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Labour MP had been unseated by the Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths, who had fought a campaign protesting at the influx of Asian immigrants into the town.

      Such was the vitriol stirred up by Griffiths that the victorious Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, suggested he be met at Westminster as a ‘parliamentary leper’ when he took up his seat. Griffiths was ousted in the ensuing election of March 1966 but it would take many years for the raw wounds he had opened up to heal.

      ‘Robert did everything against the rules then and it was quite brave of him to do so,’ reflects Perry Foster, Plant’s first mentor. ‘Be it leaving his perfectly nice, middle-class home or stepping out with a girl from Goa. I will say this for him, he’d got more balls than I had.’

      It was equally true that Maureen had a positive influence on Plant. He became a frequent guest at her family’s home on Trinity Road in West Bromwich, there acquiring a taste for Indian curries and spices, and also hearing new and exotic sounds.

      ‘A lot of Asian families lived in that part of West Brom,’ he said to me. ‘Those amazing sounds of the Indian singers from the ’50s … It was all around, coming from next door and up the alley from the terraced house where I was staying. I was intrigued by it.’

      Says John Crutchley: ‘Maureen was good for Robert, and he couldn’t have wished for a better family because they took him under their wing. He stayed at Trinity Road quite a lot, among all the comings and goings there. I fancied Maureen’s younger sister, Shirley, and the four of us used to go about together. It was a nice, cosy scene.’

      Not that Plant’s restless ambitions were stilled. He was mindful of the precedent being set by the Move, who had struck out beyond the Midlands, and he convinced the others that they needed to get off the local circuit, too. Listen’s answer to Tony Secunda would be Mike Dolan, who ran a tailoring business in Birmingham. Dolan approached the band with a view to becoming their manager, telling them he had money to invest.

      His money did not go far, but Dolan did get Listen taken on by two booking agencies, the London-based Malcolm Rose Agency and Astra in Wolverhampton. They began to get gigs in far-flung places such as the 400 Ballroom in Torquay on the English south coast, and up north at Newcastle’s Club A’GoGo. On 30 July, the day that England won the World Cup at Wembley Stadium, Listen opened for the Troggs, of ‘Wild Thing’ fame, at the Boston Gliderdrome in Lincolnshire.

      ‘We went all over the place in a van Mrs Reagan had given to us,’ recalls Crutchley. ‘It had belonged to another of her bands, the Redcaps, but they’d split up. A friend of Robert’s from Kidderminster, a lad named Edward, used to drive us. He was a total nutcase, this chubby little guy who used to take loads of substances.’

      Carole Williams was then the receptionist at Astra. It was her job to hand out the wages to the agency’s bands each week.

      ‘The lads would all come and get their money on a Friday morning,’ she says. ‘Robert was living with Roger Beamer and neither of them was very good at getting up. One of my little jobs every Friday was to call them at 10 am to wake them. They were on £15 a night for two forty-five-minute slots, which was quite good in those days.

      ‘Robert had an aura about him and stood out from the other guys in his band. He was drop-dead gorgeous, too. One time, a band I liked called the Roulettes were doing a show in Shrewsbury, a couple of hours away. Robert offered to take me. It was on a Friday night and he picked me up after work. He turned up in this really old, black car – a Ford Poplar, I think.

      ‘We trundled along to Shrewsbury, saw the band and had a lovely night. We got home, and that’s when he told me he didn’t have a driving licence. To him that was a mere technicality. At least it was a straight road.’

      For all this roaming, the highest-profile gig Listen played was back in the Black Country on 20 October. That night they and the N’Betweens opened up for Eric Clapton’s heavyweight new blues-rock trio, Cream. It was to be an inauspicious occasion for them.

      ‘At the end of their set Plant and John Crutchley started their fake fight, and Crutch ended up falling off the stage,’ says Jim Lea. ‘He broke his ankle, as I recall. Plant told me later that they really were fighting. He said they argued a lot, so the fake thing was just an excuse to bash seven shades of shit out of each other.’

      Listen’s last roll of the dice was to record a three-track demo tape that Dolan shopped to various London labels. He secured a deal with CBS. Yet unbeknown to the others, the label’s talent scout, Danny Kessler, had been taken in by Plant’s voice, and it was the singer that CBS signed up and not his band.

      As such, when the time came to record Listen’s first single, a cover of a song called ‘You Better Run’ originally by the American pop-rock band the Rascals, it was Plant alone who was required to travel down to London for the day.

      ‘CBS said they wanted to have session guys on it to make it more commercial,’ says Crutchley. ‘We were a little bit upset but it was one of those things. We were trying to get a hit record, so we were led.’

      Even at this distance the power of Plant’s voice on the track is striking but Kessler’s own over-fussy production smothers it in strings, brass and backing singers, one of whom was future Elton John sidekick, Kiki Dee.

      By unfortunate coincidence the N’Betweens had also chosen ‘You Better Run’ to be their first single, albeit in a more stripped-down form. Both versions were released on the same day in November 1966. To boost sales, Dolan directed his charges to go into every record shop in the area and order their own song. In the event it crept into the Top 50 for just one week and then vanished.

      ‘At one point I had Robert on one phone line and Noddy Holder on the other, both of them asking me which version I liked best,’ says Carole Williams. ‘My loyalties were with the N’Betweens, but I told Robert a little white lie.’

      ‘After that, things started to peter out for us,’ says Crutchley. ‘A lot of money had gone into publicising the record. We more or less sat down together and admitted it wasn’t working out. We were really broke, too.’

      With no band or money coming in, Plant moved in with his girlfriend and her parents. The couple were living off Maureen’s wages from working as a shop assistant at Marks & Spencer, which were £7 a week. Plant, who had just turned eighteen, made her a promise: if he had not realised his dream by the time he was twenty he would give it up and get a proper job.

      I howled so much that I couldn’t do anything at all.

      There remained something for Plant to hold on to: he was still signed to CBS Records. He was broke and had again been shoved back to the margins, but so long as he kept his foot in the door his dream would not die. He just had to find a way – any way – to kick that door open. If that meant abandoning himself to the whims of others then so be it.

      As it happened, CBS did have a vision for their young singer. They had decided to mould him into a crooner. With that voice and those looks of his he could surely make the ladies’ hearts flutter and soar. Their rivals Decca had done just the same with two of their own singers, and with great success. The first was a strapping bloke they had plucked from the Welsh valleys named Tom Jones. Then there was the still more unlikely Gerry Dorsey, an Indian-born club singer the label had re-christened Engelbert Humperdinck. As 1967 began, Humperdinck was enjoying a smash hit on both sides of the Atlantic with ‘Release Me’, a corny ballad Decca had found for him.

      For their charge CBS had earmarked an Italian ballad, ‘La Musica è Finita’, which had been a Number One in its country of origin. For Plant the track was re-titled ‘Our Song’ and he was once more paired with CBS’s in-house producer, Danny Kessler, to record it. Kessler was as unstinting in his use of strings and brass as he had been on Listen’s ill-starred ‘You Better Run’, but such a backdrop was better suited

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