to get a finished track, the process reducing him to tears.
Plant’s first solo single was released in March 1967, the same month that Pink Floyd’s ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘Purple Haze’ by Jimi Hendrix came out. It was an abject failure, selling fewer than 800 copies. Even one of his first champions, the Express & Star newspaper’s pop columnist John Ogden, dismissed it as ‘a waste of a fine soul singer’.
‘I got a phone call from Robert’s mother soon after,’ says Ogden. ‘She wanted to know if I really thought her son was any good or not. I told her that while you could never guarantee anything, he stood as much of a chance as anyone of making it. She must have been terribly disappointed over the next year or so because it just didn’t happen for him.’
Plant was not yet deterred from throwing himself into this radical transformation. Back in the Midlands, he crimped his hair into a bouffant, bought a dark suit and told anyone who asked that he was going to have a career in cabaret. He reasoned to himself that there was nothing not worth trying. He even had business cards printed up that unveiled a new identity, advertising ‘Robert – The E Is Silent – Lee, now available for bookings’.
And he found an unexpected ally in his father. A local big-band leader, Tony Billingham, had hired Robert Plant Sr to design and build an extension to his home.
‘Robert’s father noticed the coming and going of musicians, and one day told me that all his son wanted to do was sing and asked if I could take him on,’ recalls Billingham. ‘I said that I would give him a go. We were called the Tony Billingham Band, and it was a traditional dance band.
‘I couldn’t say how many jobs Robert did with us but I remember one of them being at Kidderminster College. He sang some Beatles songs that night. We usually wore evening dress for functions in those days although we wouldn’t have contemplated doing so for a college date. For that we’d have worn black shirts, something like that. Robert had got his long hair and his shirt open right down to the last button. Dance people didn’t do that kind of thing.’
Five months after ‘Our Song’ had sunk, CBS tried again with a second single, ‘Long Time Coming’. This was better tailored to fit Plant’s voice, being R&B-based, but it was no less aimed at the middle of the road than its predecessor had been. It was also no more successful. But by then Plant had headed off in yet another direction, this one moving closer to the spirit of the time.
He had put together a new group, calling it Robert Plant and the Band of Joy. The guitarist, Vernon Pereira, was a relative of his girlfriend Maureen. Although the Band of Joy’s line-up would be fluid for as long as it lasted, Plant’s inspiration remained the same – the new American music he had by now picked up on.
The catalyst for this was John Peel, a twenty-seven-year-old DJ born into a well-to-do family in Liverpool and boarding-school educated. Peel’s father was a cotton merchant who in 1961 had packed his son off to the US to work for one of his suppliers. He remained in the country for six years, during which time he got his first job as a DJ – an unpaid stint at a radio station in Dallas – and also acquired a stack of records emanating from America’s West Coast.
Returning home in 1967, Peel was taken on by the pirate station Radio London, creating for it a show called The Perfumed Garden. He filled this with the records he had bought back from the US, exposing the bands behind them to a British audience for the first time. Coming out of LA and San Francisco, they included the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. These were rock groups born out of blues, folk, country and jazz traditions, but which pushed further out there through their consumption of the newly available psychedelic drugs and an uncontrolled urge to freak out.
‘We’d never heard any of this music till John started playing it,’ says Peel’s fellow DJ Bob Harris. ‘It changed my perception of things and I’m sure Robert was listening in the same way.’
Plant was indeed enraptured by it, digesting this American music with an appetite the equal of that he had first shown for its black blues. Of the bands then emerging from San Francisco’s psychedelic scene the two that hit him hardest were Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape. The Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow album of that year gave rise to a brace of acid-rock anthems, ‘White Rabbit’ and ‘Somebody to Love’, singer Grace Slick’s spooked vocals haunting her band’s lysergic drone. Released that summer, Moby Grape’s eponymous début LP fused rock, blues, country and pop into a sound that oozed heady adventurism and a sense of unbridled joy.
From LA he embraced a further two bands in particular. Buffalo Springfield brought together two gifted songwriters, Neil Young and Stephen Stills, whose woozy folk-rock was setting as much of a template for the era as the Byrds, the same tensions destined to pull both bands apart. Then there was Love and their ornate psych-pop symphonies conjured up by another singular talent, Arthur Lee. Love put out two albums in 1967, Da Capo and then Forever Changes, their masterpiece. Although neither of these records would make stars of Lee or his band, each served up a kaleidoscopic musical tableau for others to feast from.
‘All that music from the West Coast just went “Bang!” – and there was nothing else there for me after that,’ Plant told Melody Maker’s Richard Williams in 1970. ‘Three years before I had been shuddering listening to Sonny Boy Williamson. Now I was sobbing to Arthur Lee.’
Soon John Peel brought this music to his front door. The DJ began hosting a regular Sunday evening session at Frank’s Ballroom in Kidderminster, often appealing on air for a lift up to the Midlands.
‘It was fantastic,’ enthuses Kevyn Gammond, like Plant a champion of these shows. ‘Peel would bring up people like Captain Beefheart and Ry Cooder, but also the first incarnation of T-Rex. There was a great story about Captain Beefheart’s band being sat in the dressing room, rolling up these big joints, and Peel offering them cups of tea and cucumber sandwiches. Peel hipped us to this whole great scene and Rob especially got so into it.’
The first incarnation of the Band of Joy began to gig in the spring of 1967, playing both of Birmingham’s hippest clubs, the Elbow Room and the Cedar Club, the latter as warm-up to former Moody Blues man Denny Laine’s Electric String Band. It was still a covers band but one heading gingerly for the acid-rock frontiers.
Local music historian Laurie Hornsby recalls the group he was then playing guitar for doing a show with the Band of Joy at the city’s Cofton Club on 25 April.
‘The club was an old roller rink,’ he says. ‘I remember the place was packed. Drugs hadn’t yet become a part of the scene. It was all about going out for a pint and to pull a bird. The mod look had gone by then – Robert and his band were all wearing Afghan coats, buckskins and things like that.
‘Because they were far superior to us, we went on and did forty-five minutes and then they did an hour. I watched the Band of Joy’s set but I only remember Robert. He sold himself so well, knew exactly how to make people watch him.’
‘In the Midlands, there were two schools of thought about Robert at that time,’ says John Ogden. ‘People either liked him or hated him. All the women loved him. You could see them eyeing him up from the audience. Because of that the blokes most often didn’t.’
This antipathy towards their singer extended to the band’s de facto manager, ‘Pop’ Brown, father of their organist Chris Brown. Following a heated altercation between the two, Plant conspired to get himself fired from the Band of Joy.
‘Robert had his own ideas and “Pop” Brown didn’t like it,’ suggests Ogden. ‘Robert’s always known his own mind and what he wanted, which was, basically, to be a star.’
That June the Beatles presented Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to the world and with it Britain was launched into its Summer of Love – one founded upon sounds, fashions and a predilection for mind-bending drugs that were all directly imported from California. The suggestion that this amounted to a sweeping cultural revolution has been exaggerated – the preposterous Humperdinck, Tom Jones and a crooner of even greater vintage, Frankie Vaughan, fronted