No one can spend as much time in the limelight as Robert Plant has without picking up a few soulmates along the way. The music business isn’t exactly the business to make friends in, but there are always going to be those few people who will be able to stick by you no matter what, […]
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Any other guitarist would consider working with Jimmy Page to be one of the highlights of their entire career. Even outside of Led Zeppelin, Page was a wizard whenever he had a guitar in his hand, and every single riff that he could think of would have been worthy to be one of the best […]
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All the rules fell by the wayside by the time Led Zeppelin recorded ‘Stairway to Heaven’, as the band began exploring new forms of music that were different and more European than the harder-edged blues anthems on their first two albums. It wasn’t just Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, either, as keyboardist John Paul Jones […]
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It might seem like the world spent most of its time allowing rock stars to do whatever they so chose. But that’s not quite true. In the glory days of rock excess, Led Zeppelin could never catch a break with critics. Although the fans clamoured for what the next instalment from the band was going […]
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By the end of the 1970s, Led Zeppelin were in a state of discombobulation. Having survived the onslaught of punk and disco, the mighty Zeppelin emerged intact as rock and roll’s truest survivors. Nothing could bring them down: not changing tastes, not harsh critical reviews, and not even car accidents or family tragedies. The only […]
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There are essentially two halves to Dusty Springfield’s career, standing either side of Dusty in Memphis. It was a gamble. Across the 1960s, Springfield had emerged as the leading female face of the British invasion by the decade’s end, but it took a while. She’d stormed the UK charts, reeling off big, string-laden pop numbers […]
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Artistic inspiration often comes from the most unlikely surroundings, and although it is easy to envision every one of Led Zeppelin’s hard rock riffs and expansive long-playing masterpieces being dragged from the endearingly dirty gutters of rock and roll, where all guitar-based abrasion surely resides, Jimmy Page and the gang often took their core inspiration […]
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Robert Plant joined Led Zeppelin just as they sprang from the ashes of The Yardbirds. The 20-year-old singer had been the frontman of his West Bromwich-based group Band of Joy when he was approached by guitarist Jimmy Page, who was in search of a new vocalist for his new incarnation of The Yardbirds. As Plant […]
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A decade into Led Zeppelin’s existence, they could still make a rational argument for being the biggest rock ‘n’ roll band on earth, but the days of appearing cutting edge or ‘dangerous’ were long gone, as the louder voices in the emerging punk scene had reframed them as unhip dad rock, or yesterday’s news. Jimmy […]
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The rock world had erupted and solidified like an angry volcano during the 1950s and ’60s. It had welcomed a brand new ream of artists who all seemed intent on making rebellion the forefront of their message. Many bands had come and gone, and the new decade of the 1970s seemed to offer up yet […]
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