goalposts. In his second year he was nominated as 2B’s form monitor by his tutor, a role that gave him the giddy responsibilities of cleaning the blackboard and trooping along to the staff room to notify the other masters if a tutor failed to arrive for a lesson.
What marked him apart was his love of music and the manner in which he carried himself. Going about the school he would typically have a set of vinyl records tucked under his arm – and these, often as not, would be Elvis Presley records. He even took to imitating Elvis’s pigeon-toed walk.
‘Bloody hell, Rob did a fantastic Elvis impression,’ says Gary Tolley, who sat next to Plant in their form. ‘He was Elvis-crazy, but early Elvis, not the Elvis of G.I. Blues, when he’d started to go a bit showbiz. He was very into Eddie Cochran, too. He had the same quiff. When you see all those pictures of Cochran looking out from the side of his eyes at the camera, that was Robert.’
Plant and Tolley, who was learning to play the guitar, soon became part of a clique at school that was based around their shared interest in music. Their number included another classmate, Paul Baggott, and John Dudley, a budding drummer. They prided themselves on being the first to know what the hot new records were and when the likes of Cochran or Gene Vincent would be coming to perform in the area.
‘Not blowing our own trumpets, but we were all popular at school,’ recalls Dudley. ‘The other kids sort of looked up to us, because we knew a little bit that they didn’t. Robert was a nice guy, but a bit full of himself. He was quite cocky. He’s always been like that. The Teddy Boy era had died by then, but he made sure that he’d got the long drape coat and the lot. A lot of people thought he was arrogant because he’d got that sort of body language about him.’
‘Rob was very good looking and he always seemed to be at the centre of whatever was going on,’ adds Tolley. ‘He had something. Charisma, I suppose. In those days, the Catholics would have a separate morning service to everybody else and then come in to join us for assembly. Robert would walk into the main hall with his quiff and his collar turned up, and you could see all the masters and prefects glaring at him. He wore the school uniform but somehow he never looked quite the same as everybody else.’
Plant and Tolley would become good friends. Outside of school they went to the local youth club to play table tennis or billiards, and Plant would bring along his Elvis and Eddie Cochran singles to put on the club’s turntable. Plant had also picked up his father’s love of cycling, and he and Tolley would go off riding around the Midlands on a couple of stripped-down racing bikes.
‘Robert’s dad knew someone at the local cycling club and I can remember going to a velodrome near Stourbridge with Rob, riding round and round it and thinking we were fantastic,’ says Tolley. ‘He’d come to my house a lot and always turn up at mealtimes. If we were going out cycling for the evening, he’d arrive forty-five minutes before we’d arranged. Inevitably, my mum would say, “There’s a bit of tea spare, Robert. Would you like it?” “Oh, yes please, Mrs Tolley.”’
‘He’d be round our house for Sunday tea,’ says John Dudley. ‘He was always very polite. He’d ask my mum for jam sandwiches. If you’re going to put people into a class, his mum and dad were a class above mine. My father worked on the railways. I believe Rob’s father by then was an architect. They lived in a better house than we did. Rob was never from anywhere near an impoverished background.’
For as long as their son maintained his academic studies Plant’s parents tolerated his love of rock ’n’ roll, although his father, who mostly listened to Beethoven at home, professed to being mystified by it. In 1960 they bought him his first record player, a red and cream Dansette Conquest Auto. When he opened it he found on the turntable a single, ‘Dreaming’, by the American rockabilly singer Johnny Burnette. With his first record token he bought the Miracles’ effervescent soul standard ‘Shop Around’, which had given Berry Gordy’s nascent Motown label their breakthrough hit in the US.
A future was beginning to open out for the eleven-year-old Plant. It was one now free from the spectre of being required to spend two years in the armed forces upon leaving school, Macmillan’s government having abolished compulsory National Service that year. It did, nonetheless, still lie beyond his grasp, as was emphasised when his mother insisted he trim his quiff and he glumly complied.
There was us, academic whiz kids in total freefall.
By the time Plant entered his third year at grammar school in 1962 music had usurped his other interests. To begin with he was to be frustrated in his search to find something else that brought him the same sense of feral abandon he had felt upon first hearing Elvis. It was entirely absent from the TV light-entertainment shows of the time and his radio options were limited to one station, Radio Luxembourg. On that, at least, he came to hear Chris Kenner, a black R&B singer from New Orleans, and this nudged him further down his path.
‘When I was a kid there was nothing to latch onto,’ he told me. ‘In the middle of everything, all these comets would occasionally come flying over the radio. But think about the difference between here and America. In America you just turned that dial five degrees on the circle and you were into black radio.
‘We Brits, we’re monosyllabic when it comes to music. When people say we took the blues back to America, it’s such bollocks. Because John Hammond, Canned Heat, Bob Dylan, Mike Bloomfield, Elvin Bishop … all these people were already playing it. Their vision and awareness of music is so much greater than ours. All this stuff was going on, and being British I was only exposed to tiny bits of it. There wasn’t a great deal of attention being paid to the stuff that lit me up.’
Half a million black American servicemen were drafted overseas during the Second World War and it was they who first brought blues records into Britain. In time these records found their way into specialist shops and were picked up by collectors. Old 45s and 78s, they were by men and women with such evocative names as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Memphis Minnie and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Their songs documented the entire span of the black American experience, from the chains of slavery and grinding poverty to the pleasures of liquor and the love of a good – or bad – woman.
This was folk music in its most raw and pure form, the ground zero for the twelve-bar stomp of rock ’n’ roll. For Plant, as for countless other British kids at the time, it was all that he was looking for. Ironically, it would be an Englishman who opened up the floodgates for him. His interest sparked by rock ’n’ roll singles and odd nuggets captured from the radio, he picked up a book titled Blues Fell This Morning, first published in 1960 and written by Paul Oliver, a scholar from Nottingham. Oliver related the history of black American blues in an entirely dry, academic manner, but this did not deter Plant. He had an ordered mind and began noting down each of the records Oliver referenced in his book. He was to have a further Eureka moment when he found out that a shop in Birmingham stocked these records, and more besides.
The Diskery record shop, still going strong to this day, was founded in 1952 by a jazz buff named Morris Hunting. By 1962 its home was on Hurst Street, a tucked-away side road a few minutes’ walk from Birmingham’s main railway station. Cramped and poky, the Diskery’s floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with rare and imported vinyl. It became a mecca for the area’s aspirant musicians. One of the guys that worked there, a local black DJ known as Erskin T, specialised in turning these regulars on to the earliest blues, R&B and Tamla Motown sounds.
‘There was a group of about twenty of us from school who were heavily into American artists, Robert no more so than the rest,’ says Gary Tolley. ‘But he was more interested in the original recordings. In that period before the Beatles came along there were lots of British artists doing pathetic covers of American songs. We’d all go up to Birmingham, but Rob, and also Paul Baggott, would go to great lengths to find the original versions.’
To fund these visits, Plant took on a paper round, heading out on his bike each morning