The horrible gig Robert Plant couldn’t get enough of: “Drunk on the whole event”
Robert Plant didn’t want to ever be a snob when it came to everyone else’s idea of Led Zeppelin.
He didn’t want to live out the fantasy of being one of the biggest names in rock and roll for the rest of his life or anything, but he did realise that there were plenty of people who saw him as the blueprint of what a hard rock vocalist was supposed to be. But just because he was one of the biggest names in 1970s rock didn’t mean that he couldn’t try out something new every once in a while with his friends.
Hell, right after Zeppelin broke up, you would have thought that Plant was trying to scrub every single bit of the band from his body half the time. He wanted to show the world that he could do something a lot more than screaming, and while his trying to go into new wave territory may have been laughable, that didn’t mean that records like Now and Zen had to be terrible by comparison. They were only meant to be new adventures, but the Z word was going to be a long-distant memory. Or so everyone thought.
The fact that Page and Plant were able to get back together as a duo in the 1990s was unheard of, and even after Plant’s brief spat with David Coverdale, working with his old mate, he could still understand when Jimmy Page was making something tremendous. Those acoustic renditions of the old Zeppelin sound were so good that they even managed to get some of the fans to forget what a disaster their entire Live Aid performance was.
Because when you look at what Zeppelin was like in their prime, their performance in front of a billion people was not what they were supposed to be. A lot of people blame Phil Collins for wrecking everything when he started, but even if Page places the blame squarely at the drummer’s feet, there’s a lot more that went into it than being just a mangled-up version of their old hits.
Plant wasn’t safe from a few bum notes here and there, and when listening to the live broadcast, he is clearly not able to hear himself in certain sections of the show. That’s no matter as long as Page can help him out on a few pieces of the show, but since no one seemed to have their shit together, the whole thing felt more like a bunch of mates getting together for a jam session than the band that we all used to know.
But compared to everyone else trying their best to forget about it, Plant was proud to have done the show because of how much it reminded him of the old days, saying, “Live Aid was a very odd thing to do. Yet through it all, the rush I got from that size audience, I had forgotten what that was like. I’d forgotten how much I missed it. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t drunk on the whole event.”
It’s great that Plant had a good time, but when you look at the band when they were being interviewed afterwards, it was clear that the singer was doing damage control. Everyone knew that something was really off about the way that they were playing, and Plant, trying to brush everything off, that it wasn’t that big a deal, was like he was trying to make people ignore the fact that it was billed as one of the greatest bands in the world getting back together again.
The whole thing has gone down in infamy these days, but it’s not like the legacy of Zeppelin is defined by any one show. It was all about the riffs that made people feel things that they had never felt before, and whether or not Collins inserted himself into things wasn’t going to put a dent in the memories everyone has of ‘Stairway to Heaven’.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Led Zeppelin Newsletter
All the latest stories about Led Zeppelin from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.