The “horrific” Led Zeppelin vocal Robert Plant hates with a passion
A golden god with pantaloons tight enough to count the change in his pocket and a voice that could haunt a lonely mountain, Robert Plant announced himself as the new archetype rock frontman in an instant.
He brought an operatic quality to rock ‘n’ roll, and he embodied this performative pinnacle to such an extent that you could almost place a picture of him beneath the term ‘Rockstar’ in the dictionary. He had it all, the sort of enviable git who could also probably notch a hat-trick at Wembley, snog Sue Barker on Centre Court after winning Wimbledon, and knock up a second-to-none bolognese sauce to boot.
However, the reason that this didn’t add up to a loathsome level of resentment from the jealous masses was that he did it all with an air of sincerity. His charisma was completely devoid of smugness, which is a feat in itself, given the gravitas of his talent and notches on his bedpost.
Nevertheless, there were moments when Plant was still finding his feet, still exploring the limits of modern pop vocal performance, and his tireless search for profundity and perversion, by his own admission, sometimes led him down a troublesome path of vocal self-indulgence. Performing to the nth and overperforming are very close neighbours, and Plant was enduring a bout of brinkmanship in the early days.
By the same token, Plant was also never shy of having enough humility to recognise this in retrospect. In fact, sometimes he went beyond humility and was downright harsh on himself; that’s certainly the case when it comes to calling a classic “horrific”. Although his criticism does have a grounding beyond his own opinion, you see, when it comes to folk, timeless dog-eared imperfection is a force to behold. With a traditional track, you’re not looking for brash bravura, quite the opposite, in fact.
Penned by Anne Bredon back in 1959, ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ had Greenwich Village’s authenticity-obsessed folkies in mind. Thus, it feels almost fated that, despite only being written three years earlier, when Joan Baez released her famous version in 1962, it was logged in the credits as ‘Traditional’ because Baez didn’t know who had penned it.
The track had the dusty feel of a vagabond from a bygone age bidding farewell and proved to be a stirring literary ditty that Led Zeppelin couldn’t resist. It tied in perfectly with their aim to bring a sense of the grand past to the glitzy present.
As the oddity of its authorship attests, it was cut from traditional cloth, but the heavy metal band from Birmingham were anything but ‘traditional’. By the time they got their grubby mitts on it, the macho vibe of silk-garmented rock had entered full swing. Such sequined pomposity was a world away from the one that Bredon initially intended for the record—its true heart.
Plant later recognised that. “[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,” he earnestly told the Guardian. “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!”
He’s not the only one, either. Keith Richards famously shared this same opinion. The cut-throat guitarist told Rolling Stone, “The guy’s voice started to get on my nerves. I don’t know why. Maybe he’s a little too acrobatic”.
This was something that Plant was always wary of thereafter. When you’ve got such talent, it can be easy to push it to the limits without any temperance. In fact, there are a number of songs Plant puts down as “pompous”, including ‘Stairway to Heaven’.
All that being said, there will certainly be some of you reading this and scratching your head, wondering whether Plant is talking about the same ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ that you’re thinking of, the one renowned for a vocal performance that could stir honey into tea and turn the heads of stone statues.
But as he put it himself, “I think ‘craft’ is the term I would use. You grow into what might initially be an infatuation.” But with great passion, Plant applied himself alongside a band who were doing much the same, and reached such virtuosic heights that even Freddie Mercury would quip that Plant was “always my favourite singer”.
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