Robert Plant has admitted that fronting Led Zeppelin was "really nerve-wracking".
Plant discussed his time with the band in an interview with English radio presenter Mark Radcliffe on a recent episode of The Folk Show with Mark Radcliffe on BBC Radio 2.
"I’d been what I call at the sharp end in these power trios with somebody glued on the front, which is how I quite often saw Zeppelin," Plant reminisced. "My contribution was what it was. [If] you think about it, the first songs that we wrote, John Bonham and I, we were 20 years old when Good Times, Bad Times was conceived. So you go back then and being the lone guy at the front and trying to get in amongst all that was a huge challenge and it was really nerve-wracking."
Plant also admitted that, while there's a great mythology around Led Zeppelin as one of the greatest rock bands ever to take the stage, not every gig the band played was "magnificent".
"Sometimes, as you quite rightly say, it was very, very tight and it was magnificent," he acknowledged to Radcliffe. "Sometimes it was quite the opposite because that was the great thing about that group, it was like the weather. It could be extraordinarily good or on the other hand perhaps not quite so magnificent. It wasn’t sent down from the gods every day, every week."
Last week, Plant's solo band Saving Grace feat. Suzi Dian released Chevrolet, the opening track on their forthcoming self-titled debut album.
The song is their take on Donovan’s 1965 Hey Gyp (Dig the Slowness), originally released as the B-side to Turquoise in October 1965. That song was itself an adaptation of Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy’s 1930 Delta blues classic, Can I Do It for You.
"Donovan's version was the one that we all got," Plant told Radcliffe. "I know Don quite well, and I asked him what that [title] meant. And I think it was something to do with the speed at which a cigarette burnt slowly down from its first ignition. Basically they'd heard the Alan Lomax recordings from '59... but I'd didn't know until about two years ago that they'd borrowed that from Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy."
Plant and Dian are joined in Saving Grace by drummer Oli Jefferson, guitarist Tony Kelsey, banjo and string player Matt Worley and cellist Barney Morse-Brown.
"It's an impressive collection of people now," says Plant. "I can't tell you how lucky I feel about this. What I am really impressed by is this living, new world of whatever this music is. With this mélange of music, song and voice, anywhere and everywhere is the way to see the road ahead."
