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year and to re-sit his exams.

      At least things had taken a turn for the better outside of the school. Plant was singing and blowing harmonica in the Crawling King Snakes, a band that had grown up in Kidderminster, the nearest town immediately south-west of Stourbridge. From messy beginnings at such places as the local YWCA they had gradually improved enough to get themselves on the Ma Reagan circuit, and were playing twenty-minute slots at her venues as a warm-up act.

      ‘By the time I was capable of stepping in front of a microphone the Midlands scene was full of beat groups and I was a bit late getting on the bandwagon,’ Plant told me. ‘But I’d gotten a really good schooling playing with people quite a bit older than me. I’d already been getting up in the blues clubs for more than a year before I even thought about going to places where women danced.’

      In many respects 1965 was to be a pivotal year. The first rumblings of dark and crazy days ahead were felt in the US that summer as Los Angeles burnt during the Watts Riots. In October, with the number of troops being drafted to Vietnam doubling, anti-war protests swept through American cities. That same month in Britain, police in Manchester arrested Ian Brady and his girlfriend Myra Hindley, charging them with the murder of five children, three of whose bodies had been discovered on nearby Saddleworth Moor.

      This was also to be the year that pop music came of age. The Beatles made Rubber Soul; Bob Dylan went electric and released his first masterpiece, ‘Highway 61 Revisited’; the Byrds emerged on America’s West Coast; and the Who crashed out of London shouting ‘My Generation’. And as rock grew up out of pop, the notion that this was all to be a flash in the pan receded into the distance.

      In Stourbridge, the town hall became a hub of activity, hosting weekly ‘Big Beat Sessions’ that brought both the Who and the Small Faces to town. Each found an especially enthusiastic supporter in sixteen-year-old Plant, by now a fully fledged mod. He got a taste of this action closer to home, too. Out of Wolverhampton came the N’Betweens, later to change their name to Slade and then cranking out fuzzbox-heavy Tamla Motown covers. There were also the Shakedown Sound, formed – like Crawling King Snakes – in Kidderminster, but steps ahead of Plant’s band, bagging opening spots with the likes of the Who and local heroes the Spencer Davis Group.

      Plant was especially taken with the Shakedown Sound’s singer, Jess Roden. A year older than him, Roden had, like Stevie Winwood, a freakishly soulful voice. His band were gigging most nights of the week on the Reagan circuit and beyond, performing powerful versions of blues staples such as ‘Smokestack Lightning’ and ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’. The Crawling King Snakes and the Shakedown Sound became close, hanging out and copping songs off each other.

      ‘I suppose Robert was King Mod,’ says Kevyn Gammond, then guitarist in the Shakedown Sound. ‘He had a good eye for fashion, so he’d always have the latest Ben Sherman shirt on and the right hairstyle. I think the N’Betweens and the Shakedowns had a big influence on him, because we were all little mods, and our band had played with the Who.

      ‘Rob was really impressed by Jess. They’d both come round to my parents’ house and ask me to work out all the chords to songs like “I Go Crazy” by James Brown. That’s the way you learnt then, by putting the records on. I’d be left to sit there and get on with it while they went off to play pinball at the Flamingo Café down the road.’

      It was in Kidderminster at this time that Plant first came across a gifted young guitarist named Robbie Blunt. The two would hook up after school, going round to each other’s houses to listen to records and work out songs together.

      None of this allowed for any appreciable improvement in Plant’s relations with his parents, or with regard to his studies during what would be his final year at King Edward VI. He had grown to like his maths teacher, Mr Colton, but otherwise the state of things between him and the masters had, if anything, deteriorated.

      Michael Richards, a contemporary of Plant’s at the school, recalls him by then having a reputation as ‘a bit of a hooligan’, although he qualifies this by saying that ‘he was mischievous more than anything’. He continues: ‘The chemistry master was a guy named Featherstone, a nice old bloke who should have retired years ago. I remember that Robert played him up no end. But Robert was very popular, too. He hung around with a lot of people. Everybody wanted to be his friend.

      ‘You’d hear lots of things about him, and I’m not sure a lot of them were true. There was one story that Robert’s parents had gone off on holiday and left him to stay with someone else, and he’d broken back into his own house and thrown a party.’

      In that last year Plant did join the school’s jazz society and ended up sitting on its social committee. In this role he helped oversee three concerts in the school hall by King Edward VI’s resident jazz band, the Cushion Foot Stompers. For a time he also joined a jazz-influenced group called the Banned with another schoolmate, Martin Lickert, who played bass. Lickert would go on to become Ringo Starr’s chauffeur, appearing alongside his employer in Frank Zappa’s surreal 1971 movie 200 Motels.

      The Banned got as far as opening the bill at the town halls in both Stourbridge and neighbouring Dudley in the spring of 1965, although Plant was forced to miss the latter engagement after having contracted glandular fever. The proprietor of the town’s Groove record shop, David Yeats, who had sung in Sounds of Blue and seen Plant at the Seven Stars, replaced him for that one show. He went round to Plant’s family home the night before the gig for a hastily convened rehearsal. Shown up to his small bedroom, he found Plant lying stricken in bed.

      ‘He took me through this book of song lyrics he had got together,’ says Yeats. ‘I did the show, and I’d never heard anything before that was that loud. I remember standing in the middle of this fantastic noise. The audience seemed happy enough, but what they must have thought I don’t know, seeing this teenage sex god being replaced by a little bloke like me.’

      Whenever things got especially strained at home, as was increasingly the case, Plant would sleep the night in the Banned’s van. The vehicle made quite an impression, since they had used lipstick and nail varnish to graffiti it.

      That summer, he re-sat his O-levels with a little more success. He gained passes in English, English literature, geography and maths. This was reported in the school’s newspaper, the Stourbridge Edwardian, as was the fact that he would be leaving King Edward VI on 22 July to train in accountancy. Yet his departure appears to have taken place rather earlier than this, and was enforced.

      ‘I heard that one day he was off playing truant in Birmingham, walking around with a mate of his and smoking, when he bumped into one of the masters who happened to be in town on his day off,’ says Michael Richards. ‘He was still wearing his school uniform so it was seen as a bit of a disgrace. I believe that was the culmination of a long series of problems and Robert was expelled. It did create a bit of a stir around the school. Most people thought he’d had it coming but there was also the sense that he’d had a bit of bad luck.’

      There is some doubt about the veracity of this story. Gary Tolley dismisses it, although he had left King Edward VI the previous year, and no record of it happening is kept at the current school. But another of Plant’s fellow pupils during his final year, Colin Roberts, who would later return to the school to teach, supports Richards’s account.

      ‘I don’t know the circumstances of his being expelled,’ Roberts tells me, ‘but he must have done something bad because very few people got thrown out. The story goes that Headmaster Chambers told him that he’d never make anything of himself. When I came back to the school in the early ’70s, Chambers himself told me that Robert had later turned up at his house in a Rolls-Royce and asked the Headmaster if he remembered him.’

      He would dance across the stage, like he was floating.

      The summer of 1965 would be the last time Plant’s parents were able to assert

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