The singer Robert Plant knew was out of his league: “The best voice”
Led Zeppelin is among the 20th century’s most influential bands. Their distinctive brand of heavy, progressive rock left peers red in the cheeks with its accessible complexity.
Naturally, Jimmy Page, the band’s original assembler, stands out as one of his generation’s finest guitar virtuosos. Still, John Paul Jones, John Bonham and Robert Plant enter top-ten battles in their respective fields just as frequently.
Led Zeppelin was a dream team constructed by Page from the Yardbirds’ ashes. He first caught wind of Plant’s vocal talents in the late 1960s and travelled to Birmingham to hear him in action as the frontman of Band of Joy. During his first audition with Page, Plant sang Jefferson Airplane’s song ‘Somebody To Love’.
“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,” Page later recalled. “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.”
As Led Zeppelin navigated their first few albums, Plant dropped jaws with infallible cadence and window-shattering projection both in the studio and on stage. Rock ‘n’ roll had already had a few notable sets of lungs in the likes of Howlin’ Wolf, Little Richard and Janis Joplin, but Plant was something of a first.
In past interviews, the Led Zeppelin vocalist has revealed an eclectic pool of influence, with Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, Ray Charles and Elvis Presley among his earliest heroes. Later, The Cure’s Robert Smith enticed Plant with his distinctive, brooding vocal, as did the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser with her remarkable range and operatic style.
A cultured individual, Plant is also inspired by vocalists outside his immediate Western consciousness. Intriguingly, he is a particular fan of three eminent Egyptian vocalists: Abdel Halim Hafez, Mohammed Abdel Wahab and Oum Kalthoum. Plant was particularly inspired by Kalthoum when devising the vocal for Led Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir’.
“The way [Oum Kalthoum] 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 heroine in 2010. “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: somebody had blown a hole in the wall of my understanding of vocals.”
Despite such high endorsement, Plant’s hierarchy places Abdel Halim Hafez at the top of the pyramid of Egyptian singers. Speaking to Zani UK in 2015, Farouk El Safi, a percussionist who played on ‘Kashmir’ on the live version heard on No Quarter: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Unledded, remembered seeing Plant in a Kalthoum t-shirt.
“The first day I walked in the studio, I noticed that Robert Plant was wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Oum Kalthoum on the front,” he said. “She was one of the most famous female Egyptian singers ever. When we said hello, I asked him whether he knew who that singer on his t-shirt was. His reply was, ‘Yes, it’s Oum Kalthoum.'”
Intent on showing off his knowledge, Plant continued. “Then he said to me, ‘Do you know who I think is the best singer I’ve ever heard?’ I said, ‘Who?’ and he replied, ‘Abdel Halim Hafez. I think he’s got the best voice I’ve ever heard,'” El Safi recalled. “I couldn’t believe Robert Plant said that! That is my favourite singer too! This year, that singer won an award for best vocal voice. You wouldn’t think that someone like Plant would say something like that when he himself is so famous for his own voice. I went back to my country and told everyone about how Robert Plant said Abdel Halim Hafez has the best voice in the world.”
Plant’s fascination with Egyptian and Middle Eastern music helped separate Led Zeppelin from many of their hard rock contemporaries. While other bands were still drawing almost exclusively from blues and psychedelia, Zeppelin were pulling inspiration from musical traditions that felt far more expansive and mysterious to Western audiences at the time.
Songs like ‘Kashmir’ carried that influence into the mainstream, combining thunderous rock instrumentation with hypnotic melodic phrasing that sounded unlike anything else on the radio.
It also revealed the depth of Plant’s curiosity as an artist. Despite becoming one of the most influential singers in rock history, he never approached music with the arrogance of someone who thought he had mastered the craft. Instead, he constantly searched for new sounds and techniques from across the world, treating great vocalists less like rivals and more like teachers.
That openness became a crucial part of why his voice evolved so dramatically across the decades, shifting from the wild howl of Led Zeppelin into something more restrained, soulful and worldly in his later career.
Listen to Abdel Halim Hafez’s unique vocals in the live recording below.
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