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The Independent (London)

August 30, 1997, Saturday

How the other half lives; Disrepair and dry rot are features of the eccentric guided tour of Hammerwood Park.

BYLINE: Meg Carter

SECTION: FEATURES; Page 13

LENGTH: 1009 words

First appearances can be deceptive. For a start, the rough track leading to Hammerwood Park, near East Grinstead, is decidedly inauspicious. The dirt road is pitted with potholes and gradually snakes downwards past rambling houses with neatly manicured lawns, a farm, a pond, a cricket pitch and then dense foliage, before twisting right to reveal what must be one of the country's most peculiar country piles.

Built in 1792 as a hunting-lodge, Hammerwood Park is a visual conundrum with optical illusions craftily designed to make the house look bigger and more imposing. It's one of only two houses in the UK designed by the young Benjamin Latrobe, who went on to the Capitol building in Washington DC and the porticoes of the White House. And its subsequent history is equally colourful, with numerous past owners including Led Zeppelin and a property developer who, in the Sixties, knocked the 50-room house into 11 flats.

Present owners are the Pinnegars, whose son David bought the crumbling pile in 1982 at the tender age of 21 with a family inheritance - his grandfather had made a small fortune out of putting rubber on table-tennis bats. Currently occupied by David, his wife, Anne-Noelle, their three small children and his parents, Eileen and John, Hammerwood Park is a living historical drama. No, not the guided tour in period costume variety which is increasingly popular in theme-park Britain. Nor the dry and dusty veneration of ancient relics favoured by purists. Witness, instead, the gripping contest of man versus every variety of rot, dilapidation and lack of funds.

"It immediately grabbed me," David says, attempting to explain his seemingly mad decision to purchase the place. A mere snip at pounds 140,000, Hammerwood then comprised little more than a crumbling shell set in 30 acres. It was an estate agent's nightmare - running water in most of the house, one-third of an acre of dry rot and 14 holes in the roof. "The advertisement said 'in need of modernisation' - which was just what it didn't need. We were looking for a large country house to open to the public. We bought it to restore it, in the knowledge that it might otherwise suffer concrete floors and modern conversion."

The family has spent the past 15 years restoring the building, with much of the work done by self-employed craftsmen and volunteers. False walls were dutifully knocked down and covered ceilings were revealed. The philosophy throughout has been repair rather than replacement. Some of the results so far may seem a little threadbare - cracked windows are hung with broken shutters, peeling wallpaper prompts memories of the film Barton Fink and the nettle-filled garden is a work in progress - but, as David enthusiastically points out, "Hammerwood Park is not intended to be a house preserved in aspic."

"Guided tours by the family make a most interesting afternoon," the photocopied flier promises, with some understatement. Family members conduct visitors on a colourful tour of the building and its grounds, ending in tea with a fine collection of fresh cakes and home-baked scones, served beneath a replica of the Parthenon frieze in the Elgin Room, a former coach-house- turned-kitchen and a one-time badminton court.

Visitors are encouraged to understand the logic behind the house's unusual architecture. Unlike many country homes of that period, Hammerwood has no follies - the building is, in fact, itself a folly, David reveals. The house was built with pieces of stone declining upwards. Doric columns front Greek temple structures to the rear of the left and right wings. Each has been left plain, and designed to taper upwards to make the house appear bigger to approaching visitors.

Inside, you can tour many of the rooms - most of which are now midway through restoration, although telling gaps remain. "It's a question of priority," David explains. "Do we spend a couple of thousand pounds on replacing mirrored panels either side of the fireplace in the drawing- room, or on repairs to the roof and guttering?" A particularly pressing concern is the library, where shelves are caving downwards: evidence of rotting floor plates. And don't miss the dining-room, which has been left in an artful state of disrepair as a cautionary tale, complete with mould and shredded wallpaper.

Tours vary depending on day, group make-up and, of course, the members of the Pinnegar family on duty, although all are consummate storytellers. David, a physicist turned amateur classicist, is passionate about Hammerwood Park's Greek origins. His tour is an electric mix of ancient mythology and scattered references to the perils of drugs, Bosnia and global warming. Eileen offers a greater perspective on the families who have lived there: from the original owner, John Sperling to Oswald Augustus Smith, whose sister, Frances, was grandmother of the Queen Mother. And <A name=ORIGHIT_2>Led Zeppelin, of course. The band's grand scheme was to create a music complex, including studios and apartments for band members and their families. Their neglect left the building in ruin, the Pinnegars claim.

"It's a sacrifice - living in a house like this," Eileen confides. "But the reason we took this on was to prove that a family could take something at rock bottom and make it work." Private ownership restricts access to heritage grants and lottery funding. So, each family member has various businesses and schemes to plough further funds into its renovation, she adds. Hammerwood also regularly plays host to school parties studying the Greeks and operates a calendar of music and poetry events.

Hammerwood Park is in Sussex, just off the A264 between East Grinstead and Tunbridge Wells. Alternatively, you can reach it by train and take a taxi from East Grinstead station for pounds 6. The house is open to the public until the end of September on Saturdays and Wednesdays. Guided tours start at 2.10pm. Bed and breakfast accommodation is also available. For more information call: 01342 850594.

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The Independent (London)

January 10, 1991, Thursday

ROCK / Going back to his roots; Robert Plant - Town & Country Club

BYLINE: By JOSEPH GALLIVAN

SECTION: ARTS PAGE; Page 14

LENGTH: 410 words

BEFORE CHRISTMAS, Robert Plant cancelled some of his scheduled London concerts. The good news is, he's over his flu now, and playing the missing dates. Tuesday's concert at the Town and Country Club in Kentish Town was inevitably an anti-climax. The benefit of that was there was less to distract from the music - although heavy rock groups always have a good go.

Here, after the ritual darkness, smoke and tribal drumming, the band playing beneath dangling white cut-outs of wolf faces, Plant appeared: still an imposing figure with his flowing locks and tight black jeans. The general effect was spoiled by one of those T- shirts with great armholes that American college kids wear - but perhaps that's in keeping with his image as the brainy one, the one who controlled <A name=ORIGHIT_1>Led Zeppelin's image and made sure they never released any singles.

He played much the same set here as he did last June, smiling to himself periodically and offering the odd dig at former colleagues Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones. Plant's roots (every pun possible has been made over the years, so it's probably worth starting again) are, he claims, in the early Elvis and the pastoral head-music of California in the Sixties, filtered through the Birmingham blues scene in the early Seventies.

As he twisted and screamed through ''Watching You Tie-Dye on the Highway'', it became clear that he was encountering the elusive vibe more fully than the audience were. He wiggled about a lot, pouting and flicking his mane, at one point letting his T-shirt hang seductively off the shoulder. Then, during the slower ''Anniversary'', he picked a flower apart under the spotlight: he has evidently been developing his feminine side. Out in the auditorium, despite a bias towards denim and leather, the most threatening behaviour all night was one ageing fan hollering ''Stairway to Marks and Spencers.''

A brilliant acoustic guitar thrash by Doug Boyle in ''Liar's Dance'' raised the spirits, but it was the thunderous Zeppelin groove of numbers like ''Living Loving Maid'' that sparked real chanting and waving. Heads bobbed furiously and the odd imaginary guitar was given an airing in the audience, but the crowd was more concerned with being together than listening (hence the din of chatter in quiet moments).

Self-deprecating humour is the last refuge of the ancient rocker: fittingly, Plant ended on ''Tall Cool One''. And he didn't even play ''Stairway To Heaven''.

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The Independent (London)

January 6, 1994, Thursday

INTERVIEW / Page, the Oracle; Jimmy Page turns 50 on Sunday. Giles Smith talked to him about acid, Led Zeppelin and the dreaded 'Stairway'

BYLINE: GILES SMITH

SECTION: POP MUSIC PAGE; Page 25

LENGTH: 1508 words

Jimmy Page is delivered to the door of his record company in Baker Street, London, by his driver, Lionel. He is wearing jeans and a bomber jacket - Lionel, that is. Page is wearing a long black overcoat, a dark and seriously swish suit and a black shirt with a complicated collar and fashionable buttons. This is the guitarist who, during the 1970s, along with his fellow-members in the group Led Zeppelin, virtually patented hotel-trashing and on-tour mayhem. So you're not quite ready for the trace of David Niven in the voice, the fastidious politeness. ''So sorry I'm late,'' he says, entering almost bang on time.

Page will be 50 on Sunday, though you would be hard pressed to read that in his unscored face and his lavish hair. Led Zeppelin gave out in 1980 when, after a night of drinking, their drummer, John Bonham, choked to death in his sleep at Page's house in Windsor. Since then, Page has knocked about in large homes in Berkshire and Hampshire; he's jammed with Aerosmith; he's fiddled with another band called the Firm; he's released a solo record (1986's Outrider) and collaborated with the even hairier David Coverdale. But you get the impression that he has never stopped thinking about Led Zeppelin - what they did, what they were. ''Not that I would put it on regularly. But every now and again I would think it would be good to hear some of the old stuff. And it always held up.''

They were the archetypal heavy rock band (drums, bass, guitar and a skinny guy with a high voice), who threw in a bit of folk for good measure. Would-be guitar heroes liked the way Page could manage the chunky riffs and the quick-fingered solo stuff. Also, he flaunted his tiny torso, draped himself in silk scarves and could beat the strings about with a violin bow. This seemed enviable at the time. All along, though, Page was running a secret life as the man who played boffin back in the studio, someone with a train-spotter's eye for detail.

''I used to check all the test-pressings of our records as they returned from around the world,'' he says with some enthusiasm. ''We were a couple of albums down the line when I discovered the reason classical records sounded so much better than pop or rock was that they'd changed the acid that they dipped the lacquer into. Once I'd discovered that, then all the Led Zeppelin albums had to have the new acid treatment.''

When compact discs were introduced, Led Zepellin's record label, Atlantic, exercised its contractual right to exploit the old material on the new format. Page claims that the label wasn't fussy about the transfer process. This caused him some agony. His voice rises and becomes thin with dismay: ''On Houses of the Holy, side two of the tape that they employed, there was a sizzle. I was getting complaints from Zeppelin fans . . .''

Hence the project that has occupied him for the last couple of years. Going back to the original tapes where possible, Page has worked his way through the entire Led Zeppelin catalogue, re-mastering the music for CD in the hope of doing some justice to the impact of the vinyl originals. In 1992, he put out a selection in a four-CD box. ''Real Zeppelin diehards were used to their vinyl and so they were familiar with the running orders. After 'Song Remains the Same', they'd be hearing the first chord of 'Rainsong' before it even appeared. Would they go along with my new running order?''

Yes they would. In September last year, a double CD came out bearing the things left off the four- pack. Last November, the nine studio albums appeared, sumptuously re-packaged, racked in a luxury container and all in all given the kind of treatment normally reserved for superior editions of Beatrix Potter. And finally this year, the albums will start emerging individually - your first chance to acquire a remastered CD-version of Led Zep IV in its original running order, without investing a sum in triple figures.

''Re-mastering is a lengthy process, so I had time to reflect. There were times when I missed John Bonham terribly. Time and again, you would be listening and thinking what an incredible talent he was. It's beyond rock'n'roll - it's into another area altogether. Powerful and purely from the wrist. There was no banging away. I've never heard so much volume out of drums. The classic drum sample, the one that's been stolen over and over, from 'When the Levee Breaks', was actually recorded with just one stereo microphone up on a second landing pointing down. That's to do with the man and his understanding of the drums, knowing how to tune them properly, and the attack that he had. And the control, because it wasn't all loud.''

We flick through the pictures in the boxed set's booklet, and Page pauses at one taken in the back of a limo, somewhere in America, somewhere in the 1970s. While the singer Robert Plant dozes in one of the car's comfortable corners, Bonham slumps in another, staring frozen-faced through the window. He looks like a man too tired to sleep. ''He used to get so homesick,'' Page says quietly. ''Terribly homesick, poor chap.''

Page first saw Bonham play in 1968 when the guitarist was recruiting a band to follow the Yardbirds. And he first heard Robert Plant sing in ''a teacher training college in Bromsgrove. I think he was tarmac-ing at the time. So I rescued him.'' Success came fast in America. ''Every time we went back there, more people wanted to see us and the gigs got bigger and bigger. It was supply and demand. The one I felt really uncomfortable about was the Pontiac Superdome - 70,000 people indoors in an airlock. Bit by bit, the set increased to three-and-a- half hours. We were doing 45-minute versions of 'Dazed and Confused'.''

And this was the time when things went wild.

''Well, let's say we started to make life easier for ourselves. We had suites instead of sharing rooms the way we did on our first tour. And we had a private plane and things like that to make life easier. But all in all, that got to be the norm. A three-and-a- half hour set takes a lot out of you.''

So it didn't feel unnecessary?

''Not at all. It was the only way to do it. If you're doing that size of show, you can't start flying chartered airlines, because you want to get off stage and be in your hotel room. So basically the quickest form of transport is a private plane.''

Frankly, Zeppelin could have invested in an entire airforce on the profits of one song alone - the dreaded ''Stairway to Heaven'', eight minutes of tremulous doggerel which Page has never lost faith in. ''I knew it was really good because we'd had a bit of difficulty getting it together. Not a lot, but a bit. Because it was a totally different structure to anything that had been around before. But we embarked on a tour of the States, before the fourth album was out on the shelves. And we played at the Forum in Los Angeles and we'd included 'Stairway' in the set. At the end, about a third of the audience stood up and gave us a standing ovation, and I thought, 'Actually, this may be a better number than I imagined.'

''Maybe Robert and I differ on this one: someone told me the other day that he said he'd forgotten what the whole thing was about, the gist of it. Which I thought was pretty strange for him to say at this point in time. Or at any point in time. From my point of view, it was a summing up of certain elements of the band - the acoustic side, the bringing the drums in much later, having this thing which crescendoed, which was actually speeding up at the same time. All deliberate. And Robert's lyrics were incredible, the ambiguity. We shouldn't go into that because people have their interpretations of what it's about. If Robert's forgotten, then let's leave it to everyone else's interpretations.''

What about the Jimmy Page interpretation?

''No, no. I'll leave it at that, I think.'' And he smiles decorously.

At 50, Page now qualifies - whether he likes it or not - for the generalised respect that these days settles over rock's elders. Nobody is out to get him any more. He might not have relied on that in the late 1970s when punk rock parked its tank on his lawn. Punk sometimes seemed conceived specifically as a revolt against Led Zeppelin - their distance, their indulgence. As a member of the Clash said at the time: ''I don't even have to listen to their music. Just looking at one of their album covers makes me want to vomit.''

But somehow the nausea passed. Black Americans started sampling the noise of Bonham's drum kit for hip hop records. And maybe the rift was never as deep as it seemed. ''The Sex Pistols were one of the ones that were knocking us,'' Page says, ''and Johnny Rotten's next band, PiL, attempted 'Kashmir', for heaven's sake. At the time, we went to see the Damned, who actually weren't quite so vocal about kicking the dinosaurs as some of the others. But I remember the drummer coming up and saying, 'You know, I go home every night and play ''Stairway'' . . .' ''

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The Independent (London)

June 2, 1995, Friday

BYLINE: Maryann Bird

SECTION: INTERNATIONAL; Page 13

Where's the justice when a rock star can't even get arrested? Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin's legendary founder, discovered that breaking the ban on in-flight smoking just isn't enough these days.

On a flight from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon, for a recent concert, Page locked himself in a toilet and lit a cigarette. The alarm sounded and the flight crew notified the authorities in Portland. A police report said the intoxicated rocker tried to persuade officers to arrest him, admitted to smoking and acknowledged he knew it was not allowed. But going to jail just isn't an option under the smoking ban. Page could still be fined up to $ 1,000 (around pounds 620) if he is prosecuted after the Federal Aviation Administration investigates further.

Copyright 1995 Independent Print Ltd

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The Independent (London)

October 21, 1994, Friday

ROCK / Back on the stairway to heaven; Led Zeppelin's Plant and Page tell Adam Szreter why they are back together

BYLINE: ADAM SZRETER

SECTION: POP MUSIC PAGE; Page 27

LENGTH: 512 words

If new versions of old songs are anything to go by, then Page and Plant, temporarily at least, are back at the top of the music business after an absence of 14 years. Then it was Led Zeppelin, a four-piece band; now it's a double-act.

With the current surge of middle-aged come-backs, it's easy to imagine that a reunion was always inevitable - and Robert Plant and Jimmy Page are working together again both in the studio and on stage. But until very recently, according to Plant, a combination of loyalty to their late drummer, John Bonham, and a reluctance to rake over old ground looked likely to prevent it.

That problem was solved when an old friend sent him some tapes of drum patterns. Page admits that he had ''been wanting to work with Robert again for a long time. And now the time was right. We were both agreed that if we were going to do something then it had to be new, and that if we were to look at the old material, we'd have to treat it as an old picture ready for a new frame.''

It is by no means certain that their old partner, John Paul Jones, would have accepted an invitation to work with them, but Plant's existing band included a ready- made rhythm section in Michael Lee and Charlie Jones, and there seems to have been little temptation to try to resurrect the old relationship: ''Once we got started we were a two-piece. We were a guitarist and singer who'd written loads of songs already, so we knew very quickly if we didn't like what we were doing. But if you bring in a third imagination it can take longer to reach the same point, and it can be uncomfortable. I much prefer being in the middle of that than churning it out in a four-piece.''

Although the new album, No Quarter, contains only a handful of new songs, it is undoubtedly as ambitious a project as any they have undertaken. Even for those of us who appreciated the fine musicianship that was sometimes hidden behind Led Zeppelin's larger-than-life image (and No Quarter's fusion of influences - rock and classical, Arab and Western, Indian and blues, acoustic and electric - develops ideas already apparent in the Seventies) it all comes as a surprising delight.

No Quarter is due out on 7 November, and there are plans for a tour of the US -

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This is a journalist's attempt at humour :rolleyes:. It relates to Jimmy's court case with his neighbour about the hedge.

The Independent (London)

October 22, 1999, Friday

LYRIC SHEETS; THE HEDGES OF THE HOLY

BYLINE: Martin Newell

SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 15

LENGTH: 267 words

Former Led Zeppelin star Jimmy Page has won a battle in court over his Leylandii hedge. His neighbour, Group Captain Dudley Burnside DFC, an RAF war hero, was ordered to pay pounds 25,000 costs.

Jimmy Page's conifers

Remained untouched by secateurs

His neighbour, Burnside DFC

Was miffed and understandably

Began to cause a song and dance

Being fan of neither Page

nor plants

And having fought a valiant war

Had no recourse but go to law

Though, didn't have an easy ride

And victory fell to Pagey's side

The heavy metal pioneer

Needs privacy and made it clear

That rapid-growing evergreens

Provide the necessary screens

The problem with this type of tree

Leylandii, if left to be

Without a yearly topping-out

Will grow to forty feet, about.

And unlike privet, box or yew

Can ruin a next-door

neighbour's view

As gardener and Led Zep fan

You could say I'm bi-partisan,

But had the case not gone his way

And famous axeman lost the day

He might have had to down guitar

To shin up ladder as the star

Reluctant to pay gardeners' bills

Was forced to practise

pruning skills

And see his foliage die back brown

From over-zealous cutting down

Deprived of special sound FX

No Black & Decker double-necks

Exist as such and he would be

Less expert at the job than me

And headlines run for ever more.

Newell Beats Page ... On

Pruning Saw

The world would know I had

the edge

As Hendrix of the garden hedge

And that would be reward enough.

Leylandii? I hate the stuff.

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The Independent (London)

May 27, 1993, Thursday

MUSIC / 'Robert Plant? I'm not a huge fan'; Led Zeppelin's original tight-trousered frontman is back with a new album. Andy Gill reports

BYLINE: ANDY GILL

SECTION: MUSIC PAGE; Page 18

LENGTH: 1022 words

''I'M pleased with how ridiculous I am,'' admits Robert Plant graciously. ''I like me.''

Then, as if realising how much more than ridiculous this might sound, he quickly adds a disclaimer: ''Though I'm not a huge fan. I know when to switch me off.''

That's just as well. As the prototype for hundreds, probably thousands, of heavy metal vocalists, Plant bears responsibility for some of the most ridiculous squawking and bleating ever to stretch the term ''singing''. Few examples, admittedly, come close to the hysterical perfection of his own shrieking variant on the blues. For his part, Plant offers little comment on his former colleague Jimmy Page's recent Coverdale-Page project, beyond the dutiful bland platitudes about being happy for Jimmy and all that. Of David Coverdale's vocals, nothing is said. They sound, I suggest, rather tightly trousered . . .

''Absolutely!'' agrees the original tightly trousered frontman. ''What else am I going to tell you? I can keep a straight face.'' And indeed, he can.

The difference between Plant and his imitators is that, essentially, he views his style as an extension of that of the blues singers to whom he used to listen in his youth. This includes the guttural moan of Ray Charles doing ''Drown in My Own Tears'', or the falsettos of Otis Rush and Don Covay, and the similar, all-too-brief brushes with perfection of such as Otis Clay, O V Wright, Tyrone Davis, Vernon Garrett - ''all these people who became happening for a moment on the soul scene''.

As a result, there's always been a discernible root to Plant's work, an emotional conductor back to the blues, even when he's singing about squeezing his lemon till the juice runs down his leg.

He refuses to regard his <A name=ORIGHIT_2>Led Zeppelin years as a millstone, even though his post-Zep work hasn't created anything like the same buzz or comparable sales. Indeed, it's not even created as big a buzz as the recent Australian compilation of covers of ''Stairway to Heaven''. Ever the sport, he's generous about it: ''I thought some of the lounge shit was terrible, but the choir was really good, a bit pompous, but quite moving - I got a bit of a lump and thought, I'd better not play this to me mum. I thought the Beatles take-off was excellent, too.''

But wasn't it a bit hard going, after 20 different versions?

''It's pretty hard going in its original form.'' Boom boom!

Asked whether he wasn't just a little bit flattered by the tribute, Plant suggests I ask Howlin' Wolf whether he liked Zep's version of ''Killing Floor''. This is difficult, to say the least, since the Wolf died in 1976, but one takes his point.

''All the riff-mongering that Willie Dixon and Hubert Sumlin and the Wolf and all those guys developed in Chess studios was taken on and developed for a white, acned audience,'' he continues, ''and they must have thought, Jesus Christ, that's only a pasteurised version of what we're doing. If you listen to 'Little Red Rooster' . . . with all the best will in the world - and I am a Stones fan - the Wolf one is, well, wow! But whoever was distributing Chess when the Stones put out their version . . . the Wolf wouldn't have been in there with a shout at all. You couldn't put the Wolf out, because the Wolf would have frightened everybody! How would Jack Jackson have dealt with that? Even Fluff - nor'arf! - would have had a bit of a job on to make it stick.''

These days, the real blues is still something to be searched out - unless, of course, you have a father like Plant, who admits his teenage son can already spot a Robert Johnson track at a hundred yards. But Plant's not just a superannuated bluesman, not by a long way. His new album, the grandly titled Fate Of Nations, leans more towards the diverse influences of the hippy years, to West Coast groups like Buffalo Springfield, Moby Grape and Love, and to singer-songwriters like Tim Rose and Tim Hardin, and the exotica of world musicians such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

''I don't think it's 'world music', that's such a donkey term for it,'' Plant says. ''It's just music that comes from Small Heath in Birmingham as far as I'm concerned. It's part of what you hear if you've got your window down. So was 'Kashmir', and 'Calling to You' on this album.

''It was easier for acoustic music and rock music to co-exist in those days,'' he continues. ''You could have a concert featuring Pentangle, Roy Harper, Deep Purple and Blodwyn Pig, or whatever, all together. And especially on the big American festivals we used to play, there was a lot of what we'd consider impossible billing these days: The Doors, Zeppelin, Woody Herman, John Lee Hooker - you'd never believe those combinations.''

The new LP tries for what he calls the ''natural intensity'' of acoustic music, Plant aiming for a kind of ''power-folk'' feel.

''I like to make the acoustic stuff powerful. 'Come into My Life' on the new LP is a good example of that: when the riff comes in, it's just drums and acoustic guitar, but it's heavy as hell. As was 'Ramble On', or 'What Is and What Should Never Be', in Zep.

Ultimately, though, whatever power the new album has resides mainly in that voice, recorded in full analogue glory just like on the early Zep albums. ''I've tried digital before,'' Plant admits. ''It suits some projects, and it's very clean. But I'm not really that clean any more, I've taken all my beads and bangles off recently, but I just want to do something I feel comfortable with - and I remember the glory of 8-track, like on Led Zep I & II, where you have to sing on the guitar solo track, so you've got to stop singing just before Page starts playing - I love that kind of ramshackle, shit-or-bust style. Now that has gone, to a degree, but parts of it live on, and I think I'm harking back to it in approach, and certainly in temperament. But though my performance is spontaneous, the arrangements are all well worked out beforehand. I've learnt lots of things, one of which is Never Waste Time.''

In studios, time is money.

''At my time of life, time is time!''

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The Independent (London)

November 13, 1996, Wednesday

Lays of ancient rock; Why Pamela Des Barres survived the stars she slept with

BYLINE: Suzanne Moore

SECTION: FEATURES; Page 8,

LENGTH: 1311 words

Pamela Des Barres wanted to write a book about Jesus and Mary Magdalene. "It would be about them coming back today as a rock star and a groupie. It would be about the love affair, the romance." Failing to drum up interest in this proposal, Pamela ended up back in her "rock 'n' roll genre" where she is known as the world's most famous groupie.

As she explains: "It's only because I wrote about it. I didn't do anything that hundreds of other girls weren't doing at the same time. It's just that I had my wits about me, I kept a journal. I'm proud of my history, but there is only so many times that you can answer 'What was Jim Morrison really like?' and people only ask these dumb questions."

I realise that I had better not ask her, then, what Mick Jagger was like. I suppose I had better take her seriously as a rock courtesan, or, as she prefers it, "muse", even as a writer, but it is difficult when her entire claim to fame is based on the men that she has slept with. She admits as much, entitling her previous two books, I'm with the Band and Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up. But sometimes it gets too much. "Oh God, when I go on radio in the States, they introduce me as 'Pamela Des Barres. She has slept with our entire playlist'."

Her new book, Rock Bottom, Dark Moments in Music Babylon, chronicles the tales of excess from the music business. We've heard the story before. Sex, drugs, alcohol, more drugs, madness, death. Jimi and Janis, Morrison, Bolan, Barrett. Here they are, losing it big time, and Des Barres, this "daughter of rock 'n' roll", writes tidily of the mess of their lives.

She is now a proper journalist, who researches her subjects, but it's a depressing and spurious read. Chuck Berry makes the book because of his coprophilia; GG Allin simply because he was the most perverted animal around, penning lyrics such as "Let's fuck some kids/They can't say no/Molest them now/Before they grow."

Each rock 'n' roll "god" is brought down by life on the road. Debauchery flows from numbness to excess. All the sorry tales are here, involving <A name=ORIGHIT_1>Led Zeppelin, dogs, bacon and groupies. Sordid stories of addiction and of violence: Marvin Gaye shot by his father, Kurt Cobain shot by himself, Syd Barrett shot to pieces by too much acid.

Yet Pamela herself is a healthy, happy survivor with a gurgling laugh. She is relentlessly upbeat. She makes no judgements in the book, she merely documents decline after decline. As I talk to her I wonder what judgements she made when she was hanging out with her icons. She still seems overwhelmed by them.

"I think these guys martyred themselves for us. They will be remembered like Keats and Shelley - Morrison will, Lennon will - as prophets. They lived a lifestyle for us. We gasped at what they did and tried to emulate it and they burnt for us - but then I'm really gooey that way."

Gooey enough, it seems, to have turned a blind eye to what was going on much of the time. Did she ever feel used? "Oh no. There was a time when Jimmy Page went off with younger girls and I felt pretty bad. But I was with him for two or three years. The same with Keith Moon and Noel Redding. Whenever they came to LA I was their girlfriend. I even went on the road with Noel and Jimi Hendrix. That was big news when you could do that."

The boys apparently would just phone Pamela up when they were in town. She was part of the Frank Zappa experiment, an all-girl group - Girls Together Outrageously. "That was always an intro for me - a lot of the English guys were desperate to meet Frank. It was competitive, you know, a lot of girls going for the same Greek gods."

Pamela developed a certain technique. "Oh, I was hot for Waylon Jennings. I don't sleep with married guys. I respect that union. I just didn't know he was married . . . I used to go to these Country and Western clubs in garters and stockings - this is way before Madonna - and I brought huge bouquets of flowers which I used to throw at his feet and just sit there in front of him in my underwear. He couldn't not go for me. And he did."

She describes this boldness as full of coquettish joy, rather than as a sleazy endeavour. I ask gently if she was so popular not only because she was "fun" but because she made few demands on these men. "Probably. How about no demands?" she laughs loudly. Was there any one she rejected? "Oh sure. Mick Jagger for a long time. I was in love with Jimmy Page and I thought he was being true to me out there on the road. I was so naive. I was hanging around with Mick a lot and we made out a couple of times. I wasn't in love with him but you know, in those days you were supposed to experience free love."

I tell Pamela that I met Marianne Faithfull a while ago. "Oh yes, there is a part of her book where she says that Mick came home and brought her flavoured douches and that he must have got the idea from me." So did he? "Well, I used them. Strawberry-flavoured. You can't find that stuff any more." She reminisces about the good old days when you could "make out for hours" with the likes of Jim Morrison.

Yet all of this seems to me to be about male rather than female sexual pleasure. The argument that groupiedom is a primitive form of female empowerment leaves me cold. I am from another generation, though Pamela argues that Courtney Love told her that she would have been a groupie "back then". Surely, I say to Pam, some of these guys were disappointing? She disagrees: "I never found that. I totally got off on it." Her only regret is that she didn't sleep with Hendrix, because she was scared of him.

She also denies that self-destruction becomes repetitive, addiction boring. "I don't get bored," she says although she will admit that addiction does stunt emotional growth, so that guys like Jimmy Page "still act like 25- year-olds". Pamela, who has an 18-year-old son - "I mommed out there for a while," she says, in true Californian style - has just finished a relationship with a musician who was 22 when she met him. She is still hopeful, one might say hopelessly romantic, about the whole scene, excited by the news that Pearl Jam want to hang out with her.

Though she documents the darker moments of the times, she denies that she was involved in any of the nastiness. Was she expected to do things with dogs and baked beans and octopuses? "No. Sweet girls like me were almost like wives. We were protected, brought presents, kept in the room while they went off for half an hour or so. I knew about these things from my friend Cynthia Plastercaster but no one even asked me to do a three-way. Except Mick, and he wasn't like a boyfriend. I wasn't into any of that, but one girl wasn't enough for them. They were bored. I was so young. My goal was to spend the rest of my life with one of these arseholes."

She had a list, and she can now cross off most of the men on it; many of them have crossed themselves off for her. This 48-year-old woman, this chronicler of "Babylon", still giggles like the Californian girl she is. Perhaps she was protected because she bought the myth. She really has faith; she worships at this phallic shrine of rock 'n' roll.

I understand why she wants to write about Jesus - from one god to the next, I guess. But I am agnostic, and as she goes off to score herself some vitamins I think of Patti Smith's fabulous refusal of faith: "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine"

'Rock Bottom, Dark Moments in Music Babylon' is published by Little Brown at pounds 16.99. 'Head Over Heels', a collection of journalism by Suzanne Moore, is published by Viking, at pounds 13. Suzanne Moore and Andrew Marr, editor of The Independent, will be in conversation at the National Lyttelton Theatre, London SE1, on 14 November at 6pm (tickets, 0171-369 1734).

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The Independent (London)

November 17, 1990, Saturday

ROCK / Heavy and the relishers; Ten years after they broke up, Led Zeppelin are not only popular but newly respectable. Kevin Jackson reports

BYLINE: By KEVIN JACKSON

SECTION: WEEKEND ARTS PAGE; Page 32

LENGTH: 1374 words

Fifteen Pints in Valhalla'': it was an unsung sub-editor on the New Musical Express who coined that mythical track title to sum up everything that was most risible about the musical genre spawned by Led Zeppelin and the beery British lads who adored them. For most of the late Seventies and Eighties, Led Zeppelin have been an object of derision among arbiters of taste in the NME and other rock organs, their name redolent of all the worst excesses of a taste-free decade - bombast, Hobbit-fancying, preening male arrogance and general buffoonery.

Zeppelin loyalists, ran the party line, were strictly beyond the pale of fashion. To confess even a passing fondness for the band would immediately relegate you to the ranks of the benighted: ageing hippies, heavy metal troglodytes or the less bright citizenry of the American heartlands, where local FM stations can still make you believe it is a bright spring morning in 1971. (A major road hazard for tourists in the US has long been wrist whiplash, caused by a frantic scrabbling at the car radio's dial when the opening chords of ''Stairway to Heaven'' twang out for the 18th time that morning.)

And yet, 10 years on from the band's break-up after the death of their drummer John Bonham, there has been a sea change. To be sure, many of the customers who have been pushing the two new collections of Led Zeppelin remasters to the upper reaches of the album charts are simply replacing records that, as one marketing manager put it, ''they bought when they were 15 and have scratched to pieces in drunken stupors'', or hoping that Jimmy Page's fresh production work on the old tracks will carry a sufficently mighty sonic punch to propel them safely through their mid-life crises. Empirical observation, though, suggests that the consumer profile is rather more varied than bien-pensant prejudice would have it.

According to Rob MacLennan, Rock Music Sales Controller at London's Virgin Megastore, the largest section of the market are first-time buyers in their late twenties or thereabouts - the sort of people who were frightened off by the rock press's sneers in the late Seventies and may have only the most nodding (rather than head-banging) acquaintance with the back catalogue, but now feel unembarrassed. Still more strikingly, ''you have much younger people buying the records as well, and not just the ones who'd usually buy heavy metal records. It's really surprising: people who until recently wouldn't have been caught dead buying a Led Zeppelin album are now perfectly happy to be seen with that boxed set. They've gone from being the least credible rock band in the world to the most credible rock band of the Seventies in just two years.''

Professional critics are not quite so full-blooded in their enthusiasm as the man in the Megastore queue. Still, even a writer as generally scornful of the band's tendencies to melodrama and ''penile dementia'' as Charles Shaar Murray is willing to say some kind things about them these days: ''It's great hard rock, and unless you have a real objection to hard rock and find it unpalatable, then you'll respond to them, because they're among the best.''

Moreover, though his book Crosstown Traffic outlines some serious reservations about the uses that white rockers have made of the black styles they plundered, Murray feels that the closeness of the band's music to country blues sources (well illustrated on the new collection) makes the group ''far more interesting than the ones which came after, and only had Led Zeppelin as a source. There's an old joke from the siege of Budapest, where someone serves up a hot dinner to his friends, and they ask 'Is this real rat, or just ersatz rat?' Well, whatever else you think of Led Zeppelin, they were real rat - they did more than anybody else to transform blues material into mainstream rock, and that makes them valuable, especially for people who lacked the capacity to check out the originals.''

Murray's sentiments are echoed by other critics, none of whom is grudging about Page's talents as a guitarist and arranger or Bonham's drumming prowess. What has made the sceptics fall partly back into step with the despised masses for whom Led Zeppelin have remained, in the words of Neil Jeffries of Kerrang! magazine, ''the gods''? Most witnesses agree that the key word is ''sampling'': Zeppelin tracks have been sampled more frequently for modern rap and dance records than those of any other act except James Brown. Younger listeners have heard the rhythmic chunks for the first time and responded to what one fan calls their ''filthy'' quality; their elders have been reminded of what they liked about the band in the old days.

John Bonham's thunderous drum part on ''When the Levee Breaks'' is the most heavily sampled of these fragments, but sharp-eared listeners claim to have detected Page's guitar riffs or John Paul Jones's bass lines on tracks by musicians as diverse as the Beastie Boys, Herbie Hancock (on his hit ''Rockit'') and any number of hip-hop outfits. Not unreasonably, Robert Plant decided to follow suit by sampling himself on his solo album Now and Zen. Trevor Horn, the producer of Frankie Goes to Hollywood and others, has himself taken samples from Zeppelin (he prefers not to specify where and when), and believes that their influence is even more extensive than these direct liftings may suggest:

''I've often used Led Zeppelin tracks as a kind of blueprint for the things I've done, especially when I was working with Malcom MacLaren. John Bonham was a brilliant musician - everyone's stolen what that guy did, imitating his drum fills with computers and so on. And Jimmy Page was a really innovative producer - he was the first person to record a heavy rock band properly, by moving the microphones around until he could get the same sound on record that bands like the Yardbirds had achieved on stage.''

If the modishness of rap and hip-hop has allowed fashion slaves to own up to a sneaking taste for their music, another shift in musical taste has also proved a boon to the band. Thanks to the vogue for World Music, the side of Led Zeppelin's music that Jimmy Page refers to as ''the CIA connection - part Celtic, part Indian, part Arabic'' (as in their crunching mini-travelogue ''Kashmir'') can now sound less like the self-indulgence of hippies with platinum credit cards than a ground-breaking attempt to broaden the range of rock by referring to the folk music of the East and the British Isles.

More broadly, the process of musical rehabilitation has been hastened by a renewed tolerance for the kind of squashy, heterodox mysticism which flourished in the late Sixties, went underground for a few years, and has re-emerged in a spruced-up form under the blanket heading of New Age. In this light, the choice of album cover for the boxed set - it shows the shadow of a Zeppelin falling across one of those mysterious crop circles - was inspired.

The image stirs associations (for older fans, at least) with the cryptic symbols that graced the band's fourth album instead of a title; it also hints at the way in which the band has cast a long shadow over the music of the present day. Even discounting the dozens of bands followed by purist heavy metal tribesmen - a sizeable discount, since they account for some 40 per cent of the record market in the States - Led Zeppelin have clearly influenced the likes of The Mission, The Cult, Guns'n'Roses and (virtual carbon-copies) Kingdom Come.

Would they have been so pervasive a force, though, had Bonham not met his premature death? Jeff Gillespie, head of rock promotions at Phonogram, thinks not: ''The mystique that has built up around them probably couldn't have been sustained if they were still around. It's like the old sick joke, where a manager tells his band that the best way to revive their careers is to die in a plane crash.'' Rumours of a reunion tour are spread and disclaimed with a regularity matched only by those surrounding another well-known four-man band who lost a key member 10 years ago, but, if Gillespie is right, the survivors are probably wise to remain apart, and allow their Songs - albeit in remastered form - to Remain the Same.

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The Sun

June 28, 2001

GOOD NEWS MEL B'S MOVING TO BRAZIL. BAD NEWS ONLY FOR SOME OF THE YEAR

BYLINE: Dominic Mohan

SECTION: BIZARRE

LENGTH: 412 words

MEL B is to move to a house she is having built at a celebrity resort in BRAZIL.

But don't crack the champagne just yet...she'll still be spending part of each year in England.

Mel splashed out Pounds 20,000 for the large plot at Angra Dos Reis, 50 miles from Rio de Janeiro, one of South America's hottest new locations.

The Spice Girl says she wants to introduce her two-year-old daughter Phoenix Chi to Latin American culture.

Mel, who still has a sizeable following in South America, told me: "I've just bought a big bit of land over in Brazil so I will be visiting quite a bit with my baby -and I can't wait.

"I've fallen in love with the place because it's the capital for Latin, funky music, brilliant people and thongs."

Scary Spice -advised by money men to sell her Pounds 2.5million mansion in Little Marlow, Bucks, after recent cash problems -will be able to afford a lavish standard of living in Brazil.

Building a home there will cost a fraction of what it would here.

Mel's finances are suffering after a string of chart failures.

Record company bosses are threatening to drop the star after her latest single, Lullaby, only got to No13. Scary has always loved Brazilian culture. She hired carnival troupe Yes Brazil to perform at her wedding to Jimmy Gulzar in 1998.

She even transformed her home into a South American paradise -at an estimated cost of Pounds 200,000 -for a charity event in November last year.

And she is not the only star interested in the swanky resort town.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Sting are looking at property in the area.

One of her neighbours will be <A name=ORIGHIT_1>Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. His wife Jemima says she will welcome Mel with open arms.

She told me: "We'll be delighted to see her move to the country.

"Brazil is a beautiful place and Mel will only make it better. She'll be just down the road and we'll help her settle in."

Meanwhile, Mel has decided to avoid possible humiliation by not releasing her flop album Hot in the U.S.

The CD peaked at No28 in the British charts when it came out here last year - making it the poorest solo offering by any Spice Girl...yet.

She said: "You can't expect the same success as I had with the Spice Girls but I'm happy with it so far.

"My album hasn't been released in America yet and I don't think I'm going to release it. I'm probably going to write another album next year so I'm a bit more up to date with things."

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The Sun

August 2, 2004

ZEP ZAP GELDOF

LENGTH: 58 words

ROCK legends Led Zeppelin have banned Bob Geldof from using film of their Live Aid performance in a new DVD of the charity concert.

The band is rumoured to be embarrassed about its "sub-standard" show at the 1985 gig.

They will be the only act missing from the DVD -billed "the greatest show on Earth" -which goes on sale on November 1.

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The Sun

September 27, 2003

BASS-IC INSTINCT IS A CLASH HIT FOR PENNIE

BYLINE: Richie Taylor

SECTION: OPINION

LENGTH: 423 words

LEGENDARY rock photographer Pennie Smith will open her first Irish exhibition at The Helix on Monday night.

Pennie spent nearly ten years with music magazine NME - and is best known for her cover shot of The Clash's 1979 classic third album London Calling.

Prints of that world-famous photo of the band's Paul Simonon smashing up his bass during a gig can be bought at the exhibition.

They are fetching around Pounds 1,000 sterling EACH in London, but will be considerably cheaper here.

Snapper Pennie revealed: "All the prints I'm bringing over will sell from Pounds 375 upwards. I think that's a good price."

She still likes the famous London Calling pic but admitted she "can't really see it anymore".

And Penny also confessed that she wasn't even a big fan of the shot initially. She added: "Paul Simonon calls it our b*****d child. It keeps coming back to haunt us!

"At first I thought I would have preferred it to be more in focus, but I've grown to like it.

"I almost didn't get to take it. I was supposed to meet friends that night but decided to stay and see the gig.

"I could really see Paul getting more and more annoyed during the gig. I think he just thought that the crowd was dead."

Hell-raisers

She will also display shots of rock 'n' roll greats such as The Rolling Stones, Oasis and Iggy Pop, as well as disgraced glam-rocker Gary Glitter and indie band Mansun,

But there will be no photos of Irish artists on display.

Pennie railed: "I'm not racist! I have photographed most of the big Irish names but these are the prints I've picked. Some of them are my favourites - and others are there for different reasons."

During her time with the NME from 1973-1982, Pennie photographed an astonishing 2,000 bands.

And notorious hard-rock hell-raisers <A name=ORIGHIT_1>Led Zeppelin were the first band she went on the road with way back in 1973.

She revealed: "I actually found them to be perfect gentlemen! I think they were a bit taken aback by me.

"I later heard they didn't allow any photographers backstage, but I just walked into their dressing rooms and started snapping."

Next year busy Penny plans to stage a major exhibition of her photographs - as well as finally setting up her own website.

She said: "I should have done all that this year, but it just never happened. It was meant to be a sabbatical year for me."

Freelancer Pennie still works on band tours, album covers and books - as well as having her work appear in countless magazines and newspapers.

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The Sun

January 22, 2000

Robert Plant; Insider; Football

LENGTH: 123 words

INSIDER has the wackiest and juciest of stories from the big bad world of sport. From Julius Francis' pantomime to Nicky Banger's little problem.

It's all here!

EVER wondered what sort of people make up the bumper crowds of about 192 at League of Wales matches? Sad anoraks maybe, sheep fanciers perhaps - or how about rock legends?

Led Zeppelin frontman ROBERT PLANT is an ardent fan of Inter Cardiff.

The dinosaur rocker has become a regular at Inter games since his son Logan started playing centre-half for the semi-pro club last month.

Young Logan, a University of Wales student, scored on his debut in a 1-1 draw against Cwmbran. But what next? A move to Inter Milan? Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, it makes me wonder....

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The Times (London)

February 5 1988, Friday

Arts (Rock): New life for Plant / Review of Robert Plant at the Marquee

BYLINE: DAVID SINCLAIR

SECTION: Issue 62995.

LENGTH: 270 words

The re-writing of rock history to facilitate the vogueish interest in the early Seventies has inevitably led to a favourable re-assessment of Led Zeppelin, a group whose appeal was widely assumed to have been consigned to the dustbin in the wake of punk.

Now that the hip hop movement has adopted Zeppelin's catalogue as a biblical source, while AC/DC is one of the hippest bands in the world and even flares are on the way back, the yowling Robert Plant finds himself closer to centre stage than he has been for a decade.

Seeing performers of Plant's stature at a small venue is always a thrill, although it must be something of a jolt for the musicians. Chris Blackwell's drum cage took up almost a third of the stage space, and there were moments when it looked as if Plant was about to get clouted by a guitar headstock or two.

But the essence of a spry, varied and surprisingly fresh-sounding collection of songs was distilled that much more strongly in such confined surroundings by his young-looking band. The guitarist, Doug Boyle, was of an age to be Plant's son, and if such a thing as a generation gap exists, it no longer finds expression in rock music.

There are now groups who sound more like Led Zeppelin than Plant himself, but it was noticeable that the best reactions came when the band played 'In the Evening' from In Through The Out Door, and 'Trampled Underfoot' from Physical Graffiti, while the singer's own favourites - a rather lumpen version of John Lee Hooker's 'Dimples' and the Doors' 'Break On Through (To The Other Side)' - met with a more restrained response.

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The Times (London)

April 15 1988, Friday

Arts: No headbanging, please - Robert Plant, former singer with Led Zeppelin, now building a less frenetic solo career

BYLINE: DAVID SINCLAIR

SECTION: Issue 63056.

LENGTH: 707 words

If Robert Plant was ever the hell-raiser that most accounts of Led Zeppelin's heyday suggest, the scenes backstage on the current British dates indicate that such activities are now either behind him or else much more discreetly managed. His closest companion in the touring party that reached Sheffield City Hall last week was his nine-year-old son, Logan, a thin, dark-haired boy loyally respectful of his Dad's music but more of a fan of Michael Jackson.

'If you're heading for that chocolate again, you'll be thrust into the flames of Hades,' Plant admonished the little fellow, who was making for a tray of goodies laid out in the singer's dressing room area. 'Take him and give him some food in the catering room,' Plant instructed an aide.

Plant senior was born in West Bromwich, the son of a civil engineer, and enjoyed what he describes as a 'sheltered' grammar-school upbringing. Although his 39-year-old face bears the lines of a life lived to the hilt, his waistline looks about the same as it was when he was 19, and his blond curls, although cut a bit shorter, show no signs of receding.

Plant agrees that he has emerged 'relatively unscathed' from the turmoil that surrounded Led Zeppelin, the group which scaled Olympian peaks of success in the Seventies while retaining a remote public profile that served to encourage some of the least savoury tales of excess in the pantheon of rock legends.

'We are right in the eye of the storm. We were riding through the middle of this black hole without every really touching the sides and feeling any of the momentum. I still played soccer on a Sunday, everybody did what they wanted to do when they weren't working, but around that normality there was this great myth.'

The myth suffered a shattering collision with reality when Zeppelin's drummer, John Bonham, died after a drinking spree during rehearsals at Jimmy Page's Windsor home in 1980. 'Bonzo left us at short notice,' Plant remarks as an aside, in the same jokily cavalier tone of voice that he uses to describe himself and Logan's mother as 'happily divorced'.

His confident bearing gives the impression that there is very little in life that Plant is not capable of handling with a touch of positive thinking and a few words of deprecating humour. Even the challenge of carving out a solo career after Led Zeppelin's demise did not daunt him.

'The reality of just being Robert Plant, potential maker of a million mistakes, in 1981 was, in many contradictory ways, quite exciting; to be standing there with a career under my arm - with one foot on the platform and the other foot on the train, as Dylan said. The question was, do I jump on this train and keep going, or stay on the platform and turn into Ronnie James Dio's dad?'

But Plant has paid dearly in this country for his artistic pride. By turning his back on the heavy metal fans, who, whether he likes it or not, are the legacy of Zeppelin's era or primacy, he has sacrificed a ready-made constituency of avid music purchasers. 'I would have 10,000 headbangers at any gig if I were to do the tricks and make the appropriate record - but I couldn't stand the idea of it.'

Of the five albumns he has released during his solo career, it is the collection off old rock 'n' roll favourites, recorded with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page under the name of the Honeydrippers, that has so far sold the most copies (about 2.5 million) and yielded his biggest hit single, 'Sea Of Love', No 3 in America in 1984.

The Americans, who accept the idea of rock as a legitimate activity for grown-ups in a way that the British never have, are much better disposed towards Plant's latter-day output. The new album, Now And Zen, is in the US Top 10 and he is selling out arena shows a long way in advance of his tour there.

He may have opted for a dignified withdrawal from the histrionics which he did so much to establish in the first place, but Plant is a long way from turning in his microphone for a pipe and slippers. 'I'm a very strong character,' he observes. 'I've stopped smoking after 20 years. I take vitamins, I read a lot and I try and calm down when I can. But it's hard like throwing a bucket of water on a volcano, really.'

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The Independent (London)

March 27, 1998, Friday

Rock music: Still sexy after all these years; Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Shepherds Bush Empire

BYLINE: James McNair

SECTION: FEATURES; Page 18

LENGTH: 500 words

Jimmy Page and Robert Plant

Shepherds Bush Empire

Rock music needs its occasions, and 30 years after the birth of Led Zeppelin, a surprise gig by the band's pivotal members still registered heavily on the music hack

Richter scale. Tonight's guest list was literally 800 names long, and there were enough pop stars in the audience for a Tussaud's Rock Circus. With the pomp, bombast and frivolous excess of 1970s rock hanging in the air like patchouli, the faithful prepared to pay homage.

The roar that greeted them as they came on-stage was immense, and there was also that pleasing sense of the surreal which occurs when one encounters icons of popular culture in the flesh. Plant looked the better preserved of the two, but then he has several years on Page, who's now pushing 55. They were joined by Michael Lee on drums, Plant's son-in-law, Charlie Jones, on bass, and Phil Andrews on keyboards, squeeze-box, and mandolin. Unfortunately Andrews was so quiet in the mix that he often appeared to be miming.

Wisely, they began with a medley of oldies, rather than slavishly promoting their forthcoming album, Walking Into Clarksdale. We got "Nightflight" from Physical Graffiti, then "Bring It On Home" and "Heartbreaker" from Led Zeppelin II. The latter served as an only reminder of why Jimmy Page is still revered in rock guitar circles. His riffs are mammoth hooks; sexy, melodic phrases that lodge in both the crotch and the cranium. And even although he's no longer the lithe, twenty-something who (together with Hendrix) pioneered the phallocentric repertoire of rock guitar posturing, he still has a certain elegant swagger when he gets going.

The acoustic interlude which featured "Going To California", "Tangerine" and the hugely infectious stomp of "Gallows Pole" seemed to induce a mass reverie of nostalgia. When Page teased his Les Paul with a violin bow, and when a roadie ran on with a fresh incense stick for Plant's monitor, it was a reminder of those heady days before This is Spinal Tap brilliantly deconstructed the whole heavy rock genre.

Of the new material, only "Walking into Clarksdale" and the single "Most High" came close to Zeppelin of old, but then to be fair the agenda has changed, with Steve Albini's production on the new album attempting (and often succeeding) to contemporise the pair's sound. The audience cared not a jot about this, of course - they simply wanted "Stairway To Heaven". Despite Page teasingly closing "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" with "Stairway's" opening however, they knew in their heart of hearts that it wasn't going to happen.

Instead, we got a truly incendiary "Whole Lotta Love" in which Page coaxed other-worldly squeals from an archaic theremin, and a strangely poignant "Thank You", the song which Plant wrote for his wife back in 1969. "Just silly old buggers singing songs about love," he grinned at the end. How could he have confused himself with Des O'Connor and Sacha Distel?

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The Independent (London)

July 21, 1995, Friday

Page & Plant / Cornwall Coliseum, St Austell

BYLINE: Nick Coleman

SECTION: POP; Page 14

LENGTH: 481 words

In some ways, the hideous entertainment multiplex modestly named the Cornwall Coliseum is an ideal <A name=ORIGHIT_1>Led Zeppelin venue. It squats grimly on a granite beach a matter of feet from the Atlantic ocean. It is featureless, implacable, massy yet compacted, as if dropped on Cornwall from a great height: corrugated concrete blocks set against black cliffs and a riffing sea.

Perfect, you'd have thought, not only as a metaphor for Zeppelin's most inhospitable music but also as the setting for a memorable entrance: Robert and Jimmy, horned and cross-gartered, in the prow of a Viking longship driven hard up the beach like a sword into the maw of Gossips' niterie.

If only. Sadly, the realisation of such a coup would ask unanswerable questions of the chaps' security operation. And besides, how keen are the chaps going to be to plug in their Gibsons while gartered in sopping thongs? In the event, we had to make do with the group appearing gingerly from behind a curtain of green and vermillion light to the sound of chugging Arab modes. It was bathos, but it was good bathos.

The same went for the rest of the show. P&P's solution to the problem of being too young to die but old enough to worry about it is to take their heavy business lightly. They came with a full complement of Egyptian drummers, but not the orchestra scheduled for later shows, eschewing theformal solemnity of last year's do in favour of all-out Arabian crunch- rock.

Indeed, they went off at the deep end with a somewhat perfunctory "Whole Lotta Love", during which Plant essayed the occasional bottom-clench and hair-toss before leaving it to his accomplice to make an unspeakable racket with his Theremin thing. This contraption has been around since the early days. It's constructed out of a black toolbox, Meccano, some gaffer tape and the gear-stick off an old tractor and it sounds like an earthquake. Page played it like a laid-back traffic policeman waving his arms at an intersection, looking chuffed to bits while the tarmac cracks and suppurates all about, belching black vapour and the smell of testosterone.

"Since I've Been Loving You" was pretty torrid, too, as was "Four Sticks", which snicked the vibe up a gear from the pervading matey languor. "Kashmir" was the clincher, though, being long, hot and cinematic. Guitars swelled and bellied like sails, Arab drums lurched and swayed: Viking sea-dogs rode ships of the desert. Page grinned afterwards like a 12-year-old.

There remained an element of restraint in Plant's demeanour, however, which may have been the product of a 47-year-old's natural angst at having to clench his bottom in front of strangers or may simply have been from the effort of making his voice soar more freely than at any time since his original separation from his pallid chum. It brought a lump to the throat rather than to the trousers.

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The Independent (London)

June 14, 2002, Friday

WHOLE LOTTA LEGEND;

LIVE ROBERT PLANT ASTORIA LONDON

BYLINE: Steve Jelbert

SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 20

LENGTH: 497 words

Although the Government may feign concern about the inability of Britain's motley line-up of hoofers, greeters and singing waiters to sell any records in the US, at one time, British acts shifted insane quantities in the American heartland, and without compromising their native qualities. The biggest act of all were, of course, Led Zeppelin, so unconcerned about the commercial potential of their blend of electric blues, English folk and eastern influences that they didn't even bother to release singles.

Twenty years after their demise, following the drummer John Bonham's death, they retain a fascination that unites generations. The image of them crossing the world in their jet, pausing only to headline the occasional stadium full of baying, stoned kids, lives on in movies such as Almost Famous, and was memorably spoofed in the video for Cornershop's terrific last single (which even slipped in some morris dancing).

Which is why this distinctly un-stadium-like venue is rammed, with several hundred outside trying to negotiate entry, to see a genuine rock legend at a civilised distance.

Robert Plant may no longer be the golden god who led Zeppelin (sorry). Though his flowing locks are intact, he looks like he's just stepped off a yacht. But his distinct voice is perfectly intact, and, to his credit, his solo career continues on its erratic but endearingly eclectic path.

Backed by a band including a couple of members of Portishead's live line- up, notably the crack drummer Clive Deamer, Plant playfully leads them through an entertaining set of unlikely covers, the odd Zep classic and a handful of tunes from his solo career. Though Deamer may not possess the thump of Bonham (the kit is mixed too low throughout), exciting versions of "Four Sticks" and "Celebration Day" are ecstatically received, while the acoustic idyll of "Going To California" is strangely touching. (Of course, when Zep actually visited the state, they usually hung out with under-age groupies on Sunset...)

Plant's most recent tours have seen him leading a pick-up band of old friends called Priory of Brion (yes, it is apparently a Monty Python reference), playing selections of his favourite old songs at unlikely venues (Kidderminster Tennis Club, anyone?). His new album Dreamland, his first solo effort in nearly a decade, sustains the theme, including a range of covers from Bob Dylan to Tim Buckley, Moby Grape to the Youngbloods.

Tonight, he performs not one, but two tunes by Love's Arthur Lee, recently released from incarceration and currently touring Britain himself, an intriguing deconstruction of "Hey Joe", all loops and familiar moans, and his new single, an impressive version of Tim Rose's "Morning Dew". But best of all is the sincerity in the performance. These are songs that this fiftysomething millionaire obviously loves and he's not selling them, but sharing them. This was a refreshing display from a man with nothing to prove.

Edited by kenog
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Jimmy Page and the Black Crowes: Live At The Greek (SPV)

Mat Snow, Mojo, September 2000

Recorded live in October’99, a scorching blues-rock hit-packed double album like they used to make ‘em.

THERE ARE some things that are fun by yourself but are even better with a few thousand close friends. Boogieing down to the sound of Led Zeppelin is just such a pleasure. The more of you there are, the bigger the blast. Which is all the excuse Jimmy Page needed to bring the LZ songbook to the multitudes once more.

But after Robert Plant and the crew that came with him for the 1998 Page & Plant world tour dispersed in search of fresh challenges, Page required a new band to carry the weight. That band is The Black Crowes, and he has chosen wisely. Like the ‘60s Eel Pie Island generation of which Page remains (after Keith Richards) the second least likely to get a knighthood, this Atlanta-based outfit have a soul-blues schooling and that lucrative knack for alchemising the defiance of the downtrodden black underclass into the dandified swagger of the hormone-driven white libertine. (Can we agree that this particular paradox has been chased around the cultural studies farmyard long enough? Leave it to the copyright lawyers to sort out.) And, crucially, they sing and play as if their careers so far have been leading to this point.

What we don’t hear, due to The Black Crowes’ record contract, are any of their own numbers which they and the blues-rock legend performed last year at Hollywood’s Greek Theater. What we do get are 13 Zep tunes, plus blues chestnuts by Willie Dixon ('Mellow Down Easy' and 'You Shook Me'), Elmore James ('Shake Your Money Maker'), B.B. King ('Woke Up This Morning') and Jimmy Rogers ('Sloppy Drunk'). Even more mouthwatering: Fleetwood Mac’s rattlesnake-shaking 'Oh Well' and The Yardbirds’ psych-rock 'Shape Of The Things', which Mr Page revisits just as excitingly as did his former Yardbirds spar Jeff Beck back when Rod Stewart fondled the mikestand.

Nothing here is rethought or even rearranged from studio versions we know and love strutting to. Chris Robinson hollers mid-point between Rod The Mod gruffness and Percy Plant’s suppleness. Brother Rich and fellow guitarist Audley Freed crank out those interlocking dog-leg riffs, chugs and wails that a mere two-handed Page never could on-stage with Led Zep. Which means that 'Whole Lotta Love' blasts away with bells, whistles and maximum heaviosity. The crowd’s buzz does the rest.

So, probably the most conservative rock’n’ roll record of the year so far, and probably also the most enjoyable. It’s said they’re doing it all over again. Make sure they do it all over you.

© Mat Snow, 2000

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Led Zeppelin: Jimmy Page

Mark Williams, International Times, 9 May 1969

A VERY WELL respected record producer recently informed me that Led Zepplin were the ONLY band that we're going to elevate themselves to the ranks of the Nice, Jethro Tull, Ten Years After etc., out of the current British. What's more neither he nor his company have any financial interest in the band.

So you can possibly realise how dull the scene is here and how much of a responsibility Jimmy Page has to all the really heavy guitar freaks. Page, however, has many years behind him as a worshipped guitarist and, as one can gather from the Led Zeppelin's first LP and their live performances, is well able to demonstrate his prowess as a fingerboard athlete and his originality as a musician.

Page was off with the group to the States a couple of days after we met for China tea and splutterings from an inferior record player, high above London's romantic Soho, a fact which prompted me to ask just what he thought of the British music scene?

JP: I don't think there really is one.

M: But wouldn't you say that there's a greater interchange of ideas between musicians over here and a certain amount of 'spirit' that didn't exist, except in isolated cases, a few years ago?

JP: Well yes, but that doesn't really constitute a 'Scene'. Over here in Britain there are some good musicians and a few record companies promoting things that ought to be heard but that's about all. In America the big difference is that most of the cities have a couple of FM Underground Stations and they keep everybody informed about what's happening nationally, which groups are coming to town, and they play the records that the groups they're talking about have made. So the kids are fully aware of everything that's going on. In Britain, after we'd formed the new group, nobody wanted to book us because we weren't called the Yardbirds. In some cases they did book us and when we got to the gig we'd find that we'd been billed as the Yardbirds! That situation just wouldn't occur in the States. Of course, once we'd been to the States and begun to make a name for ourselves, all the British promoters wanted to know. It's such a drag. At first I thought the group was going to crumble before it had started properly.

M: So you feel that radio has a large part to play in pop?

JP: It's very important, but over here the BBC have effectively killed the progress of 'underground' music. I know the policy down there, there's a reviewer who gives new releases one listen, just ONE listen and if it fits the Radio One concept of what a groovy record should be, it MIGHT get selected for plugging and they only plug six, I think it's six, records per week. It's amazing that they should be allowed to do that. It's only John Peel and that other guy, er, Pete Drummond, who can play any of the good stuff. The only producer who's really into it is Bernie Andrews...

M: He's just been given the elbow from Peel's programme, I gather.

JP: Oh what a bloody drag, he was such a great guy, really involved in what he was doing. Who's going to replace him, do you know?

M: Well I think it's a guy called Peter Ritzemer, who produced a few Nightrides.

JP: Oh well, Nightride was a show I liked. Not the sort of thing our group could be on though, but it had a lot of good things to say, presented a good variety of sounds.

M: Mmmm, I wish they could've put that on every night...

JP: Yes. Well I used to agree with you but then I realised that if you put it on every night you'd he falling into exactly the same trap as Radio One does with, say the Jimmy Young Show. I mean think about lorry drivers going across the country every night, they'd get pissed off listening to the same sort of stuff every night with no alternative station to switch to. There really needs to be an alternative.

M: Well there is Radio Andorra.

JP: What's that?

M: Well there's a tiny postage stamp country in Europe with a bloody great transmitter, more powerful than Luxembourg and you can record shows in London which are sent out and broadcast from Andorra, to this country at £50 for quarter of an hour.

JP: Well that's great, somebody really ought to take advantage of that before the big companies get hold of it and make it into another Radio Luxembourg scene. I really don't understand why the British just accept everything that's laid on them without trying to resist.

M: Do you think that the record companies are starting to realise that due to the escalation of the album market and the increasing sales of progressive music, despite the media's reluctance to promote it, that progressive music may well be the pop music of the seventies?

JP: Well they've got to. There is nothing else, Jimmy Young and the Love Affair can't go on churning out the same rubbish forever. I hope that kids will move over to progressive stuff as they get a little bit older, rather than turn to the sort of thing you hear on Family Favourites every week. You can't really tell, there's so many things involved. I do think that many of the important people in the business are becoming much hippier than they used to be, so maybe they'll try and effect some changes.

M: The material on your first album covered a lot of styles, heavy electric sounds, blues, contemporary folk etc. Does this indicate that you are trying to widen the scope of your music?

JP: Well all the things on the album are things that just seemed to be natural for the group to do. There's no reason to stick to one style of music nowadays...

M: Except that it's often difficult to produce certain things onstage, whereas in a studio it's comparatively simple?

JP: Not really. We do the same arrangements onstage as we did on the album. As a group we don't want to be put into a category because we are bound to develop individually and therefore the group will always be changing. That was the trouble with the Yardbirds, everyone expected to see Keith playing harmonica like Sonny Boy Williamson, so he had to do it, even though he wanted to get into different scenes.

M: Was that one of the reasons why the Yardbirds split?

JP: Well yes, I suppose so, but there were so many things involved, it's never that simple. We quit when we were enormous in America and forgotten over here. It was a very strange situation to live with.

© Mark Williams, 1969

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Financial Times (London,England)

May 28, 2003 Wednesday

London Edition 1

Treasure from a shipwreck of rock: James Woodall charts the process that has gathered bootleg and official footage of Led Zeppelin into an astonishing DVD set:

BYLINE: By JAMES WOODALL

SECTION: ARTS; Pg. 17

LENGTH: 709 words

When ex-Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page lamented "it's a real shame that . . . there isn't enough live footage of us," he wasn't being completely candid. Page, who was speaking to me in 1998, knew full well just how much footage there was. Some of it was in the possession of himself and Robert Plant, some was left over from the only official full-length film made of the band, The Song Remains the Same (1976), and much of it, more problematically, was in the hands of bootleggers.

Now, however, with the release this week of more than five hours of footage on two DVDs, accompanying a three-CD set, How The West Was Won, of Zeppelin on stage in Los Angeles in June 1972, this footage is finally seeing the light of day. Page has been keen over the years for this material to be released. Step in music-video director Dick Carruthers, who has worked with Oasis, the Rolling Stones and The Who. Page asked Carruthers to assemble from official and bootleg material a definitive portrait of Led Zeppelin's 11 years together. One aim is plainly to prevent further proliferation of poor-quality bootleg. Another is to show the band in the flesh to the under-40s - there are plenty of Zep-heads who have never have seen them live since they broke up in 1980.

"Before anything, we had to call an amnesty with bootleggers," says Carruthers. An intermediary (whom Carruthers won't name) worked on behalf of Page and his two colleagues to track down and obtain whatever film might be out there. Led Zeppelin were the most bootlegged outfit in history - their reticence with the media made the temptation illicitly to film their concerts irresistible. Small cine cameras using 8mm film were easy to smuggle into venues, although, crucially, the Super 8 format doesn't record sound. The music was often on separate audio tapes. "The job," says Carruthers, "was to assess the quality of audio tape, some of it obsolete, so old machines were hired to process it and digitalise it. Then, we had to work out what was on the film, and where and when, and match it to the music."

The surviving members of the group - Page, Plant and bassist John Paul Jones - were closely involved not least of all to help identify what, on silent film, was being played. The result is compelling, with some sharp shocks. Is that a pert Germaine Greer sitting next to blond rock god Plant at a post-gig reception in Australia in 1972? In the same clip, Bonzo (drummer John Bonham) talks for the first and only time - and he comes across as remarkably softly spoken for a man of his fearsome reputation.

Zeppelin built their reputation on their live act and no-one in rock has invented on the road like them - which is why this package is, in Carruthers' words, like discovering shipwrecked treasure. We see and hear them at their living, and sometimes livid, best; this is history in the making. On the CDs, it's fascinating to listen to them airing great songs nearly a year before they could be heard on an album, such as "Over the Hills and Far Away", "Dancing Days", "The Ocean", all from 1973's Houses of the Holy. No band today, in a rock climate valuing promotion and merchandising above improvisation and experiment, would dare attempt that.

A visual high point comes from the penultimate stretch of film on DVD2, from gigs at Earls Court in 1975. Even with the doomy clouds of punk gathering, Zeppelin were at their zenith: airing the double-album Physical Graffiti and looking fabulous. A rare rendition of an old Dylan blues, "In My Time of Dying", one of the finest things they ever recorded, is astonishing.

The following years were disastrous for the band. Plant was seriously injured in a car crash in 1976, taking them off the road for a year. His son died of a pulmonary virus the following year, aged six. Page struggled with addiction and Bonzo drank - following a binge, he choked in his sleep in 1980. Zeppelin could be no more. In a 1975 interview clip on the DVD set, Plant confirms that the band would never attempt solo projects while they were Led Zeppelin, that they couldn't play without each other. He was right. <A name=ORIGHIT_6>Led Zeppelin straddled the 1970s like a colossus, then fell silent. With the arrival of this project, we're able to travel back in time, and be thrilled.

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...Singapore Straitimes Link to archives - Courtesty: Vinayak Razdan/At The Edge

Why Zep won't Perform in Singapore....and more archival articles....to access further searches on Led Zeppelin, Yardbirds, Clapton, more artists... click on Singapore Pages/ NewspaperSG

**check box Agree Terms/click

http://newspapers.nl.sg/Digitised/Article.aspx?articleid=straitstimes19711106.2.77&sessionid=071e594b59054175b0a5f774b390a0a9

Edited by PlanetPage
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  • 1 month later...

KRLA Beat: L.A.'s first rock-and-roll newspaper:

The KRLA Beat Archives include many reports on the Yardbirds leading to Jimmy Page joining, (a personal letter from Jeff Beck to KRLA is also published in one of the issues)

list of musicians covered is included in each issue...

December 23rd, 1964 Issue reports on Peter Grant with Herman's Hermits/Peter Grant being injured in freeway accident while traveling to KRLA.......

Link:

http://krlabeat.sakionline.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi

My search indicated no previous posts, apologies if already exists....

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KRLA Beat: L.A.'s first rock-and-roll newspaper:

The KRLA Beat Archives include many reports on the Yardbirds leading to Jimmy Page joining, (a personal letter from Jeff Beck to KRLA is also published in one of the issues)

list of musicians covered is included in each issue...

December 23rd, 1964 Issue reports on Peter Grant with Herman's Hermits/Peter Grant being injured in freeway accident while traveling to KRLA.......

Link:

http://krlabeat.saki...i-bin/index.cgi

My search indicated no previous posts, apologies if already exists....

Outstanding tour anecdote concerning Peter Grant on the road with Herman's Hermits and the link to the KRLA archives themselves is a fricking gold mine!

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