The three songs Robert Plant called Led Zeppelin’s “finest moments”
With pants so tight that you could count the change in his pocket and cast a plaster mould of his manhood from memory alone, a golden mane of flowing locks, a torso like an ironing board and a voice that threatened to knock Sputnik out of orbit, Robert Plant was the archetype frontman of his generation.
He was like a lion on stage. Not only did his hair, golden and godlike as it was, provide a natural mane, but he roared under the spotlight as if Mufasa had never been born. For a while, the argument of who the greatest frontman of all time was a two-word debate: Robert. Plant.
However, he may well have been picture postcard rock ‘n’ roll God, but it’s his invisible foresight that really mattered. In the intervening years, Plant hasn’t been too kind about everything that Led Zeppelin put out, and this discerning is a sign of the ingenuity behind the band.
It’s a fair feeling to have. Almost every singer on the planet has baulked at having to sing their greatest hit. It is, by and large, par for the course. And Plant, much like John Lennon before him and Thom Yorke after, had some serious disdain for some of Led Zeppelin’s most favoured songs.
He comically paid his favourite radio station $10,000 to stop them from playing ‘Stairway to Heaven’, he’s cited that his own vocals were sometimes “overblown” and even claimed that the band could be “pompous” in their approach. Alas, they were pioneers, and when you’re pushing music into a new era, overstepping the mark is par for the course. With pretty much only Black Sabbath for company, Led Zeppelin were blindly wading into the dark of heavy metal, and for the most part, they illuminated the path like true trailblazing progenitors at the top of their game.
During this wild ride, there are three songs that stand out for Plant as the peak of their powers. “[‘Kashmir’], ‘All My Love’ and ‘In the Light’,” he told Rolling Stone, “really were the finest moments.” These singles from 1975, 1979, and 1975 respectively depict the band at their most refined, albeit varied, best. Although many fans will argue, few would not include the tracks in their top ten.
The songs all have their shining moments, but perhaps Plant’s greatest affection comes not for how they play out on your stereo but what they represent to him as a reminder of the band he helped turn into megastars.
The tracks represent the energy that made Led Zeppelin a force to contend with and rattled the embers of the 1960s like an old Skoda going over a cattle grid. As Plant once said himself: “I realised what Led Zeppelin was about around the end of our first US tour. We started off not even on the bill in Denver, and by the time we got to New York, we were second to Iron Butterfly, and they didn’t want to go on!”
What is Robert Plant’s favourite Led Zeppelin song?
Along this journey, they uncovered that the facet that made them such a frightful force was their sense of drama. While this might have been pushed to “pompous” heights sometimes, with ‘Kashmir’ – undoubtedly Plant’s favourite Led Zep track – he feels they toed the line perfectly. “I wish we were remembered for ‘Kashmir’ more than ‘Stairway to Heaven’”, he told Louder Sound, “It’s so right; there’s nothing overblown, no vocal hysterics. Perfect Zeppelin.”
A similar sentiment can be applied to the luscious ‘All My Love’. It is an anthem that Plant poured his heart into following the unexpected death of his Karac in 1977. “It was just paying tribute to the joy that [Karac] gave us as a family, and in a crazy way, still does,” he told AXS TV.
Despite this touching premise and the gut-wrenching delivery, Plant was worried that it didn’t represent that band. “I was a little worried about the [‘All My Love’] chorus,” Jimmy Page said in an interview published in Brad Tolinski’s Light and Shade. “I could just imagine people doing the wave and all of that. And I thought ‘That is not us. That is not us’.”
As for the final song in Plant’s top three, ‘In the Light’ defines the ingenuity and exploration of the band. As Page told the BBC: “Once the vocal lines and phrasing were sorted out, you’d know where not to play, which was as important as knowing when you should play. With ‘In The Light,’ for instance, we knew exactly what its construction was going to be.”
Adding: “Nevertheless, I had no idea at the time that John Paul Jones was going to come up with such an amazing synthesizer intro, plus there’s all the bowed guitars at the beginning as well, to give the overall drone effect. We did quite a few things with drones on, like ‘In The Evening’ and all that, but when he did that start for ‘In The Light’ it was just unbelievable.”
In each of these moments, you get the sense that the band are championing the song itself uber-alles. This is when they were at their best, when technique and progression were there to serve the poetry of the music rather than the other way around. As Page proclaimed: “The thing about Led Zeppelin was that it was four musicians at the top of their game, but they could play like a band.”
Within the three tracks Plant picks as the best of that quartet, the very mechanics of the machine that was Led Zeppelin are whirring at high speed. Plant’s immaculate vocals, Jimmy Page’s technical wizardry, and John Paul Jones’ understated rhythm, complementing the thunderous hum of John Bonham, within these three songs, we see the best of one of the greatest rock bands that ever lived.
Robert Plant’s three favourite Led Zeppelin songs:
- ‘Kashmir’
- ‘All My Love’
- ‘In the Light’
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