LITMIR.BIZ

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everyone and everything as it was possible to be.

      ‘The rarefied air backstage at the O2 was something you could only savour for moments,’ he told me three years later.

      On that cold, dark night he drove north, across the River Thames and through city streets aglow with Christmas lights. On to Chalk Farm, a corner of north London a mile from the bustle of Camden Town and a short walk from the more genteel Primrose Hill, where he had a house. The car dropped him off at the Marathon Bar, an inauspicious-looking Turkish restaurant on Chalk Farm Road.

      Going inside, he walked past two spits of grey meat cooking in the window, past the stainless-steel counter and the garish display board advertising kebabs, burgers and fried chicken. He went into the small, windowless back room. There he sat at a wooden table, and ordered half a bottle of vodka and a plate of hummus. They knew him in this place and let him be. Here, at last, among the Marathon Bar’s usual late-night crowd – the young bucks, the couples and the local gangsters – he felt at peace. Through an open archway he could look out over the restaurant’s main room and onto the street beyond.

      I first met Plant in 1998 when I was working for the British rock magazine Kerrang! At the time he and Page were about to release their second album together as Page and Plant, Walking into Clarksdale. I interviewed the pair of them in London. During the course of our conversation Plant veered back and forth from being testy and disinterested to disarming and expansive, and I found him hard to read. I was fascinated by him because of this, drawn as much to his contradictions as to his obvious charisma. The quieter and more fragile-seeming Page left a much less enduring impression.

      Our paths crossed a number of times during the years that followed. We shared a journey on a public ferry in Istanbul, and I bumped into him in the backstage corridors at assorted television and music-awards shows. Discovering I was both a fellow Midlander and a football fan, he appeared to warm to me – although the team I supported, West Bromwich Albion, were local rivals of Wolverhampton Wanderers, the one he had followed from boyhood. One summer he sent me a couple of emails proposing a bet on the outcome of a forthcoming game between the teams. I am still waiting for him to honour this wager – a meal in an Indian restaurant on London’s Brick Lane.

      I interviewed him again in 2010, this time for Q magazine and when he was basking in the afterglow of the success he had enjoyed with Raising Sand, the album he had recorded with the American bluegrass singer Alison Krauss. He was warmer and friendlier on this occasion, and also appeared more at ease. This was perhaps as a result of how well both Raising Sand and his work subsequent to it had been received, or just as likely because Page was absent. He reflected on his formative years in England’s heartland, on the wild ride he had taken with Zeppelin and on his solo career, through which his fortunes had been as varied as the albums he had made.

      Two things that struck me most about Plant were his passion for music – which burns as fiercely now as it did when he was captivated by the great American blues singers as a grammar-school boy – and the uniqueness of his story. The best work of the vast majority of his peers is many years behind them but Plant continues to seek new challenges and adventures. This has kept his music fresh and vital, filling it with surprises and delights. Such was the spark for this book, fanned by the knowledge that no one had yet documented the entire span of his life.

      There was also the challenge of forming a sense of what made Plant tick and drove him on. To the casual observer he might seem garrulous, but beyond this front he is guarded and private, careful never to reveal too much of himself. I wanted to reach the man behind the music, since gaining a better understanding of him would shed new light on the road he has travelled.

      As he sat in the Marathon Bar collecting his thoughts that December night, the hours running to morning, did he reflect upon how far he had come and how long he had journeyed? Upon the years of struggle, the fights with his parents, when there was no money in his pocket and he had sensed the dream that had driven him slipping from reach. Upon the soaring heights to which Led Zeppelin had taken him, when he had basked in the adulation of millions and felt the heady rush of that band’s power pumping through his veins. And on into the deep, black depths into which he had sunk, when there had been nothing to fill the empty spaces in his heart.

      Through it all there had been music. It was, then and now, the thing that most lit him up. First it came crackling over the radio waves, then as something wild and primal from within. All the endless possibilities it promised had made his head spin. So often and so much he had been stirred by Elvis Presley and Robert Johnson, by sounds that rushed to him from the American West and the north of Africa. It had, all of it, carried him along. It had given him more than he could have dared to ask for and he had taken every last drop of it. And as he did so it had exacted from him a heavy and terrible price.

      And in looking back, did he also turn to contemplating his present and on then to what might lie over the horizon? Raising Sand, of which he was so proud, had awoken something new within him, but there was the question of what to do next, of where to roam and with whom. This relentless curiosity at all that could be was something he had never lost. Even on this night, when he had puffed out his chest and swaggered back into the past, what sustained him most was the sensation of forward motion, of new frontiers and the mysteries held within.

      ‘You can never have a life plan if you’re going to be addicted to music,’ he told me when I had asked him about such things. ‘At this age, when you find you’re still getting goosebumps and a lump in the throat when you hear it, how can you tell how it’s ever going to go?’

      Bloody hell, Rob did a fantastic Elvis impression.

      Robert Anthony Plant was born on 20 August 1948 in West Bromwich, in the heart of England’s industrial Midlands. His parents were among the first to benefit from the new National Health Service – the grand vision for a system of universal free health care set out by Clement Attlee’s Labour government upon coming to power in 1945 that had been made a reality the month before their son’s birth.

      Plant’s father was also named Robert, like his father before him. A qualified civil engineer, he had served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. Before the war he had been a keen violinist but the responsibilities of providing for his family took precedence over such things when he returned home. He retained, however, a love of classical music. His other great passion was cycling and he would often compete in local road races. He was by all accounts a decent, straightforward man, no more or less conservative in his outlook than other fathers of the time.

      Father and son found a shared bond in football. Plant was five years old when his father first took him to see a local professional team, Wolverhampton Wanderers. Sitting on his dad’s knee he watched as the players came out from the dressing rooms and onto the brilliant green pitch, those from Wolves in their gold and black strip, and felt euphoric as the noise of the thousands-strong crowd consumed him. His father told him that Billy Wright, the Wolves and England captain, had waved up to him as he emerged from the tunnel that day.

      His mother was Annie, although people often called her by her middle name, Celia. Like most households then, it was she who ran the home and put food on the table. Plant would inherit his mother’s laugh, a delighted chuckle. She called him ‘my little scoundrel’. The Plants were Catholics and raised their son within the strictures of their religion. Later on they would have a second child – a daughter, Alison. But Robert was to be their only son, and as such it was he who was the receptacle of all their initial hopes and dreams.

      From an early age, Plant can remember music being brought into the family home. His grandfather had founded a works brass band in West Bromwich and was accomplished on the trombone, fiddle and piano.

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