The Honeydrippers: When Robert Plant formed a secret band
Once you have fronted one of the greatest hard rock outfits to ever grace the airwaves, performing in different cities across the globe night after night and taking your own private plane to get from one place to another, where do you go from there?
Well, in the case of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, you join the ranks of a local cover band from Worcestershire.
When Led Zeppelin came to an end in 1980, in the wake of John Bonham’s tragic passing, Plant, along with the remaining members of the band, could have done anything they wished within the rock and roll world. After all, Zeppelin had spent upwards of ten years as one of the biggest rock bands on the face of the planet, almost single-handedly popularising the hard rock sound and amassing arenas’ worth of fans in virtually every city the world over. Seemingly, though, what Plant wanted most of all was a break from the madness.
Regardless of who you are, a decade spent on the road or cooped up in recording studios, living the archetypal life of rock and roll excess, is bound to take its toll eventually. So, when Led Zeppelin called it a day, Plant was very keen to escape all the attention, expectation, and hedonism of his previous years.
The Honeydrippers were the answer to Plant’s quandary; a pre-existing cover band that he could join the ranks of without attracting too much in the way of mainstream attention. “At the end of 1980, I had no place to go,” the vocalist shared on an episode of the Digging Deep podcast. “Led Zeppelin was over. [John Bonham] was gone. So I formed a group called The Honeydrippers, and we used to play shows in clubs around England for no money.”
Not only did the band perform for pittance, particularly in comparison to the eye-watering sums Led Zeppelin were bringing in from their colossal arena tours, but Plant made sure that nobody attending those gigs knew that they were going to see Robert Plant. Reportedly, if any promoter or gig poster dared to even mention his name alongside The Honeydrippers, the singer would outright refuse to perform.
Seemingly, the secrecy of The Honeydrippers was essential for Plant to find his feet in a post-Zeppelin world, without the overwhelming attention that clearly would have attached itself to the group had it been widely promoted. Instead, the vocalist was content with performing those low-key gigs and striking upon the kind of R&B-led rock outfit he had been batting around his mind for years.
Eventually, of course, the cat got out of the bag, and audiences began to realise that the person fronting this Midlands cover band was, in fact, a bona fide rock god. By that time, though, Plant had managed to build up some degree of confidence, and so the band hit the mainstream with their 1984 EP ‘The Honeydrippers: Volume One’, and even found some chart success with a few covers and R&B standards around the same time.
Further forgoing any need to keep things covert, Page ended up recruiting his old friends, in the form of Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, among various others, to join the ranks of the band on numerous occasions. Reportedly, an album was even in the works at one point, though it never came to fruition before the group dissolved in 1985.
The Honeydrippers might have been short-lived and fostered a fairly strange discography, but the secret cover band marked an essential moment in the life and career of Robert Plant. With the demise of Led Zeppelin, the singer was at risk of taking the wrong path and either doing himself some serious damage or creating some godawful music, but the few years spent with an unknown cover band seemed to bring him back down to earth after his ride to the top of the rock and roll pyramid.
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