Originally published in Guardian (UK)
By Will Hodgkinson

For a man who has stomped across the world’s stadiums in the biggest rock’n'roll band of all time, not to mention battled against Gollum in the forests of Mordor and raised the hammer of the gods, Robert Plant is refreshingly humble. He’s even catching the tube later on. “Let’s set up a feast for the photograph,” he says as we sit down by the dining table. “We’ll put some cutlery out, light some candles, then get Jimmy Page over and do a black mass.”

Chatting to Plant about his favourite records, you get the impression that he would have been just as happy if Led Zeppelin had been a gigging pub band rather than a heavy rock behemoth with its own private jet, a willing supply of rock chicks and enough financial weight to make American record companies open up disused pressing plants to cope with pre-orders for its albums. “When Jimmy and I worked on the Unledded project with Egyptian musicians,” says Plant, “I said to him: ‘Can you believe that all we wanted to do was play Bye Bye Johnny by Chuck Berry, and we’re in the middle of this, recording in marketplaces in Marrakesh?’”

These days, Plant is going back to what he loves the most: singing songs that have their roots embedded in the blues. His new album, Dreamland, is a series of altered versions of his favourite songs including Tim Buckley’s Song for the Siren and a beautiful 60s ballad called Morning Dew. “A woman called Bonnie Dobson wrote it, Fred Neil recorded it, and Tim Rose heard Fred Neil’s version and made it famous,” he explains. “Bonnie Dobson worked in New York folk clubs as a hootenanny singer and wrote this song about a nuclear dawn that was very poignant for the times. It’s perfect for what I’m trying to do now. The idea was to get away from the trappings I had gotten used to - I knew I didn’t want to try and drum up interest in row 70 of the Birmingham NEC any more. So I turned up at folk festivals and started playing. And it’ll always be fun because I’m not going anywhere else now.”

It could be argued that the road down which Plant has travelled began at the house of Sonny Johnson, who, Plant claims, “was the original blues singer to sell his soul to the devil - he did it five years before Robert Johnson had even thought about it and 30 years before us guys from middle England decided to sell our souls to the junkman. He wasn’t as immediately exotic as Robert Johnson, who took the slinky bits from Son House and turned them into something quite sensual, but he did have a rabbit’s foot around his neck and a great dark style.”

Plant’s other blues heroes, who include Son House, Howlin’ Wolf and Skip James, were all outcasts like Sonny Johnson. “You get these videos now of Son House performing. Although they’re strictly for anoraks and middle-aged rock gods, you do learn how Son House ricocheted between honouring the Lord and honouring the bottle and the women. But being cast out from the church isn’t so bad when you can do what you do on the riverboats and the juke joints.”

Plant received his blues education early on, playing at the folk clubs in his native Stourbridge and being part of a Hush Puppy-wearing early-60s art-school scene that brought over the country blues greats, then working as janitors and truck drivers. He still loves that music. “Bukka White was one of those guys. I was obsessed by his song Strange Place Blues when I was 15. Saw him in 1965 and he hadn’t lost a thing. It wasn’t like he had this mystic African growl, either - he was singing with syncopated joy. Joy? He was cabaret, like me.”

After trawling through a few other favourites including Shake a Tail Feather by 50s raw gospel/ doo-wop outfit the Five Du-Tones, and the debut album by 60s west-coast psychedelics Kaleidoscope, Plant stops to reflect on the dusky genius of the Egyptian singer Om Kalsoun. I admit that I have never heard of her. “She is the most played artist on the planet,” he informs me. “When she died in the 70s she had a bigger funeral procession than President Nasser. Get off a plane between Gibraltar and the other side of India and you will hear her within three minutes. It’s classical highbrow pop. The blues has a lot of poignancy, but her music is all about lost love and it has the poetry of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khyyam. In Egypt they call her the Lady.”

From the transcendental romance of Om Kalsoun to the raw soul of the blues to the brutal simplicity of 60s punk bands like the Count Five, Plant’s musical tastes are bound together only by their authenticity. “I may be older than a conker tree, but I’m so lucky to have come from a time when everybody, be it the Rolling Stones or the Merseybeats, really meant it. We all started by saying: ‘I love music! Let’s give it a go.’ The journey that we went on from there has been so surprising.”