Robert Plant said in a new interview that it was “really nerve-wracking” being the frontman of Led Zeppelin.
Speaking to “The Folk Show with Mark Radcliffe” on BBC Radio 2 on September 3, Plant explained his nerves after joining Led Zeppelin at an early age.
“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 told Radcliffe.
“I mean, 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,” he added.
Elsewhere in the interview, Plant said Led Zeppelin’s performances could be “perhaps not quite so magnificent”.
“John Paul and John Bonham would have this world of post funk, we’d spent quite a bit of time in New Orleans with The Meters and people like that. They had a thing going on. Jimmy was in another place again and I was just sort of trying to figure out how I could create melody and some kind of syncopation,” Plant said.
“Sometimes, as you quite rightly say, it was very, very tight and it was magnificent,” he continued. “Sometimes it was quite the opposite because that was the great thing about that group was 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.”
Funny how much Robert remembers.