Robert Plant admitted in a new interview with the Australian Daily Telegraph (which is behind a paywall) that he was unaware of Led Zeppelin’s upcoming fiftieth anniversary until other people told him about it.

“I didn’t know anything about that until everyone started pointing it out,” Plant told the Australian newspaper. “We didn’t put our first album out until ’69. We did play in ’68. Jesus wept!”

That wasn’t the first time that Plant has spoken about the upcoming anniversary. Plant was asked about the upcoming releases around Led Zeppelin’s fiftieth anniversary in an interview with The Toronto Sun.

“There’s a lot of stuff rolling around,” he said. “It’s a bit like water in the bottom of a paddle boat. But the thing is we didn’t even play together ’til September so we have a couple of months to connect and say, ‘What’s going on?'”

“It should capture the whole impact that we were oblivious to in the beginning where it was like a ground moving, ground shaking thing going on and interestingly we were so close into it that we didn’t even feel the tremors to begin with,” Plant said of plans for Led Zeppelin’s fiftieth anniversary. “And that’s a great thing before bands lock into a public persona or anything like that. So that kick off, 50 years ago, was something great, unexplainable, and so full of power and energy. It was brilliant.”

Elsewhere in his interview with The Daily Telegraph, Plant explained how far we will go in re-inventing Led Zeppelin songs for his solo sets.

“I obviously revisit old songs,” Plant said, “but not to the degree Bob Dylan does where you have to go outside the room and then come back in to figure out what the song is.”

With thanks to the FBO mailing list for its help in tracking down the article.