Plant higher

Even Robert Plant’s staunchest fans could not have predicted the commercial and critical success of Raising Sand, the astonishingly adventurous album he recorded last year with bluegrass queen Alison Krauss. Jonathan Wingate meets a man on a mission to embrace the new and discover unchartered musical territory: “I’ve got music running through my veins, so if you really are in love with what you do, then thank God...otherwise you could end up on a dreadful treadmill.”

robert Plant bounds into the opulent North London offices of his management company with a decidedly out-of-date looking mobile clasped to his ear, apologises for being 15 minutes late for our interview and ever so politely asks one of the staff if he could have a cup of tea with some evaporated milk.

Plant is casually attired in corduroy jeans, a stripey sweatshirt and a battered looking pair of shoes. He looks far from battered himself, although his face might best be described as lived-in; pretty much what you’d expect from a rock’n’roll icon who turns 60 in August, approximately the look you’d presume in a man whose life – if even a scintilla of the more salacious biographies can be believed – resembled a bacchanalian orgy of excess in his Led Zeppelin days. However, his age is belied by a youthful enthusiasm that proves infectious over the course of the next couple of hours.

Picking up the latest issue of Kerrang! from the coffee table, he studies the anonymous, airbrushed metalheads staring out moodily from the cover and chuckles, “They don’t really talk about me much these days. Well, only to take the piss, I’m afraid.”

He turns his attention to an altogether more attractive face on the front of another magazine. “Look at Sheryl …

by Jonathan Wingate
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