hadn’t become a big name yet,” recalled Page, “So I had him down to my place for a little while just to sort of check him out, and we got along great. No problems.”
Plant went on to become a truly phenomenal vocalist; no matter what style of music Led Zeppelin were leaning towards, he was adaptable and could take it on at a moment’s notice. He was always looking for ways that he could improve and evolve as a vocalist, and while there are very few who could hold a candle to Plant, that doesn’t mean that he didn’t find other singers intimidating. There was one artist in particular he thought was unbelievable, to the extent that he called him the “most impressive” single performer he’d ever seen.
Despite Plant having a voice that most other musicians within the confines of rock were envious of, he couldn’t help but see Prince and feel immediately enamoured. It wasn’t just his voice, granted, that was a big part of it, but it was the entire sound he was able to achieve with every second of his music.
“I’m not really intimidated by too many people. But I’m very impressed by people,” said Plant, “Prince is probably the most impressive single person. Because he is incredibly inventive, but he is using a lot of old… He’s coming from all sorts of areas from the past.”
He continued, “He is really, he is pushing them all through a blender […] So they come out oozing and tripping with honey, sex. It’s not at all sexist, but sexual. I don’t know whether I’d like to work with him because he is so powerful that he’d probably intimidate me a bit; I don’t know.”
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