Robert Plant - Singer - 1973 - Led Zeppelin - Heinrich Klaffs

Credit: Far Out / Heinrich Klaffs

The “best” Led Zeppelin songs Robert Plant said fans ignored

Sun 5 October 2025 16:00, UK

Not every Led Zeppelin fan has time to cover every single one of their songs when they turn on their stereo.

For as timeless as their music is, there are bound to be people who either gravitate to the riffs more than anything else or are in for something a bit more mellow like their acoustic passages. Whichever piece of their work suits you, though, Robert Plant knows that there are some outtakes from their catalogue that didn’t deserve to fall by the wayside by mainstream fans.

Then again, Plant may be a little bit biased when it comes to his own work. Even though Jimmy Page may have birthed Zeppelin out of nothing, Plant always had a strange protection over those tunes, hence why he never really returned to them that often. He was immensely proud of the work that he had done, but he knew that it was a lot better for him to carve out a path of his own than spend his time doing borderline karaoke to the kind of music that he played in his 20s.

Although most people can land on nearly any one of their albums and be in for great rock and roll, there is a bit of a sweet spot when it comes to their catalogue. While this is by no means meant to disparage any of their other classics, the run they had from their untitled fourth album all the way up to Physical Graffiti is virtually untouchable, especially on their double record.

Whereas most double records can be self-indulgent and be bogged down by a lot of filler, there are no duds to be found on Physical Graffiti. They simply managed to take everything great about their sound and channel it into a solid 80 minutes of rock and roll, and even if the songs were longer than what radio wanted to play, who was going to stand there with a straight face and say that ‘Kashmir’ wasn’t actually that good?

The fireworks show was so blinding that Presence was always going to be a bit of a downgrade no matter what. There was nothing wrong with the record, and Plant even managed to give fantastic performances while recovering from a major car accident, but when looking at the highlights from the record, Plant felt that they never managed to get their just due in the same way that the ‘Stairway to Heaven’s of the world did.

While Plant was happy to discuss Zeppelin’s history every now and again, he knew that a handful of their tunes didn’t get talked about nearly as much as they should, saying, “Most people have missed some of the best Zeppelin stuff. ‘For Your Life’, on Presence. ‘Achilles Last Stand!’ F***ing hell. Just extraordinary that three people and a singer can do that. Really, they were pulling so much stuff out of the unknown, Bonham and Jones together on ‘For Your Life’. It’s just insane.”

Even if ‘Achilles Last Stand’ is a bit of a commitment at over ten minutes, it’s not like it’s any lesser for that runtime. If ‘The Battle of Evermore’ told the story of a mythical duel that took place in Middle Earth, this is the closest that they ever came to throwing their listeners onto a battlefield, especially with John Paul Jones’s bass work sounding like the marching of horses’ hooves marching onward.

Although Plant might not be hearing that much praise for those tunes as much as ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and ‘Rock and Roll’, that doesn’t mean that they haven’t earned a spot in Zeppelin fans’ hearts. The classics are already set in stone, but the true fans have as much time for everything from ‘Good Times Bad Times’ to ‘Ten Years Gone’ to ‘The Rain Song’.