Robert Plant and John Lydon were fixed in the public mind at the age of 20. Plant, a golden-haired lad who had grown up in Worcestershire, became the leonine singer of Led Zeppelin in 1968, a self-proclaimed ‘golden god’. Lydon, a scrawny kid from Holloway, who had been hospitalised for a year with meningitis as a child, became Johnny Rotten, and in 1976 helped deliver ‘the filth and the fury’ – as the Daily Mirror put it – on the nation’s TV screens as a quarter of the Sex Pistols.
Both, it would be fair to say, have ambivalent relationships with their pasts. After Zeppelin’s demise in 1980, Plant spent a couple of decades being active, but without much direction. This century, though, he has concentrated almost entirely on folk and Americana and the kind of West Coast music he loved before he met Jimmy Page. He’s more or less gone back to being a hippy.
After leaving the Pistols at the start of 1978, Lydon formed PiL and with that band’s original line-up he pretty much invented post-punk even as everyone else was still catching up with punk. These days, he and the other three-quarters of the Pistols aren’t really on speaking terms: he tried to stop them allowing Danny Boyle to go ahead with Pistol, Boyle’s 2022 TV series about the band, and then had to suffer the indignity of them recruiting another singer to go out on tour singing the songs he wrote those terrifying lyrics for.
Though Lydon never bothered wholly shedding the Rotten persona – it was clearly far too useful to him – and certainly never strayed too far from extremely loud and often aggressive music, both he and Plant are the members of their bands who have been the most creative, the most interesting, and the most worth returning to, even though neither is exactly focused on the new.
I left Plant’s gig content. But I left PiL’s show excited
Plant’s set at the Royal Festival Hall – with a band of expert and unstarry acoustic instrumentalists – was entirely made up of covers, including one of his own old songs, and four Zeppelin numbers (‘Ramble On’, ‘Four Sticks’, ‘Friends’ and ‘The Rain Song’). PiL’s set at the O2 Forum Kentish Town, on the other hand, featured no songs more recent than 2015 – the 2015 ones were the weakest – and two of his non-PiL collaborations from decades ago.
You might think that PiL and Plant would have little in common. But for a spell in the 1980s Lydon’s lot used to open shows with an instrumental cover of Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir’; you can hear the same crushing slabs of sound, interest in eastern tunings, and fascination with drone in both groups. One suspects that it would be a far more likely and interesting proposition today for Jimmy Page – if he ever picked up a guitar again in public – to work with Lydon than reunite with Plant.
Plant’s show was exemplary in many ways: the band and co-lead singer Suzi Dian were fantastic, the choice of songs – Moby Grape, Neil Young, Low and Gillian Welch among the authors – spot-on. But it was also oddly sterile. And for all the delight there always is when Plant revisits the Zep catalogue, there’s no getting away from the fact that he could be an awful lyricist.
‘Ramble On’ is a classic rock song, but not because Plant sings, ‘Twas in the darkest depths of Mordor I met a girl so fair/ But Gollum and the evil one crept up and slipped away with her’ – even though he is still able to deliver it as if he really did find himself in romantic turmoil on the lower slopes of Mount Doom. But PiL’s ‘Poptones’ – as awful and beautiful today as it was on its release in 1979 – is astounding for its music and lyrics. At the Forum, there was, as ever, a sense of seasickness in the contrast between the woozy arpeggios on drugged-up guitar and the thunderous dub bassline.
Hovering maliciously above it all was Lydon’s lyric based on a news story about an abducted girl, and remembering afterwards the one song on repeat on the car stereo. ‘Drive to the forest in a Japanese car,’ Lydon sang. ‘The smell of rubber on country tar/ Hindsight does me no good/ Standing naked in the back of the woods/ The cassette played – Poptones.’
Plant was great. He always is. Beneath the hippy lies a consummate pro who knows exactly how to deliver a show – and has done for decades. I left Plant’s gig content. But I left PiL’s show excited. Sure, it was annoying that Lydon twice upset the flow of the night by taking fag breaks – literal fag breaks. Annoying, too, that the encore was so chaotic, his band not knowing whether they were coming or going.
I’d much rather go to the pub with Plant. But Lydon remains a very necessary irritant.
Comments