Robert Plant - Led Zeppelin - Singer - Musician

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The album that made Robert Plant want to leave Led Zeppelin: “I wasn’t comfortable at all”

Fri 17 April 2026 17:00, UK

There was no point in Robert Plant carrying on in Led Zeppelin after John Bonham passed away.

Every single member of the group was indispensable, so losing that massive heartbeat behind a lot of their best tunes must have been the equivalent of losing a brother in arms when he was found dead at Jimmy Page’s house after a night of heavy drinking. But if you look at the timeline, there were more than a few records that made Plant start questioning how much time he had left in the group anyway.

After all, the band was never meant to last forever. As much as Page devoted his entire life to turning Zeppelin into one of the biggest bands in the world, there was no need for anyone to try and make their own solo projects when they could express themselves however they wanted in the group. But by the end of the Physical Graffiti run, something definitely felt different when working on Presence.

Sure, Plant wasn’t contributing as much as he could after a massive car accident left him in a wheelchair for a little while, but it was about more than his vocals. Presence is an all-out guitar record, and while that works great when making a song as grandiose as ‘Achilles Last Stand’, it makes a lot more sense that the rest of the band weren’t nearly as thrilled as Page was with the end result.

But the real body blow would come when Plant was on tour and found out that his son had passed away. No matter how much someone likes to claim to be the king of the universe whenever they play, there’s no way of shrugging that off, even if you were the most grizzled badass of all time. So while In Through the Out Door did give Plant a bit of musical closure, he was already thinking about splitting the band up and going his own way before Bonzo passed away.

The life of a travelling musician was already taking its toll on everyone, but Plant felt that things had got too out of hand, saying, “I wasn’t comfortable in the group at all. We’d gone right through the hoop and, because my hoop was on fire, I didn’t know if it was worth it anymore. … My joy of life had been cudgelled and bashed so hard, I became a time-and-motion man for my own destiny.”

The album still sounded fantastic, but you could tell that something was already changing in Plant when listening to his contributions. ‘All My Love’ was clearly a frontrunner for a single thanks to his performance for his son, but when you look at the amount of keyboards that were on the record, thanks to John Paul Jones, you could tell that they were almost making up for all of the guitars that were on the previous record.

Even if they kept going in that direction, though, there’s no telling whether Zeppelin would have still remained the biggest rock band in the world if Bonham had lived. They were already moving far beyond traditional rock and roll, and since they had been stretching themselves, there was never any need for them to go back and make a song that tried to match the bluesy swagger of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ or even ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’.

Plant was still proud of the work that he had done with Zeppelin, but it’s not exactly a shock that he ended up reinventing himself altogether when he started working on his solo career. He needed to move on in some way, and the only thing that he could have done to switch up his style is to make sure the ‘Percy’ persona never came back again.