Robert Plant has recorded a new version of Elbow’s The Blanket Of Night for a forthcoming British Red Cross album, The Long Road. The song and album will serve to highlight the plight of refugees attempting to reach the UK to seek asylum.
The team behind the album includes Plant, Tuareg band Tinariwen — whose frontman Ag Alhabib witnessed his father being executed in the 1963 uprising in Mali, and subsequently became a refugee — record producer Ethan Johns, spoken word poet Scroobius Pip, songwriter-producer Kindness, and the Sierra Leone Refugee All Stars.
“We have a worldwide international catastrophe,” says Plant. “Talking about it is one thing, doing something about it is another. The position we are in, it’s paramount we all do our best one way or another to help.”
“I wanted to get involved because it’s a story worth telling,” adds Johns. “The idea is to educate people a little more about what people go through, to put their stories in some kind of context. They’re not just bodies getting off a boat”.
The Long Road is released on March 4 2016, and can be pre-ordered now.
