Robert Plant and Alison Krauss – Live In London

You want to know why Zeppelin isn’t touring this year? Because Robert Plant has a hit album! He’s always been one to experiment, but winning platinum for an album of country music made with Alison Krauss and T-Bone Burnett is pretty leftfield. Defining this work as ‘country’ is, of course, relative. It’s probably more accurate to call it American music; not rock and roll American music, but what was there before, a much older expression of the country’s inner soul.

The band started low-key, sounding a lot like the album, then three songs in came an intro full of chords strange though familiar; only when Robert parted his smiling lips did we know which Zeppelin song had been hot-rodded. You haven’t heard “Black Dog” until you’ve heard it done psycho-country. One of my few problems with Zep is that the lyrics often sound like irrelevant add-ons, but in this haunted musical setting of banjo, fiddle and stalking bass Robert’s young man lament had found its home.



“Black Dog” in Cardiff.


Now the band was awake. There were three guitarists and they played in that peculiar southern-American style of looking half asleep on their feet while regularly dropping startling interpolations and lead runs into the rhythms. The drummer had an ancient looking wooden kit with a snare sound like no other. If drummers can play a drone he did it, beating repetitive patterns on the kit while the stand-up bassist happily watched the tom foolery.

It got louder and louder and the guitars started to drone in a manner and intensity unlike anything on the album. I kept thinking that if the Velvet Underground had been formed in Texas or Tennessee, this is what it would have sounded like. It was that weird. T-Bone Burnett directed proceedings from the side of the stage, his high-necked grey waistcoat and black frock coat making him look like a preacher – a preacher of sin. During the solos Robert walked into the centre of the band, listening with contentment to the intricate volume-dealing around him, a man who feels happiest with the wind of a speaker cone against his back.

Alison Krauss had her share of the spotlight, playing both songs from their album and her own work. Notable was a haunting version of “Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us” and a spectacular “Down To The River” from Oh Brother Where Art Thou. Then T-Bone got up to play “Bon Temps Roulez” as though heavy metal had been invented in New Orleans.



“Down To The River” in Amsterdam


Robert has said in interviews that he had always thought that white American music was a poorer version of black music. Then T-Bone showed up with an armful of records. “How wrong I was.” It seems to have inspired him, a deep music that’s new but recognisable from the English folk music from which it grew, a connection made clear by dropping Sandy Denny’s “Maddy Grove” into the middle of “In The Mood” and in how some other Zeppelin songs were rearranged. But in the end he’s a Wolverhampton lad so even c&w needs some volume and edge. Think of it as two galaxies colliding. One is bluegrass and American earth music, the other is a city-size sound of factory-made riffs and earthquake drums. In the centre are “Black Country Woman” (banjo and fiddle), “When The Levee Breaks” (drone plantation moan and a verse from “Girl From The North Country”) and (a given when you have Alison Krauss to your right) a blinding country-metal version of “The Battle Of Evermore”, on which Sandy Denny originally sang.

For encores they raided the oldies cupboard, first with a rollicking “One Woman Man” with Robert sounding like a male Wanda Jackson, then sending us into the night with Alison and Robert in perfect harmony on a near-accapella “Your Long Journey”.




“Gone Gone Gone” in Bergen