Why Robert Plant hates Led Zeppelin’s classic song ‘Stairway to Heaven’
Chances are if you’ve been in the music industry for the majority of your life that some songs will stick with you. Those tracks are usually close to your heart, and others will follow you around like a bad smell. Those songs, more often than not, are not only disposable to you but entirely enjoyable to the masses, with popularity often overriding taste. For the lead singer of Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant, there is one song which simply won’t leave him alone, despite his protestations. That’s because the song Robert Plant hates from the legendary rock band’s back catalogue is quite possibly their most adored hit.
We should clear one thing up pretty quickly, “hate” may be a bit strong. It’s not like Jimmy Page’s least-liked songs ‘Livin’ Loving Maid (She’s Just a Woman)’ and ‘All My Love’, which he described as “not us” and refused to play live. This song was consistently played at Led Zeppelin shows; in fact, for many, it was the main attraction. Of course, we’re talking about one of the most famous tracks in the world, Zeppelin’s wild and wonderful masterpiece, ‘Stairway To Heaven’.
The track is often regarded as a pillar of rock and roll as we know it. A bastion of cultural relevance, ‘Stairway to Heaven’ has leapt genre boundaries, skipped neatly across the globe and cemented itself among the foundations of music for all eternity. For Plant, however, the song is no longer a transcendent moment of rock ‘n’ roll purity but a trip and fall down the spiralling staircase to hell.
Plant has never been afraid to offer up criticisms of Led Zeppelin. Despite their place at the head of the rock table, the midlands singer is still more than happy to pick holes in their output, especially the early stuff. Like any musician, he saw his journey in the art form as a gradual evolution, always loving his most recent work most keenly of all.
Opening up about their music back in the day, Plant recalled: “[I] realised that tough, manly approach to singing I’d begun on [1966 track] ‘You Better Run’ wasn’t really what it was all about at all. Songs like [Zeppelin’s] ‘Babe I’m Going to Leave You’… I find my vocals on there horrific now. I really should have shut the f*** up!” Still, it’s a big jump from this to ‘Stairway to Heaven’.
The song is widely revered as one of the greatest rock songs in history, and it feels strange that its singer doesn’t like it. But it’s happened many times before. More often than not, a band’s greatest track can be oversaturated and over-popularised to the point where even the band no longer want to play it. Look at Kurt Cobain’s dislike for Nirvana’s Gen X anthem ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’; he felt the song’s shine meant the rest of his work would always be overshadowed, despite having “more to say” in them. Likewise, Thom Yorke and Radiohead despise their song ‘Creep’ with the effort now acting as a de facto qualifying question as to your legitimacy as a diehard fan. There are countless more too, Bruce Springsteen disliked ‘Born to Run’, R.E.M. and ‘Shiny Happy People’, Oasis hated ‘Wonderwall’ the list is seemingly endless. The same can be said for Robert Plant.
Plant has become tired of performing the track, and rarely-to-never does. “I’d break out in hives if I had to sing that song in every show,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1988. It’s not an opinion that has changed much over the years, either. Later, the singer called the track “that bloody wedding song” and even went as far as to donate $1,000 to a radio show benefit when it said it would never play the song again if it reached its donation target.
The song is, in fact, one of his guitarist and songwriting partner Jimmy Page’s favourites; speaking to Rolling Stone, he said of the track: “To me, I thought ‘Stairway’ crystallised the essence of the band. It had everything there and showed the band at its best… as a band, as a unit. Not talking about solos or anything, it had everything there. We were careful never to release it as a single. It was a milestone for us. Every musician wants to do something of lasting quality, something which will hold up for a long time, and I guess we did it with ‘Stairway.'”
It would seem, perhaps befitting of their sometimes tempestuous working relationship, the very reason Page loves the song is the very reason Plant dislikes it. The track is now as universal as happy birthday, and for an artist to continually have to fall back on their work from the past must be an annoyance that few of us have experienced.
Whether or not you love ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or think it, like Robert Plant, as being played out, it’s hard to ignore the quality at hand. The question of whether Plant likes the song isn’t up for debate — he doesn’t. But we’d bet that thanks to the song’s healing lyrics, he can still find moments of pure brilliance within it.
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