Robert Plant quit accountancy after two weeks to chase the blues
Robert Plant lasted only two weeks as a trainee chartered accountant. At 16 he left home to drift between Midlands blues bands, laying tarmac and stacking shelves to get by. Within a few years a guitarist hunting for a singer came to watch him perform, and Led Zeppelin was the result.
Plant was born on 20 August 1948 in West Bromwich, in the Black Country. His father was a civil engineer who had served in the Royal Air Force, and his mother was of Romani descent. Growing up in Halesowen, he would hide between the curtains and the French windows at Christmas pretending to be Elvis, liking the way his voice sounded in that small space. He left grammar school in Stourbridge in his mid-teens, hooked on Willie Dixon and Robert Johnson.
Money came from odd jobs: in 1967 he worked for the builder George Wimpey in Birmingham surfacing roads, and he spent a short spell at Woolworths. He cut three little-known singles for CBS and met drummer John Bonham in the Crawling King Snakes, then played alongside him in Band of Joy, which blended blues with psychedelia. In July 1968 Jimmy Page, looking for a vocalist after the Yardbirds split, was turned down by Terry Reid, who pointed him towards Plant. The two bonded over blues and folk at Page's house, Plant recommended Bonham, and the group first billed as the New Yardbirds became Led Zeppelin.
Plant wrote the band's lyrics from Led Zeppelin II onward. The years brought hardship as well as fame: a serious car crash on Rhodes in 1975 left him and his wife Maureen injured and shaped the album Presence, and in 1977 his five-year-old son Karac died of a stomach virus while the band toured America. Zeppelin broke up in 1980.
His solo work kept selling. Now and Zen in 1988 went triple platinum, the Honeydrippers took a cover of Sea of Love into the top ten, and Page and Plant won a Grammy in 1998. Raising Sand, made with bluegrass singer Alison Krauss, was named Album of the Year in 2009. A 2011 Rolling Stone readers' poll picked him as the greatest lead singer.
Source: Robert Plant
