Robert Plant thinks his upcoming album could be his last, he’s revealed.
The Led Zeppelin icon launches solo record Lullaby And… The Ceaseless Roar on September 8 – and he says it has a different texture than anything he’s done before.
Plant tells the Independent: “Maybe this new album is the end now for me, of this musical wanderlust and the wonderful carousel I’ve been on. It’s like a kaleidoscope; you hold it up to the light, rotate it, and the pieces fall beautifully in different ways.
“But this record feels different. It’s a consummation of all those bits from Son House to Roni Size to the Gambia – and it seems to have some sort of finality.”
The singer has regularly dismissed the notion of a Led Zep reunion, and he reveals one of the reasons is that some of the joy of songwriting got lost in the band’s success. “As adults we have to put our shoulders back, but when I was a kid I saw everything as being absolutely beautiful,” he reflects.
“In the early part of my time in Zeppelin I wrote naively, but I loved all that mystery of the dark past and the Queen of Light. Unfortunately I had it taken away from me, bit by bit.”
But he still finds a “few magic moments” when he thinks of the band’s achievements – and one was Heart’s rendition of Stairway To Heaven, performed when US president Barack Obama presented Plant, Page and John Paul Jones with Kennedy Centre Honors in 2012.
The singer says: “After all the years of hearing the song misinterpreted and played backwards and all that nonsense, I never thought someone would tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘That was a lovely piece, and to prove it, here’s another way of looking at it.’
“Barack looked over at me, frowned a bit and shrugged his shoulders. I looked back and thought, ‘It’s always been like this, Barack. You can get it wrong a million times, but nobody mentions me and Page floundering our way across the Atlas Mountains with a tape machine, recording Berber tribeswomen.”
Page’s riff for 1969 track Whole Lotta Love was this week named the best of all time by BBC radio listeners.
