The artist Robert Plant called the “most impressive single person” in music
There’s no shortage of talent in the list of names that Robert Plant has worked with. Aside from his astounding Led Zeppelin bandmates, the singer has performed alongside Alison Krauss, T-Bone Burnett and Jeff Beck, to name but three. In fact, it is his willingness to collaborate and seek out broadening influences that define his approach to music.
However, there was one musician he was too “intimidated” to ever work with. When you’re a rock ‘n’ roll royalty who can hit notes that threaten the orbit of Sputnik, that is certainly saying something. But we’re not talking about any ordinary human who he was cagey about collaborating with. We’re talking about Prince.
As the comic Joe Pera quips, Prince, despite his own religious beliefs, might disprove the existence of the Christian god, because how could he have created the world and everything in it and have the patience to sit on a character like Prince for that long.
His singularity came to the fore immediately. Even on his first album, recorded when he was a teenager, he made demands that every single note would come from him. This meant that he wound up playing a whopping 27 instruments on the album. Thus, it perhaps comes as little surprise that Plant revered him as the most singular force in music.
During a televised interview in 1990, the ‘Stairway to Heaven’ singer commented: “I’m not really intimidated by too many people. But I’m very impressed by people”. Chief among them was the Purple One, who bestrode the 1980s in the same way Led Zeppelin had in the 1970s. “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”.
This was very similar to Led Zeppelin’s approach. Plant 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”. No doubt, many musicians have applied a nearly identical quote to Plant himself.
With that glowing comment in mind, the collaboration never occurred. However, it is clear that the pair were singing off the same hymn sheet. It’s no secret that Led Zep stole from the past—they even have the lawsuits to prove it. What the riches they robbed from the blues, they gave back to the future of music, moulding their influences into something decidedly new, something that put to bed the floweriness of the 1960s and channelled the creeping dystopia of their factory surroundings, birthing heavy metal.
This level of abounding inspiration is something that rubbed off on Prince, with the diminutive ‘Little Red Corvette’ singer commenting: “I don’t mind [being labelled ‘psychedelic’] because that was the only period in recent history that delivered songs and colours. Led Zeppelin, for example, would make you feel differently on each song”.
They would do this by letting the track rule the direction of the music and using everything they could to make such a method work. Years later, Prince would turn this up to 11, to such a degree that Plant placed him above everyone else on the stairway of impressive musicianship.
