Free Robert Plant: A Life by Paul Rees

which had been a Number One in its country of origin. For Plant the track was retitled “Our Song” and he was once more paired with CBS’s in-house producer, Danny Kessler, to record it. Kessler was as unstinting in his use of strings and brass as he had been on Listen’s ill-starred “You Better Run,” but such a backdrop was better suited to “Our Song” since it was the most saccharine of confections. Not that the same could be said for Plant, who sang it as if straitjacketed. He told his friend Kevyn Gammond that it took him ninety takes 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 lineup 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 U.S. 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