Just as it appeared that Led Zeppelin would be embarking on a long-awaited reunion tour, Robert Plant decided to focus on country and bluegrass instead. As the singer approaches his 60th birthday, he tells Sylvie Simmonsabout pushing the boundaries
ROBERT PLANT is smiling. A big, happy grin, the same one he had earlier, through almost the entirety of his show with Alison Krauss, the 36-year-old American bluegrass singer and fiddle player. "Sorry about that," he says, "but it's just so much fun. It's just the revelations, I think, that's what the smiles are about - like, 'We can do it.' I mean, could you ever imagine, with my supposed background?"
The appearance of the beautiful, understated Plant-Krauss collaborative album Raising Sand coincided with a rare reunion of the band in which Plant made his name, Led Zeppelin. Their charity performance at London's 02 Arena last year, with Jason Bonham sitting in on drums for his late father John, attracted a reported 20 million applications for the 18,000 tickets, won accolades from music critics and led to rumours of a full tour - stymied, according to the Sunday Mirror, by Plant turning down a £100 million offer to reunite for a full Zeppelin tour in favour of this low-key jaunt with Krauss.
Tonight's show, in the lovely little Tennessee city of Chattanooga, is in an old, cream-coloured brick building, looking like a cross between a town hall and a theatre. There is just one ticket tout outside. Like the rest of the audience, he exudes southern courtesy. Plant says the south seemed the perfect place to perform his reading of the music of rural America before a paying public.
"I was just saying last night, halfway through a bottle of Grey Goose, 'I don't know if this is a kind of urban northeast adventure, or whether it really does belong in the Chattanoogas and Roanokes.' "
The morning after their show in Louisville, Kentucky, he "drove across the state line into Tennessee in the Clinch Mountains, where the Stanley Brothers were, and I came over the Cumberland Gap, which I thought was a Lonnie Donegal song. And just before Chattanooga I pulled over by the side of a lake and thought, 'Man, this is so, so beautiful.' "
Poking his head into a family restaurant, he saw "a 10-year-old, porky little kid with a hat on, playing fiddle like you wouldn't believe, with a 16-year-old, 6ft 4in kid with a banjo, and the two of them were just standing on this little raised dais, while people were eating catfish, and they were just wailing. Why did I only think that Howlin' Wolf wailed?"
BEFORE HIS collaboration with Krauss - which grew, after a long gestation, from having met at a tribute to the blues singer Lead Belly - Plant admits he had serious prejudices about country, the music Hank Williams called "the white man's blues". Plant's musical epiphany, in his early teens, had come from black American music, when he saw Son House, Skip James and Bukka White play on package tours of the UK in the mid-1960s.
"I was really only interested in the black variety," he says. "As a young British male, that does change your life."
The romantic lyrics and mature singing style of the country songs he heard on British radio "didn't make as much sense for me and my friends," he says, "who were learning how to be as masculine as 'Squeeze my lemon till the juice runs down my leg.' Bear in mind I was 13. So for a long time I closed my eyes to the possibility of America having a white voice."
Collaborating with Krauss, who started performing country at the same age that Plant discovered the blues, "was like stepping into another world". But, he says, he has learned a lot: "I've been scared and I've liked not hanging on to stuff where I know that I'm in my comfort zone."
On stage in Chattanooga's Memorial Auditorium, though, it's Krauss who looks a little awkward, while Plant seems to be having the time of his life. Her singing, though, is astonishing - the missing link between Emmylou Harris and Mavis Staples.
"You know what she said to me?" Plant asks. "'You've got to understand, I have never ever stood at a microphone without holding a violin.' So that's 20, 25 odd years of being on stage, and it's the first time she hasn't held a fiddle . But she's getting more and more comfortable."
The set also includes new versions of three Zeppelin songs, which must have been weird for Krauss, who declined Plant's invitation to see the Zeppelin reunion concert and gave her pair of tickets to her brother.
The songs, though, fit in perfectly. When the Levee Breaks is stripped down to a folk-blues song with a fiddle refrain and a quote from the traditional Girl from the North Country. And, as Zeppelin fans will tell you, the original version of The Battle of Evermore also featured a woman singer, the late British folk artist Sandy Denny.
That was the first time Plant had sung with a woman, "but it was totally different than with Alison, nothing like as disciplined, an accidental drifting of harmonies. Alison is just a miracle. There was no real, 'Let's do it like this'; the two of us step up to the microphone and she's amazing, she can just follow my voice. She said, on When the Levee Breaks, 'If you want to go up, I'll come with you, just give me one split second.' And I really went for it and she was right above me, soaring like an eagle. It was amazing."
HE SAYS HE'S still learning to sing harmony and practising constantly. "I'm listening to songs now all the time and creating harmonies, walking down the street like some sad, old Everly Brother. And it's not stopping here either, that's the good thing."
Meaning a second album with Krauss? The first was, after all, a resounding success, winning a Grammy and selling more than a million copies.
"We're right in the middle of the honeymoon right now and we're coming up with all sorts of great songs. When we go back on the road after Europe, back into the Carolinas and all those places, I think that we'll all be sitting in the back of the bus getting down and writing, maybe. It seems like the natural thing to do. The fluidity and the flexibility that's coming about now, it would be a shame not to do something original."
Dates on the second leg of the tour continue through August - the month Plant turns 60 years old. "It's a monumental number," he admits. "I remember seeing Big Joe Williams and Son House and all those guys at Birmingham Town Hall when I was about 14 or 15, and most of them were born after the turn of the 20th century, so really I am now of the age and the time that those men were when I looked at them like they were some sort of mysterious messengers from another time and planet. So I'm getting up there.
"I don't wish to start sounding like I'm gushing about this particular time of my life, but being with the right people is really crucial. I'm so aware of the fact that if I hadn't taken the chances that I've taken along the line, I probably wouldn't be getting the best out of my voice anymore, I might have messed it up in that awful, predictable place. So I've already got a birthday present."
That awful place is presumably an allusion to Zeppelin or its particular brand of loud, blues rock. When we last talked - in Nashville last October, where Plant and Krauss recorded Raising Sand - he was about to leave for London for the Zeppelin show. The press reported that his bandmates were furious he preferred to promote his record with Krauss than rehearse with them. But Plant brushes it off as media spin.
I remind him of one of the questions Krauss asked him during that last interview: whether it felt good to be on stage with his old band. Well, did it?
"You'd need a month for me to tell you. I don't really know what happened. I think it was a very humbling experience. Because I'm comfortable singing Fortune Teller and Your Long Journey" - two Raising Sand songs - "I can relate to them, they're not my songs but I can really bring them to some new place. But when I'm singing my own songs with that persona and that responsibility, then that's pretty heavyweight, and there were so many forces at work."
What kind of forces?
"It was so crucial that we didn't end up sending ourselves up by trying to be whatever it was that people thought we were. Because I don't really know what anybody thought we were."
Plant tells me he was "in tears" at the end of the concert. "Because it really did work, whatever 'it' was, for what it was. A great feat of engineering - social engineering mostly. The trouble is now, with rock'n'roll and stuff, it gets so big that it loses what once upon a time was a magnificent thing, where it was special and quite elusive and occasionally a little sinister and it had its own world nobody could get in."
He feels too many big artists are fixated on the "next biggest thing" and are too willing to "sell their souls". "I'm afraid all that stuff really leaves me cold," he says.
So he did turn down a Zeppelin tour?
"There's really no point talking about it," he says. "I don't hold the keys to any decision by anybody to do anything. And everything has to be for the right reason. The reason that I have been flavour of the month or out in the cold myself as a performer is because I choose to excite myself and do these things and give it a good go, take it some place. And that's what Led Zeppelin did before. We were always pushing it and manipulating musical history and you know how serious I was about Zeppelin - it had to be absolutely right.
"So, that's the way forward. I do things because I want to be excited and I want to be risky. More important to me than anything else really," he smiles, "is to find out whether or not I've got the balls."
- Guardian service