Robert Plant has always lived in the past, musically speaking. Led Zeppelin was a blues revival band, sped up and heavy-handed to create the band’s trademark unabashed sound. With his new band, Sensational Space Shifters—a sort of rehash of his early 2000’s band Strange Sensation—things are no different. Plant is still borrowing from the past to create a trademark stamp on modern music—bluesy and ballsy—at age 66. Though his personal life is much doesn’t follow the same storyline, as he explains in this interview.
Robert, how did you come up with Sensational Space Shifters and how much a continuation of Strange Sensation is that?
Well, it’s a total continuity, really. I had spent so much time in America in the last six, seven years working on very stimulating and very different projects. Which were, they created a great learning curve for me as a singer. I learned how to sing with other people. I learned how to not sing, how to use restraint and how to just—if you like—develop my ability. But I really did miss the kind of wild stuff that I’d been doing before with Justin and Skin and Johnny Baggott and Billy. And in a lull in activity I came back, I always come back to Britain to see my family and stuff. And when I came back I went to see Justin, and he had a band called JuJu, which actually featured Billy from Strange Sensation and he had a new drummer Dave Smith and Juldeh Camara, the griot from West Africa. And I just fell madly in love with it. I just thought: “Wow, this is so expressive. What can I do? Are they available?”
So what is your fascination with ambient music? Is it people’s music for the 21st century—what folk used to be?
Yeah, maybe it’s got such a contemporary edge that it becomes something less pastoral. And it has an emotive quality, which is not new, of course, but it hits different places in the sensory departments of my head. And I like the idea of trance. I like the idea whether it’s driven by computers and loops and keyboards or whether it’s driven by Gnawa musicians on the west coast of Morocco. The whole idea of something that’s so repetitive in the end it has a really interesting effect on me and on the listener.
And incorporating African influences, Cajun, folk, blues and classic rock is like using all colors of the rainbow, like creating music without borders?
Well, you know, I couldn’t have put it better myself really. Yes, of course, I mean, there’s no Cajun in there really … and it’s not even classic rock either, that’s a terrible term. But it does come from white kids masquerading with the blues really.
What do you dislike about the term “classic rock?”
Well, because it covers a multitude of different elements. And that I don’t think anything should really be classified. Classical music is classical music, but is it classical music? Which bit of it… was everything always written to be part of a genre or is it just a sort of media generalization? And I think that’s probably what it is. It’s a generalization and it covers so many different species of music. So many aspects of music, but it’s not really appropriate. And it’s always relative to something that came before, and also that’s not the case because there’s great music that’s hard hitting and powerful now. I mean, does it have to wait for it be ten years old before it becomes classic rock? (Laughs)
Are you still as hedonistic as you used to be? Is Percy Page, rock god, still alive and
kicking?
Gee, that´s something that seems to follow me like the plague. And it´s certainly not something that I´ve come up with myself, but somebody else did that for me. Somebody who hardly knew me and was just looking for an easy way to categorize me, and put me in a box. The rock star thing, that is. Well, as a matter of fact, that box was always way too small for me. And also that lifestyle becomes really boring after a while. Of course it´s fun to be in the company of attractive women, to stay in first class hotels and to ride on your own plane, but that´s not all that matters.
In fact, luxury tends to make you lazy. And I want my life to be more of an adventure—while Percy is definitely more decadent than advantageous. So I prefer not to be him, really. I want to be me.
