There’s a distant outpost on the sonic map which many older musicians readily accept being consigned to.
It’s one policed by Jools Holland and ruled by Elton John. Things are decidedly conventional and relatively quiet there- though the imminent arrival of Mick Hucknall might shake things up.
Once your fighting days are done, Elton will sort you out with a tasteful ‘heritage’ producer, while Jools will come and play his fright wig Boogie Woogie all over the end result.
However, it seems Robert Plant has declined his invitation with a great big clanging NO.
His Sensational Spaceshifters project sees him surrounded by edgy younger players full of spark and attitude.
He has plugged himself directly into the contemporary network and, taking bona-fide Led Zeppelin classics and still-molten original blues templates as his source material, psychedelicized them for an audience who often don’t know what might hit them.
We were blissfully dazed, but never confused, by a raging dub mix of cultural elements – rising from sinister whispers to skilfully deployed bouts of willy-waving retro riffage.
Plant has taken on the mantle of a latter day sonic archivist – in the manner a more Eastern – aware Alan Lomax.
He often seems happy to simply prowl the stage with some oversized tamourine type thing – presiding benevolently over this breathtaking confluence.
It would be nice to think it had sparked to life from a crack in the ground the day before.
Rather, Plant has been stirring this eclectic strange brew (one which incidentally makes mockery of the laziness of the likes of Eric Clapton in knowing the same but sleeping on the job) since 2002, when his Dreamland LP – arriving after a prolonged hiatus of nine solid years – showed a grittier and more authentic intention to explore his encyclopaedic knowledge of the blues and folk he and Jimmy Page so engagingly re-energised.
He has latterly defined it (with typically disarming humour) as a blend of the sounds of, ‘the Mississippi, the Appalacian mountains, the Gambia, Bristol and the foothills of Wolverhampton’.
The first two of those places are self-evident. Bristol, however, refers to his love for the modern music of the city, exemplified by Massive Attack and Portishead.
Massive Attack key collaborator, John Baggot is here tonight.
He manipulates crunchy sound loops and doom-infused glitchy textures so the tall man from the foothills of Wolverhampton (now dressed head to toe in black, instead of a Zeppelin era-defining big girl’s blouse) can spin and weave the instantly recognisable elements of Black Dog and Whole Lotta Love, Friends and What Is And What Should Never Be around Gambian Master Musician, Judeh Camara’s eerily evocative Ritti playing.
It’s a one string fiddle, for the record. Camara takes these much loved themes and dances them into a whole other space.
He’s cajoled and encouraged by guitarist Justin Adams – a kind of renowned global musical polymath known chiefly for his work with Sinead O’Connor and Jah Wobble – who seems as happy teasing Camara into his own spin as he is intently channelling Bo Diddley or even Jimmy Page – the latter for the heavier blasts emerging from an often dazzlingly-modulating hurricaine.
An impressive addition to the whole thing is Liam Tyson, formerly of 90’s Britpop also-rans, Cast.
You can only sumise he has put some finger-blistering hours in in some cottage in deepest Wales to get here.
His stunningly coruscating evocations of Page at his most effectively electric – together with lyrically sensitive interludes during the opening radical rearrangement of Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You – makes you wonder if you aren’t witnessing history repeating and a Page in the making around the time of the Yardbirds – just flexing fully and ready to really fly.
Plant is blessed by contributors like this. Not that they haven’t been chosen after judicious consideration with long term collaborator, Adams.
His between song conversations introduce his cohorts kindly and attempt to contextualise his choices in songs like Bukka White’s peerlesly chilling Fixin’ To Die.
He engages us with tales of visiting Manchester’s famed early sixties soul club, the Twisted Wheel – this not long before a roadie whizzzes across the stage to his monitor speakers to re-light his joss sticks – an amusing reminder of the complexity of his cultural roots.
We are further prompted to recall legends of old in considering the implications of Plant’s brooding cover of Uncle Tupelo’s Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down.
These days, from Plant’s more cheerful demeanour (though he does chide us for poor quaility ‘ah ahs‘ during a fully rewired Black Dog) you’d have to say it has more to do with a mischievously playful and darkly humorous attitude to defining rock god tales of shadowy magic on remote country estates where the great beast himself might have been summoned from the mists.
He encores, not with the perhaps inevitable bustle in some ancient hedgerow, but with the much-derided and, apparently of its time, Big Log.
Plant self-deprecates himself out of it, talking of his video-era mullet and ballet shoes- tonight replaced by the muddy boots of a man chipping away in earnest at a rich new seam of poly-generic sound.
The suprise is that Big Log, shorn of the trappings of its unfortunate era and revived with the gentle shuffle of Al Green’s own trademark Hi Rhythm, is a beautiful, intricate thing – a rendered super sensitively by these effortlessly agile musicians.
The words to the earlier Tin Pan Valley underline his long-term investment in the role of an erudite and open-minded elder statesman; a man who needs a life beyond the ‘chat shows’ and ‘sofas’ some of his peers have settled for.
It would be good enough for me if he just keeps banana-fingered Jools Holland from tramping through this gloriously and definitively sensational maelstrom in his tired old size-nine Boogie Woogie Dr. Martens. To say nothing of Police Sgt.Elton John giving it the once over.
Image courtesy of BT Lifestyle via YouTube, with thanks
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