“Nothing overblown”: One singer changed everything Robert Plant knew about singing
It’s easy to get caught up in the brilliance of Led Zeppelin. As an outfit, they are certainly one of the most potent around.
To include the mercurial guitar maestro Jimmy Page in your ranks and the powerhouse percussion of John Bonham and the dynamic rhythm of John Paul Jones too, and you have some serious credentials. But perhaps the brightest jewel in this particular crown is the supremely talented Robert Plant.
“My vocal style I haven’t tried to copy from anyone,” Robert Plant once opined. “It just developed until it became the girlish whine it is today.” The ever-self-effacing singer changed the musical landscape with that so-called ‘whine’. His four-octave range was always pushed to the limits in the most high-octane, fearless fashion that made him a central figure in the orchestra of Led Zeppelin.
While this wasn’t copied from everyone, evidenced by the fact that when the band first emerged in 1968, with a concert in Gladsaxe, Denmark, nobody had heard anything quite like him in the field of rock. However, there had been singers of a similar ilk operating in more operatic fields of music and one rare voice who ushered that towards the structure of pop.
“The way she sang, the way she could hold a note, you could feel the tension, you could tell that everybody, the whole orchestra, would hold a note until she wanted to change,” Plant said of his vocal hero Oum Kalthoum. This ability for the voice alone to rise above the grandeur of instrumentation was a huge inspiration to Plant, particularly given the company he shared with Led Zeppelin.
Somehow, Kalthoum was able to command the spotlight amid a full orchestra without ever growing overblown, simply by truly treating her voice as an instrument. This is something Plant always tried to keep in mind, and now the performances he regrets from within the band are those that he terms “exaggerated” or “pompous”.
He didn’t think that there was a jot of this amid Kalthoum’s sincere majesty. “When I first heard the way she would dance down through the scale to land on a beautiful note that I couldn’t even imagine singing, it was huge,” he said, “somebody had blown a hole in the wall of my understanding of vocals.”
In essence, it changed his thinking. “When I first heard Om Kalthoum,” he recalled, “It was a very important day for me, because it opened, it just enriched my life so much. Even though I hardly understand a word she’s singing, because it’s in Arabic, I had to take some of the effect it had on me and put it into the music.”
In fact, ‘Kashmir’ is the closest Plant ever came to imitation in his career, and it was the Egyptian he had in mind. Thus, it’s little wonder that he calls the song his favourite. “I wish we were remembered for ‘Kashmir’ more than ‘Stairway to Heaven’”, he told Louder Sound, “It’s so right; there’s nothing overblown, no vocal hysterics. Perfect Zeppelin.”
In later life, he would long to perform in this style and in 1995, he performed with the Egyptian orchestra, revealing to the world how Led Zeppelin always had a wider inspiration pool than most. “I never ever thought I’d be singing against that back in 1960-something when I had records playing, you know people playing with Oum Kalsoum doesn’t mean much to people in video press kit land but to me, it means fucking hell of a lot,” he told the Independent at the time.
Who was Oum Kalthoum?
Born in 1898, the Egyptian singer-songwriter, actor, and all-around trailblazing renaissance woman rose to fame in the mid-1920s and quickly became known as ‘The Voice of Egypt’ or perhaps even grander, ‘The Fourth Pyramid’. Hailing from humble beginnings in a religious household in the countryside, she joined the family vocal ensemble when she was 12 years old.
Initially, the family disguised her as a young boy to quell anxieties over the scourging remarks that such a public performance might bring. However, in time, her voice would soar above the rest of the and talent like that was impossible to wrap up in the robes of a Bedouin. She was then noticed by an artist eternally on the edge of fame known as Mohamed Abo Al-Ela. He recognised her ability and taught her a classic Arabic repertoire. This was the start of her journey to Cairo, where she would flaw the orchestras with power untold.
In the process, she quickly gathered up her own audience and became the region’s most famous vocalist, having a huge impact on society in the process. She kept performing right up until her death in 1975 at the age of 70.
