Robert Plant’s favourite songs by The Rolling Stones
There is no real surprise that former Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant is a lifelong fan of The Rolling Stones. The West Midlands native is well-known for being a fan of all sorts of music, but before all else, he is a fan of the blues and blues rock, a form that The Rolling Stones helped to pioneer when they broke through in the early 1960s.
When speaking on BBC Radio 2’s Tracks Of My Years, Plant discussed his love for the blues and explained how obsessed with it he was in the early days: “You probably may have realised that in my early history as a singer and a recording artist, and the adventures that I had in the music game, I was really drawn and obsessed by the music of Chicago and Mississippi and the Delta blues”.
He then turned his attention to The Rolling Stones and how they were a conduit for bringing the American genre to the British listener: “I think on the English music scene, one of the main forerunners and purveyors of this music bringing it to us as early teenage kids was the Rolling Stones”.
Detailing further, Plant referred to the band’s debut single, their 1963 cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Come On’, and said it was “just the beginning of their great career promoting and perhaps giving us inspiration for country blues and [the] blues of North America”.
However, Plant wasn’t finished discussing his love for The Rolling Stones there. When appearing on BBC Radio 6 in 2021 for their Festive Takeover, he listed another one of his favourite Stones songs, and it’s a classic from 1968’s Beggars Banquet. He reflected: “There is so much to be said about this band. (Also) about the politic of the time in the late 60s, early 70s and how great that The Rolling Stones’ Jagger and Richards were putting together songs that were really quite vital… and are in many ways timeless.”
Picking the indomitable ‘Street Fighting Man’, which happens to be the band’s most political track to date, the former Led Zeppelin man said: “This track ‘Street Fighting Man’ from Beggars Banquet is just incredible. And, of course, many stations banned the record because they said it was subversive. There is a great comment from the band that said: ‘Of course it’s subversive. It’s stupid to think that you can start a revolution with a record; I wish you could'”.
