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weeks of Sgt. Pepper’s emergence both his beloved Small Faces and Stevie Winwood’s new band Traffic scored hits with songs that mined the same seam of psychedelic whimsy, ‘Itchycoo Park’ and ‘Hole in My Shoe’. The Traffic song would have jarred him most. Again he was confronted by the stark fact of how far his contemporary Winwood had travelled, and the distance he trailed behind.

      By the time ‘Hole in My Shoe’ had risen to Number Two in the UK charts Plant was working as a labourer for the construction company Wimpey, laying Tarmac on West Bromwich High Street. Turning up for his first day on site, his new workmates took one look at his long, blond hair and began calling him ‘The Pop Singer’.

      It would not be long before Plant hauled himself up from this latest low ebb, since he was never lacking in resolve or self-assurance. He soon gathered about him another group of musicians, announcing them as Robert Plant and the Band of Joy. ‘Pop’ Brown howled in protest and for a time there were two Band of Joys hustling for gigs, but the others blinked first, changing their name to the Good Egg and drifting to obscurity. The following year Plant would marry into their guitarist Vernon Pereira’s family – Pereira was Maureen’s cousin – although the two of them never played together again. Pereira died in a car crash in 1976 at a time when Plant was consumed by other troubles.

      To manage his latest band Plant called on an old contact, Mike Dolan, who had stewarded Listen. Dolan had an immediate effect, although not perhaps a considered one. Plant had an impending court date to answer a motoring charge and Dolan convinced him this could be used to drum up publicity. Dolan hatched a plan to stage a ‘Legalise Pot’ march on the same day. He contacted the local press, suggesting that his singer was going to lead a crowd of young disciples to the courthouse steps, protesting their civil rights.

      In the event Plant arrived at Wednesbury Court on the morning of 10 August 1967 accompanied by a supporting group that numbered just seven, one of whom was his girlfriend’s younger sister Shirley. This ragged band carried placards daubed with slogans such as ‘Happiness Is Pot Shaped’ and ‘Don’t Plant It … Smoke It’.

      A report in that evening’s edition of the Express & Star described the scene: ‘Police peered curiously from the windows of the police station and some even came out to photograph the strangely assorted bunch, which included two girls in miniskirts.’ Dolan denied that the whole farrago had been stage-managed, telling the paper: ‘It was a completely spontaneous act on the part of these youngsters, who regard Bob as a kind of leader.’

      Although Plant was cleared of the charge of dangerous driving, a fellow protestor, a nurse named Dorette Thompson, was less fortunate, losing her job for her part in the march.

      ‘That pantomime was Robert’s scuffling side,’ says John Ogden. ‘He didn’t need to do it, but he tried everything. He actually defended himself in court attired in the costume of an Indian bridegroom. Now, I’d been in court once to give a character reference and gotten cross-examined by this snotty lawyer. It’s an intimidating experience. Yet he did that when he was still just eighteen.’

      Plant’s domestic arrangements at the time were no less haphazard than the march had been. He lived on and off with Maureen and her family in West Bromwich but crashed with friends, too. That summer he also moved in to a house at 1 Hill Road, Lye, close to his Stourbridge stomping grounds. One of his new housemates was Andrew Hewkin, an aspiring painter then in his final year at Stourbridge College.

      ‘I can’t imagine that house is still standing – it would be in need of serious renovation after what we did to it,’ Hewkin tells me. ‘People came and went all the time. It was hard to know who was living there and who wasn’t because you’d bump into a different girl or guy every morning. We were all paying virtually nothing in rent.

      ‘There were lots of rooms, each one with a different colour and smell, all sorts of music blaring out from them. I don’t remember seeing much of Robert’s room but then I don’t recall seeing much of Robert either. The big dormitory up at the college was called West Hill; that’s where all the action happened and where Robert was most of the time. He wasn’t a student but he knew that all the best-looking birds hung out there.’

      The house in Lye soon doubled up as a rehearsal space for the Band of Joy. The band set their gear up in the cellar, which was cramped, windowless and feverishly hot.

      ‘It was seriously loud down there and Robert would drip with sweat,’ says Hewkin. ‘I saw them perform a lot, too. He was very much the same on stage then as he is now, the chest puffed out, but even more so. I think he probably learnt quite a bit off Mick Jagger because Robert strutted, too, though he was more of a cockerel.

      ‘Otherwise, he was very down to earth, and charming, too, although he was heavily into his hobbits and underworlds. Sad, isn’t it? He bought a car, an old Morris Minor, and parked it in the garden of the house, which was completely overgrown. It never moved in all the time he was living there. I heard later that the police eventually came and took it away.’

      This second incarnation of the Band of Joy was no more durable than the first. Their cause wasn’t necessarily strengthened by the image they adopted – daubing their faces in war paint. In particular, this look did nothing for bassist Peter Bowen.

      ‘It frightened everybody to death,’ Plant told Richard Williams. ‘This big, fat bass player would come running on, wearing a kaftan and bells, and dive straight off the stage and into the audience. I howled so much that I couldn’t do anything at all.’

      By the end of the year Bowen and the others had gone, leaving Plant to pick up the pieces once more. This he did with great zest, persuading both Bonham to join him again and Kevyn Gammond to walk out on reggae singer Jimmy Cliff’s backing band. With typical chutzpah, he next turned to the Good Egg, bringing in their bassist Paul Lockey and organist Chris Brown, doubtless to the considerable ire of his father.

      With this line-up, the Band of Joy gelled at last. Bonham’s hulking drums giving them added weight, they were all heft and power, indulging themselves on sprawling instrumental workouts. This was a precursor to all that would soon enough change the lives of Plant and his hooligan drummer, although at the time neither could have known it. Yet it was all too much for the Midlands audiences of the time.

      ‘I used to run a club at the Ship and Rainbow pub in Wolverhampton and booked them for a gig,’ says John Ogden. ‘It wasn’t really a success because a lot of the audience were still blues freaks and Robert wasn’t doing that then.

      ‘I do remember him singing Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and it being bloody great. We had a chat afterwards and he was disappointed with the response. He was saying people ought to listen, that he couldn’t keep doing the same thing. But back then if you were unusual, and especially if you were loud, you couldn’t get gigs around here.’

      Mike Dolan took the band outside of the area to the Middle Earth and Marquee clubs in London, and up north to Club A’GoGo in Newcastle. That March they did a handful of dates around the country with an expat American folk singer, Tim Rose. Such gigs were intermittent and paid less than the covers circuit they had each started out on but to begin with a shared purpose spurred them on.

      ‘You couldn’t call what we were doing freak rock but it had that spirit to it,’ says Kevyn Gammond. ‘It was exciting and it set us apart from all the twelve-bar stuff that we’d grown up with. A number could go on for ten, fifteen minutes ­ – God help the poor audience. There was also a battle going on between John and Rob, because Bonzo was such a showman. He’d set up his drums in such a way that Rob and I could be pushed a bit to the side or behind him.’

      Just as he had done with Listen, Dolan got the band to record a demo tape. It was done at Regent Sound Studios in London and featured versions of Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What It’s Worth’ and the murder ballad ‘Hey Joe’, plus two self-penned songs, ‘Memory Lane’ and ‘Adriatic Seaview’. Both covers suggest the potency of this Band of Joy, although little room was afforded for subtleties and even less for restraint. Plant embodied their full-on assault, his voice pitched lower than it would later be, attacking ‘Hey Joe’ as if by doing so he could rid

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