This one’s for Denise, the love of my life, and the lights of it, Charlie and Tom.

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Encore

PART ONE: BEGINNINGS

1 THE BLACK COUNTRY

2 THE DEVIL’S MUSIC

3 KING MOD

4 THE RUBBER MAN

5 THE REAL DESPERATION SCENE

PART TWO: AIRBORNE

6 BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

7 VALHALLA

8 BLOND ELVIS

9 SODOM AND GOMORRAH

10 CRASH

11 DARKNESS, DARKNESS

12 THE OUT DOOR

PART THREE: SOLO

13 EXORCISM

14 SEA OF LOVE

15 TALL COOL ONE

16 CROSSROADS

17 GOOD TIMES, BAD TIMES

18 DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAIN

19 REBIRTH

20 GONE, GONE, GONE

21 JOY

22 CODA

Acknowledgements

Sources

List of Searchable Terms

Picture Section

Copyright

About the Publisher

How can you ever tell how it’s going to go?

For a moment he was alone. Back in his dressing room, where he had paced the floor little more than two hours before. Then, he had been in the grip of a terror at what was to come. The weight of history pressing down upon him; the burden of all the demons he had come here to put to rest at last.

He had felt fear gnawing away at him. The dread of how he might appear to all the thousands out there in the dark. Here he was, a man in his sixtieth year, desiring to roll back time and recapture all the wonders of youth. Did that, would that, make him seem a fool? In those long minutes with himself he had looked in the mirror and asked over and over if he really could be all that he had once been; if it were truly possible for him to take his voice back up to the peaks it had once scaled. He had so many questions but no answers.

There would be ghosts in the room, too. Those of his first-born son, of his best friend and of all the others he had lost along the way. For each of them he wanted to be the Golden God this one last time …

It was going on midnight on 10 December 2007. Robert Plant was gathering himself in the immediate aftermath of Led Zeppelin’s reunion concert at London’s O2 Arena. The roar of the crowd, which had rolled over him like thunder, had faded. He could hear the chatter of many voices in the corridors backstage; the same corridors that had earlier been silent and still, pregnant with expectation before he and his band had walked tall once more.

Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, the other surviving original members of Led Zeppelin, were off in their own corners thinking their own thoughts. Tonight they had come together but there would remain a distance between them. It was one that spoke of all they had built together and then seen turn to ruin; of shared victories and bitter recriminations; of relationships so complex and complicated they were all but impossible to unravel.

When at last Plant threw open his door, all of those who came to shake his hand and pound his back told him what he already knew. He, they, had been great. Better than anyone could ever have hoped they might be. His doubts had been stilled. His debt, such as it was, had been honoured.

Pat and Joan Bonham, wife and mother of John, the friend and colleague he had buried a lifetime or a heartbeat ago, were among the last he welcomed and he held them especially close. Jason, their son and grandson, had sat in his father’s drum seat that night. He told them how proud John would have been of his only son. And then the ghosts came to him again.

He was supposed to go to some featureless hospitality room upstairs to meet with friends. There was a VIP party to attend where he would be feted by Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, Priscilla and Lisa-Marie Presley, and more and more. He instead took one last look around the scene of his triumph, then summoned a car and asked to be driven away from it. He wanted nothing more now than to get as far from 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.

‘My great-grandfather was a brass bandsman, too,’ he told me. ‘So everybody played. My dad could play, but never did. That whole idea of sitting around the hearth and playing together had gone by his generation. He went to war, lost his opportunities, and had to come home and dig deep to get them back, like so many men of the time.’

The town in which the young Plant spent his first years was two miles by road from the sprawling conurbation of Birmingham, England’s second city. Locals called the regions to the north and west of Birmingham the Black Country. This was on account of the choking smoke that had belched out from the thousands of factory chimneys that sprung up there during Britain’s industrial revolution of the 19th century. Writing of these acrid emissions in The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens described how they ‘poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light and made foul the melancholy air’.

By 1830 the Black Country’s 130 square miles had been transformed into an almost entirely industrial landscape of mines, foundries and factories, a consequence of sitting upon the thickest coal seam in the country. The rush to heavy industry brought not just bricks and mortar, but also the creation of new canal and rail networks, enabling the Black Country to export its mineral wealth to the far-flung corners of the British Empire.

They were still hewing coal out of the Black Country earth in the 1950s, although the glory days of the mines had passed. Iron and steel were worked intensively in local factories until the 1980s, glass to this day. The anchors and chains for the RMS Titanic’s first – and last – voyage of 1912 were forged in the Black Country town of Netherton, and the ship’s glass and crystal stemware was fired and moulded in the glassworks of nearby Stourbridge.

In keeping with their austere beginnings the people of the Black Country pride themselves on being hard workers; tough and durable, they tend in general towards a stoical disposition and a droll sense of humour. Their particular dialect, which survives to this day, has its roots in the earliest examples of spoken English and is often impenetrable to outsiders. Habitually spoken in a singsong voice it conveys nothing so much as amusement and bemusement. There is an old saying around these parts: ‘Black Country born, Black Country bred, strong in the arm and thick in the head.’ This was how they went out into the world.

Two of the most prolific gunfighters of the Wild West, Wes Hardin and ‘Bad’ Roy Hill, who between them killed seventy men, had their roots in the Black Country town of Lye, their families leaving from there for the promised land of America and their own subsequent infamy. The ancestors of Wyatt Earp, the Wild West’s great lawman who wrote his name into history at the O.K. Corral in 1881, hailed from Walsall, less than four miles from where Plant took his first steps.

When the Second World War came the region was inextricably tied to it. Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister at the time of its outbreak who had misguidedly attempted to appease Adolf Hitler, was born into one of Birmingham’s great political dynasties. Although the war was eventually won, its after-effects lingered on into the following decade. The rationing of foodstuffs such as meat and dairy continued in Britain until 1954. At the time of Plant’s childhood, West Bromwich and the Black Country, like so many of the country’s towns and cities, still bore the scars from six years of conflict. As a centre for the manufacture of munitions the area had been a prime target for German bombs. Throughout Birmingham and the Black Country were the shells of buildings and houses blasted into ruin. It was an everyday occurrence to find the tail end of bombs or shards of shrapnel littering the streets.

‘The whole area was still pretty much a bomb site in the early 1950s,’ recalls Trevor Burton, who grew up in Aston to the north-east of Birmingham’s city centre, and who would later cross paths with Plant on the local music scene of the 1960s. ‘The bomb sites, these piles of rubble and blown-out houses, they were our playgrounds.’

The 1950s would bring great change to Britain. At the start of the decade few Britons owned a TV set; those who did had just one channel to watch – in black and white. The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953 led to an upsurge in TV ownership and by the end of the decade 75 per cent of British homes had a set. The ’50s also witnessed the opening of Britain’s first motorways – the M6 in 1958 and the M1 in 1959 – establishing faster, more direct road links between cities such as London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester. Such progress brought the world closer to Britain, making it appear more accessible.

Yet at the same time Britain’s role on the global stage was diminishing. The Suez Crisis of 1956, during which Britain tried and failed to seize back control of the Suez Canal from Egypt, hastened the end of Empire. The United States and the Soviet Union were the new superpowers, Britain being relegated to the role of junior partner to the Americans in the decades-long Cold War that was to unfold between those two nations.

The national mood in Britain, however, was one of relief at the end of the war in Europe and of hope for better times. This began to be realised from the middle of the decade, by which time the nation’s economy was booming and wages for skilled labour were increasing. A rush by the British to be socially upwardly mobile left a void for unskilled workers that was filled by successive governments with immigrant labour from the Commonwealth. With these workers populating its steel mills and foundries – and now its car plants, too – Birmingham and the Black Country soon ranked among the country’s most multi-cultural areas. To the already healthy Irish population in Birmingham there would be added vibrant communities drawn from the Caribbean, India and Pakistan.

In 1957, so pronounced was the collective sense of affluence and aspiration that Harold Macmillan, the Conservative prime minister, predicted an unprecedented age of prosperity for the country. ‘Let us be frank about it,’ he said, ‘most of our people have never had it so good.’ The British people agreed and elected Macmillan to a second term of office in October 1959.

The Plant family embodied the rise of the middle classes in Macmillan’s Britain. As a skilled worker, Robert Plant Sr could soon afford to move his wife and son out from West Bromwich to the greener fringes of the Black Country. They came to leafy Hayley Green, a well-heeled suburban enclave located fifteen miles from the centre of Birmingham.

Their new home was at 64 Causey Farm Road, on a wide street of sturdy pre-war houses just off the main road between Birmingham and the satellite town of Kidderminster. It was a neighbourhood of traditional values and twitching net curtains, populated by white-collar workers. Unlike West Bromwich, it was surrounded by countryside. Farmland was abundant, the Wyre Forest close by and Hayley Green itself backed onto the Clent Hills.

Situated near the end of Causey Farm Road, number 64 was one of the more modest houses on the street. Built of red brick, it had a small drive and a garage, and from its neat back garden there was an uninterrupted view out to the rolling hills. For the young Plant there would have been many places to go off and explore: those hills, or the woods at the end of the road, or over the stiles and across the fields to the town of Stourbridge, with its bustling high street.

It was during this period that many of Plant’s lifelong passions were first fired. The Clent Hills and their surrounding towns and villages were the inspiration for the landscape of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the writer of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit having grown up in the area in the 1890s. Plant devoured Tolkien’s books as a child, and time and again in later life would reference the author’s fantastical world in his lyrics.

In the summer the Plants, like so many other Black Country families of the time, would drive west for their holidays, crossing the border into Wales. They would head for Snowdonia National Park, 823 square miles of rugged uplands in the far north-west of the country. It was an area rich in Celtic folklore and history, and this, together with the wildness of the terrain, captivated the young Plant.

He was entranced by such Welsh myths as those that swirled around the mountain Cadair Idris, a brooding edifice at the southern edge of Snowdonia near the small market town of Machynlleth, which the Plants would often visit. It was said that the mountain was both the seat of King Arthur’s kingdom and that of the giant Idris, who used it as a place of rest from which he would sit and gaze up at the evening stars. According to legend anyone who sleeps the night on the slopes of Cadair Idris is destined to wake the next morning as either a poet or a madman.

At Machynlleth Plant learnt of the exploits of the man who would become his great folk hero, the Welsh king Owain Glyndŵr. It was in the town that Glyndŵr founded the first Welsh parliament in 1404, after leading an armed rebellion against the occupying English forces of King Henry IV. The uprising was crushed five years later, and Glyndŵr’s wife and two of his daughters were sent to their deaths in the Tower of London. Glyndŵr himself escaped capture, fighting on until his death in 1416.

But for Plant there would be nothing to match the impact that rock ’n’ roll was to have upon him as a child. Like every other kid who grew up in post-war Britain he would have been aware of an almost suffocating sense of primness and propriety. Children were taught to respect their elders and betters. In both the way they dressed and were expected to behave they were moulded to be very much like smaller versions of their parents. Authority was not to be questioned and conformity was the norm.

The musical landscape of Britain in the ’50s was similarly lacking in generational diversity. Variety shows, the big swing bands and communal dances were popular with old and young alike. As that decade rolled into the next, the country’s clubs heaved to the sounds of trad jazz, making stars of such bandleaders as Chris Barber, Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball, who played music that was as cosy and unthreatening as the social mores of the time. In the United States, however, a cultural firestorm was brewing.

Elvis Presley, young and full of spunk, released his first recording on the Memphis label Sun Records in the summer of 1954. It was called ‘That’s All Right’, and it gave birth to a new sound. A bastardisation of the traditional blues songs of black African-Americans and the country music of their white counterparts, rock ’n’ roll was loud, brash and impossibly exciting – and it arrived like an earthquake, the tremors from which reverberated across the Atlantic. Behind Elvis came Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent and others, all young men with fire in their bellies and, often as not, a mad, bad glint in their eyes.

In 1956 the mere act of Elvis swivelling his hips on TV’s Ed Sullivan Show was enough to shock America’s moral guardians. It was also instrumental in opening up the first real generational divide on either side of the Atlantic. Elvis’s gyrations acted as a rallying point for both British and American teenagers, and as an affront to their parents’ sense of moral decency.

In the English Midlands rock ’n’ roll first arrived in person in the form of Bill Haley. In 1954 Haley, who hailed from Michigan, released one of the first rock ’n’ roll singles, ‘Rock Around the Clock’. He followed it with an even bigger hit, ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’. When, on his first British tour, he arrived at Birmingham Odeon in February 1957 the city’s teenagers queued all around the block for tickets. At the show itself they leapt out of their seats and danced wildly in the aisles. It mattered not one bit that, in the flesh, Haley had none of Elvis’s youthful virility.

Laurie Hornsby, a music historian from Birmingham, recalls: ‘The man who was responsible for going down to Southampton docks to meet Haley off the ship was Tony Hall, who was the promotions man for Decca Records in London. He told me that he stood there at the bottom of the ship’s gangplank, and down came this old-age pensioner hanging onto his hair for grim death. Hall thought, “My God, I’ve got to sell this to the British teenager.” But sell it he did.’

By the time Elvis burst onto the scene Plant was a primary-school boy. Tall for his age, he was blessed with good looks and a pile of wavy, blond hair. He might have been too young to grasp the precise nature of Elvis’s raw sex appeal but he was immediately drawn in by the untamed edge to his voice and the jungle beat of his music. From the age of nine he would hide himself behind the sofa in the front room at 64 Causey Farm Road and mime to Elvis’s records on the radio, a hairbrush taking the place of a microphone.

He soon progressed to the songs of Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. Each weekend he and his parents would gather around the TV set to watch the variety show Sunday Night at the London Palladium, and it was on this, in the spring of 1958, that the ten-year-old Plant first saw Buddy Holly & the Crickets. That year Holly also came to the Midlands, playing at Wolverhampton’s Gaumont Cinema on 7 March and, three days later, giving an early and later evening performance at Birmingham Town Hall.

By then Plant had begun to comb his hair into something that approximated Elvis’s and Cochran’s quiffs, much to the chagrin of his parents. He was also digesting the other sound then sweeping the UK, one that made the act of getting up and making music seem so much more attainable. Its roots lay in the African-American musical culture of the early 20th century – in jazz and blues. In the 1920s jug bands had sprung up in America’s southern states, so called because of their use of jugs and other homemade instruments. This music was revived thirty years later in Britain and given the name ‘skiffle’.

Britain’s undisputed King of Skiffle was Lonnie Donegan, a Glaswegian by birth who had begun playing in trad jazz bands in the early ’50s. Having taught himself to play banjo, Donegan formed a skiffle group that used cheap acoustic guitars, a washboard and a tea-chest bass. They performed American folk songs by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. Starting in 1955 with a speeded-up version of Leadbelly’s ‘Rock Island Line’, Donegan would go on to have twenty-four consecutive Top 30 hits in the UK, an unbroken run that stretched into the early ’60s.

Donegan’s success, and the simplicity of his set-up, prompted scores of British kids to form their own skiffle groups. One of these, the Quarrymen, was brought together in Liverpool in the spring of 1957 by the sixteen-year-old John Lennon. For his part, Plant was still too young and green to even contemplate forming a band. But in skiffle, as in rock ’n’ roll, he had located a route back to black America’s folk music, the blues. It was one he would soon follow with the tenacity of a pilgrim.

The thing that Plant thought about most on the morning of 10 September 1959, however, was not music but how little he liked his new school uniform. There he stood before his admiring mother dressed in short, grey trousers and long, grey socks, a white shirt, a red and green striped tie and green blazer, with a green cap flattening down his sculpted hair. At the age of eleven, and having passed his entrance exams, he was off to grammar school.

But not just to any grammar school. Plant had secured a place at King Edward VI Grammar School for Boys in Stourbridge, which had a reputation for being the best in the area. For his parents, his attending such an establishment would incur extra expense but would also impress the neighbours. The school had been founded in 1430 as the Chantry School of Holy Trinity and counted among its alumni the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson. A boys-only school of 750 students, it was so steeped in tradition that first years were introduced in the school newspaper beneath the Latin heading salvete, the word used in ancient Rome to welcome a group of people.

On that first morning Plant and ninety or so other new arrivals were lined up outside the staff house in the school playground. Surrounding them were buildings of red brick, including the library with its vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows. The masters in their black gowns and mortarboards came out and assigned each of them to one of three forms. Those boys who had excelled in their entrance exams and were considered to be future university candidates were gathered together in 1C. Plant was placed in the middle form, 1B.

The school operated a strict disciplinary code, one that was presided over by the headmaster, Richard Chambers. A tall man who wore horn-rimmed glasses, Chambers had a hooked nose that led students to christen him ‘The Beak’. Behind his back he was also mocked for a speech defect that prevented him from correctly pronouncing the letter ‘r’. But Chambers mostly engendered both respect and fear.

‘He was extremely strict, a sadist really,’ recalls Michael Richards, a fellow student of Plant’s. ‘If you got into trouble, he would call your name out in assembly in front of the whole school. You would have to go and stand outside his office, and eventually would be called in. He would reprimand you for whatever you’d done and then whack you across the backside four times with a cane. Then he’d tell you to come back after school. So you’d have all day to think about it and then you’d get the same again.’

In many respects Plant was, to begin with at least, a typical grammar-school boy. He collected stamps and during the winter months played rugby. Although the school did not play his beloved football – indeed footballs were banned from the playground – he would join groups of other boys in kicking a tennis ball about at break times, using their blazers as makeshift goalposts. In his second year he was nominated as 2B’s form monitor by his tutor, a role that gave him the giddy responsibilities of cleaning the blackboard and trooping along to the staff room to notify the other masters if a tutor failed to arrive for a lesson.

What marked him apart was his love of music and the manner in which he carried himself. Going about the school he would typically have a set of vinyl records tucked under his arm – and these, often as not, would be Elvis Presley records. He even took to imitating Elvis’s pigeon-toed walk.

‘Bloody hell, Rob did a fantastic Elvis impression,’ says Gary Tolley, who sat next to Plant in their form. ‘He was Elvis-crazy, but early Elvis, not the Elvis of G.I. Blues, when he’d started to go a bit showbiz. He was very into Eddie Cochran, too. He had the same quiff. When you see all those pictures of Cochran looking out from the side of his eyes at the camera, that was Robert.’

Plant and Tolley, who was learning to play the guitar, soon became part of a clique at school that was based around their shared interest in music. Their number included another classmate, Paul Baggott, and John Dudley, a budding drummer. They prided themselves on being the first to know what the hot new records were and when the likes of Cochran or Gene Vincent would be coming to perform in the area.

‘Not blowing our own trumpets, but we were all popular at school,’ recalls Dudley. ‘The other kids sort of looked up to us, because we knew a little bit that they didn’t. Robert was a nice guy, but a bit full of himself. He was quite cocky. He’s always been like that. The Teddy Boy era had died by then, but he made sure that he’d got the long drape coat and the lot. A lot of people thought he was arrogant because he’d got that sort of body language about him.’

‘Rob was very good looking and he always seemed to be at the centre of whatever was going on,’ adds Tolley. ‘He had something. Charisma, I suppose. In those days, the Catholics would have a separate morning service to everybody else and then come in to join us for assembly. Robert would walk into the main hall with his quiff and his collar turned up, and you could see all the masters and prefects glaring at him. He wore the school uniform but somehow he never looked quite the same as everybody else.’

Plant and Tolley would become good friends. Outside of school they went to the local youth club to play table tennis or billiards, and Plant would bring along his Elvis and Eddie Cochran singles to put on the club’s turntable. Plant had also picked up his father’s love of cycling, and he and Tolley would go off riding around the Midlands on a couple of stripped-down racing bikes.

‘Robert’s dad knew someone at the local cycling club and I can remember going to a velodrome near Stourbridge with Rob, riding round and round it and thinking we were fantastic,’ says Tolley. ‘He’d come to my house a lot and always turn up at mealtimes. If we were going out cycling for the evening, he’d arrive forty-five minutes before we’d arranged. Inevitably, my mum would say, “There’s a bit of tea spare, Robert. Would you like it?” “Oh, yes please, Mrs Tolley.”’

‘He’d be round our house for Sunday tea,’ says John Dudley. ‘He was always very polite. He’d ask my mum for jam sandwiches. If you’re going to put people into a class, his mum and dad were a class above mine. My father worked on the railways. I believe Rob’s father by then was an architect. They lived in a better house than we did. Rob was never from anywhere near an impoverished background.’

For as long as their son maintained his academic studies Plant’s parents tolerated his love of rock ’n’ roll, although his father, who mostly listened to Beethoven at home, professed to being mystified by it. In 1960 they bought him his first record player, a red and cream Dansette Conquest Auto. When he opened it he found on the turntable a single, ‘Dreaming’, by the American rockabilly singer Johnny Burnette. With his first record token he bought the Miracles’ effervescent soul standard ‘Shop Around’, which had given Berry Gordy’s nascent Motown label their breakthrough hit in the US.

A future was beginning to open out for the eleven-year-old Plant. It was one now free from the spectre of being required to spend two years in the armed forces upon leaving school, Macmillan’s government having abolished compulsory National Service that year. It did, nonetheless, still lie beyond his grasp, as was emphasised when his mother insisted he trim his quiff and he glumly complied.

There was us, academic whiz kids in total freefall.

By the time Plant entered his third year at grammar school in 1962 music had usurped his other interests. To begin with he was to be frustrated in his search to find something else that brought him the same sense of feral abandon he had felt upon first hearing Elvis. It was entirely absent from the TV light-entertainment shows of the time and his radio options were limited to one station, Radio Luxembourg. On that, at least, he came to hear Chris Kenner, a black R&B singer from New Orleans, and this nudged him further down his path.

‘When I was a kid there was nothing to latch onto,’ he told me. ‘In the middle of everything, all these comets would occasionally come flying over the radio. But think about the difference between here and America. In America you just turned that dial five degrees on the circle and you were into black radio.

‘We Brits, we’re monosyllabic when it comes to music. When people say we took the blues back to America, it’s such bollocks. Because John Hammond, Canned Heat, Bob Dylan, Mike Bloomfield, Elvin Bishop … all these people were already playing it. Their vision and awareness of music is so much greater than ours. All this stuff was going on, and being British I was only exposed to tiny bits of it. There wasn’t a great deal of attention being paid to the stuff that lit me up.’

Half a million black American servicemen were drafted overseas during the Second World War and it was they who first brought blues records into Britain. In time these records found their way into specialist shops and were picked up by collectors. Old 45s and 78s, they were by men and women with such evocative names as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Memphis Minnie and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Their songs documented the entire span of the black American experience, from the chains of slavery and grinding poverty to the pleasures of liquor and the love of a good – or bad – woman.

This was folk music in its most raw and pure form, the ground zero for the twelve-bar stomp of rock ’n’ roll. For Plant, as for countless other British kids at the time, it was all that he was looking for. Ironically, it would be an Englishman who opened up the floodgates for him. His interest sparked by rock ’n’ roll singles and odd nuggets captured from the radio, he picked up a book titled Blues Fell This Morning, first published in 1960 and written by Paul Oliver, a scholar from Nottingham. Oliver related the history of black American blues in an entirely dry, academic manner, but this did not deter Plant. He had an ordered mind and began noting down each of the records Oliver referenced in his book. He was to have a further Eureka moment when he found out that a shop in Birmingham stocked these records, and more besides.

The Diskery record shop, still going strong to this day, was founded in 1952 by a jazz buff named Morris Hunting. By 1962 its home was on Hurst Street, a tucked-away side road a few minutes’ walk from Birmingham’s main railway station. Cramped and poky, the Diskery’s floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with rare and imported vinyl. It became a mecca for the area’s aspirant musicians. One of the guys that worked there, a local black DJ known as Erskin T, specialised in turning these regulars on to the earliest blues, R&B and Tamla Motown sounds.

‘There was a group of about twenty of us from school who were heavily into American artists, Robert no more so than the rest,’ says Gary Tolley. ‘But he was more interested in the original recordings. In that period before the Beatles came along there were lots of British artists doing pathetic covers of American songs. We’d all go up to Birmingham, but Rob, and also Paul Baggott, would go to great lengths to find the original versions.’

To fund these visits, Plant took on a paper round, heading out on his bike each morning before school. With the money he earned he picked up such records as John Lee Hooker’s Folk Blues and Robert Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers. This last record had a profound effect on him.

Born in Mississippi in 1911, Robert Johnson, more than any other bluesman, is surrounded by myth and mystery. It was said that his mercurial talents as a guitarist, singer and songwriter came to him overnight. The legend grew that one night he had gone down to the crossroads on Highway 49 and 61, outside the town of Clarksdale, and there made a Faustian pact with the Devil. Johnson’s early death at the age of 27 fuelled such speculation, although he was probably poisoned by the jealous husband of a woman he had been seeing.

Decades later Plant would tell the Guardian newspaper: ‘When I first heard “Preaching Blues” and “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” by Robert Johnson, I went, “This is it!”’

He had, he would also add, never heard anything quite so seductive as Johnson’s voice – a wounded howl that spoke of pain and lust all at the same time. Propelled deeper into the blues by Johnson, Plant began expanding his record collection as fast as the money he got from his paper round would allow.

Coming home from school he would go up to his room and play these records over and over again. He catalogued and carefully filed each of them, having first pored over the sleeve notes and recording credits. It had become an obsession, one that his parents found increasingly difficult to understand. Staunch Catholics, they began to refer to the songs blasting out from their son’s room as ‘the Devil’s music’.

‘My dad really didn’t get much bluer than Johnny Mathis,’ Plant suggested to the Guardian. ‘I think he found Robert Johnson too dark.’

One evening, when Plant had played a Chris Kenner song, ‘I Like It Like That’, seventeen times in a row, his father came up to his room and cut the plug off his son’s record player.

As Plant was embarking upon his journey through the blues a beat-group scene was bubbling up in and around Birmingham. By 1962 scores of suited-and-booted bands had begun playing the local pubs and clubs. Some of these had grown out of schoolboy skiffle groups but all were inspired more by the Shadows. Backing band for the British rocker Cliff Richard, a sort of virginal Eddie Cochran, the Shadows had struck out on their own in 1960 when their tremulous instrumental ‘Apache’ topped the British charts. Their bespectacled lead guitarist, Hank Marvin, was the Eric Clapton of his day, compelling fleets of callow boys to take up the guitar.

These were covers bands, their members scouring record shops in the city to find songs from the US they could learn to play. Jimmy Powell was credited with the first recording to emerge from this scene, his cover of Buster Brown’s R&B tune ‘Sugar Babe’ being released as a single on Decca that year. Later it was claimed that an eighteen-year-old named Jimmy Page had played guitar on this session, although in Birmingham it was also said by some that if bullshit were an Olympic sport Powell would have a home filled with gold medals.

As 1962 turned to 1963 Britain was in the grip of its coldest winter on record, snow blizzards and freezing temperatures bringing the country to a virtual standstill for two months. 1963 would be the year in which President Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas and a war in Vietnam began to escalate – it was also the year when the Beatles came to Birmingham in the middle of the big freeze. Like so many of the local bands, the Beatles had been born out of a skiffle group that had first been gripped by Elvis and Buddy Holly; they, too, cut their chops re-interpreting songs that had been flown across the Atlantic. The Beatles, however, had their own songs as well. Their second single, ‘Please Please Me’, was one of these and it was released in the UK on 11 January 1963, beginning a month-long run to the top of the British charts.

On 13 January the Beatles arrived at the ATV studios in Birmingham to perform ‘Please Please Me’ for that night’s Thank Your Lucky Stars variety show. Police were forced to seal off the streets around the studios as thousands of kids turned out to catch a glimpse of them. Six days later the Beatles returned to play a gig at the Plaza in Old Hill, two miles from Plant’s family home.

Promoting this show was Mary Reagan, who would come to play a significant role in Plant’s early musical career. A formidable Irishwoman known to one and all as Ma Reagan, she and her husband Joe, who stood less than five foot tall, had established a dancehall business in the Midlands in 1947. By 1963 the Reagans were running four ballroom-sized venues in the area, the Plaza at Old Hill being seen as the most prestigious on account of its revolving stage.

In the wake of the Beatles’ visit the Midlands music scene took off. By the end of that year there would be an estimated 250 groups operating around the city. It was said that half of these still wanted to be the Shadows, the other half the Beatles. These bands were made up of kids in – or just out of – school. They were playing up to twenty shows a week in the hundreds of city pubs and clubs that nightly put on live music, earning more than their fathers did for going to work in the factories. Each of these bands aspired to get on the Reagan circuit, as it came to be known. The local acts that passed an audition for Ma Reagan could expect to perform regularly at all of her venues, often in a single night and for good money.

In July 1963 the Shadows’ producer Norrie Paramor pitched up at Birmingham’s Old Moat House Club to audition local bands for EMI, which was by then desperate to unearth another Fab Four, and he subsequently signed six Birmingham acts to the label. Although none came close to being the next Beatles, he did at least give the Midlands scene a name, christening it ‘Brumbeat’, a knowing adaptation of Liverpool’s then reigning Merseybeat sound.

One band just then starting out on the Brumbeat scene was to have a direct influence on Plant. The Spencer Davis Group had debuted at a Birmingham University student dance in April 1963, performing a set of blues and R&B covers. The band was a tight one and the undisputed star was their singer, Stevie Winwood, a white schoolboy with the voice of a black soul man. Like Plant, Winwood was then fourteen years old but he was moving faster.

In September 1963, at the start of the academic year, King Edward VI’s students were gathered together for a school photograph. In this picture Plant can be seen standing towards the centre of the group, six rows back. He alone among the many hundred students looks as if he is posing for the camera – his curly hair is rustled up into its habitual quiff, a look of practised insouciance on his face. To his right stands Gary Tolley, appearing to be somehow much younger and less worldly-wise.

Yet it was Tolley, not Plant, who by then had formed a first band with two more of their friends, Paul Baggott and John Dudley. Tolley played lead guitar, Baggott was on bass and Dudley on drums. A further pair of boys from their school year completed the line-up: Derek Price on guitar and the singer Andy Long. This school group had begun playing in pubs and youth clubs, calling themselves Andy Long and the Jurymen. They performed contemporary pop and rock ’n’ roll covers and dressed up in maroon suits with black velvet collars. Plant would often accompany them to these gigs.

‘He sort of followed us around for a long time,’ says Tolley. ‘He’d come to see us play but he’d carry our gear as well. Derek Price’s dad would drive our van and he lived just up the road from Robert. He’d pick Rob up first and then the rest of us.’

‘It sounds daft but he was more of a hanger-on than anything at that stage,’ adds Dudley. ‘It only slowly dawned on us that what he wanted to do was sing.’

The Jurymen’s nightly engagements soon brought them to the attention of Headmaster Chambers. He saw a piece on the fledgling band that ran in the local newspaper, the Express & Star, one that made much of the fact that they were playing in places in which they were too young to drink.

‘Because of the way things were for kids then, if you had hair an inch too long and were playing in a band, the figures in authority did look down on you,’ says Dudley. ‘Chambers had us all up before him. He pulled Robert in for that, too, because he knew that he would have been with us. He told us we were nothing more than a rabble – but because he couldn’t pronounce his “r”s, it came out as a “wabble”. That may have been the start of the masters disapproving of Robert.’

For Plant, however, the world was now expanding beyond the gates of his grammar school and 64 Causey Farm Road. Down the road in Stourbridge something was stirring. Blues, jazz and folk clubs had started to spring up around the town; so too coffee bars. The Swiss Café became the main meeting place for local teenagers. Later, a local singer named David Yeats opened the Groove record shop, catering for R&B enthusiasts like Plant.

In the pubs and clubs one could hear everything from Woody Guthrie songs to Dixieland jazz being performed. It was a movement largely driven by Stourbridge College, a technical and art institution that in the ’60s had begun attracting students from all over the country and across Europe, and it was one into which Plant threw himself.

‘It was a huge, amazing, subterranean moment,’ he told me. ‘There was poetry and jazz, there was unaccompanied Gallic singing. There were off-duty policemen standing up in folk clubs, holding their pints and singing “Santy Anna”.

‘There were hard drugs. There were registered junkies mixing with beautiful art students. And there was us lot at the grammar school down the road, academic whiz kids in total freefall. I was just mincing about with my Dawes Double Blue bike, with my winklepicker shoes in the saddlebag, listening to all this stuff.’

Plant had by now also bought a cheap harmonica that he taught himself to play by blowing along to records on his repaired Dansette turntable. He began to take this harmonica with him wherever he went, delighting in pulling it out from his back pocket and blowing away, to entertain himself more than anyone else. On one occasion at school, Headmaster Chambers, fast becoming Plant’s nemesis, spied him doing as much in the playground. Chambers loudly informed him that he would get nowhere in life messing around with such nonsense.

‘Rob was so much into the kind of music that we weren’t,’ says Dudley. ‘I mean, where on earth he got the knowledge that he had of the blues from I don’t know. He was forever going on about people like Sonny Boy Williamson, and from that age. For God’s sake, in those days you wouldn’t hear anything like that on the radio.’

Plant got to see a physical manifestation of the blues for the first time on 10 October 1963 when his aunt and uncle took him along to the Gaumont cinema in Wolverhampton to see one of the new package tours that had begun travelling around the UK. This one featured the young Rolling Stones, the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, and a Mississippi bluesman, Bo Diddley. It was Diddley who transfixed him.

‘I was sweating with excitement,’ he told Q magazine in 1990, reflecting back on that night. ‘Though the Stones were great, they were really crap in comparison with Diddley. All his rhythms were so sexual – just oozing, even in a twenty-minute slot. Now that’s an evening.’

Before the year was out Plant had also stepped onto the stage himself. His opportunity came when Andy Long was struck down with appendicitis, which at the time required a six-week period of convalescence. Long’s Jurymen were by now playing several nights a week and did not want to turn down the work, so who better to fill in for their singer than their friend Robert Plant, given that he already knew their set inside out?

Plant’s début live performance came at the Bull’s Head pub in Lye, a regular haunt of the Jurymen since it was run by John Dudley’s grandfather. On this night one might imagine that he would have been stricken with nerves as he looked out from the small, low stage and into the eyes of an audience for the first time. That here, in this smoky bar, he would wilt before such judging looks and when standing next to his then more experienced schoolmates.

‘When he first got up there, he was full of it – absolutely full of confidence,’ says Dudley, laughing at the memory. ‘He played more than half-decent harmonica even then and so he transformed our set into something a lot more bluesy. We had to busk it but we went down okay. I can’t remember how many gigs we eventually did with Rob but people always reacted favourably. Even then he sang in this blues wail. He used to like to take it down to a low rumble and then build back up to a crescendo.’

His stint as the Jurymen’s singer took Plant as far away as the East Midlands city of Leicester, a two-hour drive from home in the band’s old van. It also brought what he wanted to do with his life into clear perspective. Before Andy Long returned Plant began to go to work on his fellow Jurymen, attempting to persuade them that he should now become their permanent singer. He was to be frustrated in his efforts, just as he would be many times during the next few years.

‘We told him Andy was our singer and thanks very much,’ says Tolley. ‘We were all a bit mercenary. To be honest, we all had our stage uniforms and there wasn’t anything that would fit Robert.’

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