The artist Robert Plant said he could never truly imitate: “He sang them with confidence”
In the late 1970s, a whole host of Robert Plant and Led Zeppelin copycats began emerging from the darkness.
Because, let’s face it, Led Zeppelin were the premier band of the decade. Taking on the mantle from The Beatles, they became the band that screaming fans could obsess over and that music aficionados could closely study. Sure, it might seem relatively traditional what they were doing, with the beauty of hindsight, but at the time, they were pioneering this idea that would later become stadium rock and roll.
Unlike some other bands, Zeppelin were so incredible because of the band members’ equal roles in the sound. No one player stood out as the beating heart of the band, desperately dragging a group of mediocre musicians with them. No, for every spiralling guitar line written by Jimmy Page was a soaring vocal take from Robert Plant. And for every drum fill from John Bonham was an equally crucial bass line from John Paul Jones. They were, simply put, a steamroller of a band.
But Plant seemed to capture something within the 1970s zeitgeist at that time. He introduced the idea of pairing operatic charisma with gravelly rock and roll to become somewhat of a rock god in the decade. Pairing his sonic delivery with the visual allure of his long flowing hair and tightly clad clothing, he created a framework for burgeoning musicians to loosely follow.
In fact, the generation of copycats were so obvious to Plant that he once labelled them “pretty-boy-wailing department”. Various bands of said department failed to make an impact on the music industry and sort of faded off into creative obscurity. Because, as we all know, greatness comes from innovation. And there was one singer who launched from a similar platform as Plant, but transformed the formula completely.
Visually, you could argue that Freddie Mercury was the complete opposite of Robert Plant, with his clean-cut, darker features. But sonically, he was operating in the same realm with his hypnotising operatic sound. Slightly different to the shared stage of Zeppelin, however, you could see that Mercury was the star of the Queen show. And in Plant’s mind, it was for good reason, as he claimed Mercury was singing in a way that no one else had ever done before.
He said, “Freddie Mercury sang all these songs originally and he sang them better than we’re gonna sing them. He sang them in the correct keys and he sang them with confidence and he sang them really, really well”.
Adding, “And his personality, vocally and his whole projection is something that we can’t capture. And the real thing about today is that he’s not here.”
It’s funny, given how much Plant respects the originality of Mercury, that Mercury’s bandmate, Brian May once said that Mercury “behaved as if he was Robert Plant at the time”. There was, of course, mutual admiration, but crucially, Mercury didn’t abuse that. He didn’t admire it so much that he baselessly copied. No, he followed the path set out by Plant and used it to create something deeply original, which is why he’ll always be remembered.
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