Led Zeppelin

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

Many indie types from the 1980s and 1990s were secretly metal fans. But it’s not something they ever really wanted to admit to in public. They’d talk a good game about the Stooges and the Velvet Underground but back home – as was the case with Leeds’s goth overlord Andrew Eldritch, of the Sisters of Mercy – their living rooms were full of AC/DC videotapes. In fact, I’d go further and say the most influential track in the history of alternative music might very well be ‘Kashmir’ by Led Zeppelin rather than one of the hipster-anointed underground classics. It sometimes feels as though every indie band with one foot in

The ploy of releasing an album without any advance warning comes into play when an artist feels they are being paid either too much or too little attention. The stealth arrival of Jack White’s new solo album falls firmly into the second category. Putting out music in this way ensures additional media coverage and a certain level of intrigue I didn’t love White’s old band, the White Stripes, back when they were a garage-rock/blues revival phenomenon in the early 2000s. Since their demise in 2011, the world seems to be coming around to this way of thinking. Their most successful albums, Elephant and White Blood Cells, hold little cultural currency