And It Makes Me Wonder - How Does It Affect You Blokes?

An Spailpín Fánach has been rather shaken all week by those pictures in the papers of Robert Plant receiving his CBE (Commander of the British Empire) from His Royal Highness Prince Charles of England last week. Robert Plant is the lead singer of what was once the heaviest, meanest, most badly behaved band in the world, and now he’s hob-knobbing with royalty. He has received the ultimate endorsement from the establishment.

The bizarre thing is that Plant now is exactly who he was thirty-five years ago when Led Zeppelin were at their height, although he might now, after Leonard Cohen, ache in the places where he used to play. It’s the establishment that has sold out.

Daniel Finkelstein was attempting to explain the bizarre reaction to the death of Michael Jackson in the London Times last week, and he concluded that this is who we are now. That there is no such thing as a generation gap repeating every generation – that there was only ever one generation gap, between the generation that had fought in World War II and the generation that grew up in the ‘sixties, and the ‘sixties generation has won completely.

The values of the ‘sixties generation – peace, love and understanding, but maybe a little woolly on the details - are now the dominant values in society. Hence the bizarre attempt to portray Jackson, a man born black but who died white – insofar as he was recognisably human by the end at all, God love him – as a civil rights hero.

And the more you think about it, the more correct you realise Finkelstein is. AC/DC challenged Led Zeppelin’s reputation as the baddest rock band on the planet for a while in the ‘seventies, not least when the late Bon Scott was their lead singer, but was it Hell’s Angels and ne’er-do-wells that were in Punchestown last week rocking to Whole Lotta Rosie, or was it bankers, accountants, solicitors and other shining lights of the petit bourgeois?

As a hint, Hell’s Angels would have brought their own bikes, and not be standing around, looking at their watches, wondering why the 12.40 bus was ten minutes late and remarking that it wasn’t good enough and a stern letter would be written to the Irish Times in the morning. Rock and roll is now the music parents play to scare their children.

An Spailpín Fánach has his doubts about the viability of the culture that has Led Zeppelin as the ne plus ultra of music, but the Brown government over the water is relentless in its attempt to appeal to the lowest common denominator – due in part, one fears, to its inability to appeal to anyone else. When Elizabeth II was crowned the music featured Vaughan Williams and Sir William Walton, but Prince Charles’ first wife was waked to the strains of Elton John. Is Robert Plant - or Sir Robert, who knows - going to give Ramble On a run-through when they finally give Charles the key to the car?

I quite enjoy Led Zeppelin myself, of course, but it’s no harm to keep them in perspective. Which Rolf Harris does so devastatingly this clip. Take it away, sport:








Technorati Tags: culture, music, Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant, Rolf Harris

Led Zeppelin

There’s a tremendously po-faced article published yesterday on Slate.com about the imminent Led Zeppelin reunion and whether or not the band will play Stairway to Heaven at the show on Monday. It seems that the writer, one Andrew Goodwin, is a professor of media studies at San Francisco University, and “teaches a class on Led Zeppelin.”

A professor? Teaches a class on Led Zeppelin? That would explain some of it, as it’s only academics that can write sentences like: “[Stairway to Heaven] is unique among their epic tracks in that it privileges melodic/lyrical development at the expense of rhythmic exploration and timbral/psychoacoustic experimentation.” Timbral/psychoacoustic experimentation, eh? There won’t be much of that at Bayreuth this year, I’m thinking.

Having experimented sufficiently, Professor Goodwin then gets stuck into the lyrics. “If, for instance, the lady at the beginning of the song is a fool (she believes, after all, that she can buy a stairway to heaven), then why at the end of this long and winding lyrical road is she shining white light and showing us how everything still turns to gold? Some critics have turned themselves inside out trying to prove that this must be a different lady.”

Not the sharpest stick in the box, Professor Goodwin. A different lady, by dad. Hasn’t he noticed, in the course of his professorship, that over the course of nine studio albums, Robert Plant hasn’t one decent lyric to his name? Robert Plant couldn’t write a shopping list, for God’s sake. A substantial amount of the Led Zeppelin oeuvre is simply shameless rip-offs of old bluesmen, and the other half has the merit of the phone book, lyric wise. In his interview with Plant and Allison Krauss in the Telegraph some weeks ago, Neil McCormick calculated that Robert Plant has sung the word “baby” some 271 times in the Led Zeppelin canon. So it’s not like we’re dealing with Sondheim here.

Professor Goodwin makes much of the fact that the lyric to Stairway to Heaven was printed on the gatefold sleeve of the Four Symbols album as proof that Zeppelin thought that Robert Plant had reached a new plane as a songwriter. Well, perhaps so, but considering the amount of yokes those bucks were ingesting during their pomp it’s equally likely that they wanted the lyric printed because the man in the moon asked them to print it, when they went visiting there on Tuesday, after a gig in the Royal Albert Hall. The lyric to Stairway to Heaven is cat. C-A-T, cat. Awful. Any eejit can see that.

None of this means that An Spailpín doesn’t enjoy “Zep,” of course. I do. But to try and spin some sort of university course out of them is ridiculous in the extreme. It’s sledgehammer cracking walnuts time. Led Zeppelin’s formula was quite simple, and you need not spend much time in the groves of academe to figure it out – let Robert Plant wail what he liked, have the boys give it socks behind him, and then have James Patrick Page tart up the lot back in the studio.

Having a musician who can also produce is never to be underestimated in any band. And this is Jimmy Page’s real gift, to mix in all that stuff that’s going on so that people can’t actually make out what Plant is signing but just let themselves go, like a really good ride at an extraordinarily loud and rockin’ funfair. People over-estimate lyrics; anyone that rates lyrics first is the sort of gnu that would sooner listen to the Divine Comedy than Zeppelin, and you won’t find An Spailpín signing up for that horror anytime soon. It would be nice if the lyrics were better – Phil Lynott could be quite gifted as a lyricist, God love him, and Zeppelin’s Monsters of Rock contemporaries, Deep Purple, possibly worse with quill in hand – but the little lyrical gap in the Zeppelin armoury is more than papered over by the tremendous noise that they generated, with Plant’s wailing contributing as much as anyone.

And it would be nice if, at some stage in the show on Monday, Led Zeppelin remembered the only guest singer that every appeared on any of their studio albums. The English folk revival of the 1960s and early 70s had a huge impact on Led Zeppelin, and they asked Sandy Denny to guest vocal on the Battle of Evermore on the Four Symbols album. Sandy Denny died tragically young, but your correspondent always smiles when he remembers the six words in Q magazine fifteen years ago that summed up Ms Denny’s performance on the track exactly. “Fought the Battle of Evermore. Won.” God rest you Sandy, where-ever you are.






Technorati Tags: culture, music, led zeppelin, sandy denny