running on 3 March 1966, in the week the Rolling Stones topped the UK charts with ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’.
‘They came into the office and we had a chat in the works canteen,’ Ogden says. ‘It wasn’t at all surprising to me that Cathy McGowan would go for him – she wasn’t alone. He looked great. There was something special about Robert, although not everyone saw it at the time.’
Listen’s beginnings were otherwise decidedly small-scale. Fashioning themselves as a mod group, their first gigs were mostly in pubs such as the Ship and Rainbow and the Woolpack in Wolverhampton, alongside the now-traditional warm-up engagements on the Reagan circuit. Yet Plant had by this stage developed into an impressive performer. He had learnt to better control his voice, although it remained very much a strident blues roar. And he had gained enough confidence to unveil the dance moves he had honed strutting his stuff at mod clubs.
‘Oh, he was great,’ says Crutchley. ‘We’d start off our set with “Hold On I’m Comin’” by Sam & Dave, and Robert would dance across the stage like he was floating. We rehearsed at my parents’ house, which was an old corner shop. My dad would ask me, “Is the Rubber Man coming tonight?”
‘Rob gave us all an extra confidence. He was ambitious, but not so as it was in your face. He was a bit more relaxed off the stage. But once he got on it he would go into a different mode. He had a great stage presence and the voice was very much there from the start. For sure, he was very popular with the ladies, too.’
Bill Bonham, no relation of John’s, was then a fourteen-year-old schoolboy playing keyboards in a covers group called Prim and Proper. They shared a bill with Listen at one of these early shows. ‘I remember going “Whoa” when they started the first song, and the next thing they’d finished and I breathed out again,’ he says. ‘To me, Robert was a star and I was mesmerised by him. He’d already got a big female following. We became friends but you couldn’t trust him with your girlfriend for two seconds, that’s for sure.’
That May, Bob Dylan and his new backing band, the Hawks, played the Birmingham Odeon. On this same tour a member of the audience at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall shouted ‘Judas!’ at Dylan for the perceived crime of plugging in his guitar. Yet Dylan was instrumental in whipping up the storm clouds of cultural change that were billowing across the Atlantic. In all its speed-fuelled wonder, that year’s Blonde on Blonde, a double album no less, cemented the idea of the rock album as an art form.
By the summer Dylan had crashed his motorbike in Woodstock and retired from view, but all that he had set in motion had begun to fly. The Beatles made Revolver; Brian Wilson went to the edge and brought back Pet Sounds for the Beach Boys; and the Byrds soared through ‘Eight Miles High’. It was this latter track, and the album upon which it featured, Fifth Dimension, that announced the arrival of the psychedelic movement. It was to be a fitting soundtrack to a decade of social and civil upheaval in the US, one filtered through the new perspective of the hallucinogenic drug LSD.
These sounds coming out of America would soon enough have a profound effect on Plant. It would be another year, however, before Britain basked in the Summer of Love. Yet the sands were shifting even in the Midlands, where people are traditionally cautious of such radicalism, as if wanting first to weigh up its substance. The boom in venues opening up to music continued unabated, the classifieds pages of the local newspapers filled each night with adverts for gigs in pubs, clubs and dancehalls.
In Birmingham, the Elbow Room and the Cedar Club were the places to be and to be seen. The latter club, it was said, attracted the drinkers, while the clientele at the former preferred to smoke dope and intellectualise about jazz. It was through such sessions at the Elbow Room that Stevie Winwood’s Traffic would come together the following year. Out of the Cedar Club, in the first weeks of 1966, came the Move, who at a stroke raised the bar for the other local acts, Plant’s Listen among them.
Bringing together the pick of Birmingham’s musicians, the Move consisted of singer Carl Wayne, guitarists Trevor Burton and Roy Wood, bassist Ace ‘The Face’ Kefford and drummer Bev Bevan, each of whom had served a beat-group apprenticeship. To begin with they covered the same tunes as every other band in town but added songs by the Byrds and other blossoming West Coast acts to the mix. Their own songs came later, although from the start the Move’s multi-part harmonies were one of two things setting them apart. The other was their image. At the insistence of their manager, Tony Secunda, a former merchant seaman, the Move kitted themselves out in gangster-style suits. Securing his band a residency at London’s Marquee Club, Secunda further compelled them to add an element of theatre to their presentation.
‘Tony said to Carl one night, “Be a great idea if you smashed up a television on stage,”’ recalls Trevor Burton. ‘The next day Carl went out and got a TV and an axe. There was outrage. We let off a couple of smoke bombs, too. The third time we did it we had the fire brigade and the police hit the place. It made all the papers, which is what it was all about.’
The impression this made on Listen was instantaneous. The four of them went to a second-hand clothes shop in Aston, Birmingham, and bought double-breasted suits, co-opting the Move’s gangster chic. Their idea for whipping up drama was more prosaic, amounting as it did to Plant and Crutchley staging a mock fight each night.
‘Rob and I used to go at it for about two or three minutes,’ says Crutchley. ‘The bouncers would often intervene and stop us. We really should have mentioned beforehand that it was part of the act.’
Such mishaps seem to have been a common occurrence. Jim Lea, then the bassist with the N’Betweens, recalls frequently seeing Listen.
‘The first time was at the Civic Hall in Wolverhampton,’ he says. ‘Plant had got that testosterone-filled thing about him. He had on plaid trousers and a shirt buttoned up to the neck, and he’d backcombed his hair. He was doing this really exaggerated kind of strut. At one point he got up on the bass cabinet, which was turned on its side. He was standing up there going “Ooh, baby, baby” and got his mike stand trapped under the cabinet. He jumped down, went to strut off and was yanked backwards, almost off his feet.
‘But the girls thought he was wonderful. They used to have these Monday-night dances at the swimming baths in Willenhall, down the road from Wolverhampton. I saw him there, dancing with a neck-coat on, showing off to all the birds.’
By then the N’Betweens had become the biggest band in Wolverhampton and were looking for a singer. Their new guitarist, Neville ‘Noddy’ Holder, had assumed the role but he recommended to Lea and the others that they hire Plant. Like the rest of Listen, Holder hailed from Walsall and had on occasion driven them to gigs in his dad’s window-cleaning van.
Says Lea: ‘Nod told us, “Plonk’s a good singer, but all the birds like him – that’s why he’ll be good for us.” At the time I didn’t get what all the fuss was about. By then he’d got a reputation for getting up with all of the B-list bands in town. The thing is, once he was up you couldn’t get him off the stage, so I was adamant we weren’t letting him on with us.’
Lea’s reasoning that retaining Holder as sole singer would mean more money for each of them swung the argument, and Plant was not asked to join the band. Had he been, it’s doubtful he would have remained loyal to Listen. He had gone along to see the Who at Kidderminster Town Hall that May. Pete Townshend had sung lead vocals that night, Roger Daltrey having temporarily walked out following the first of many clashes. After the gig Plant waited outside the stage door for Townshend and offered him his services. If nothing else, he was sure of himself.
The English summer of 1966 was a wet one. There was a new Labour government in office and mounting anticipation of football’s World Cup kicking off in the country that July. On a chill, damp night Plant met his future wife at a concert by British R&B singer Georgie Fame. Although she was born in West Bromwich, Maureen Wilson’s family had come to the Black Country from Goa in India. Petite and pretty, she was a keen dancer, and the attraction between her and Plant was immediate.
Their relationship would have been frowned upon by many around the Midlands at that time. Less than two years earlier the General Election