bluesman wrote:
mart wrote:
Thanks mart, I haven't heard any of Plants work with this band
Review of Cardiff gig by Independent's Simon Price:
The Aslan of hard rock roars once more.
Robert Plant is blessed with a voice which, whether by decades of direct association or because of some intrinsic quality (it's too late now to tell) seems to resonate with secret truths and esoteric mysteries. From anyone else, "When I get older, settling down/Will you come down to the sea?" (the "When I'm Sixty-Four"-like number from his 29 Palms album) would be unforgivably trite. But Plant could sing "Dem Bones" and we'd still be asking, "Ah, but what does it really mean?"
The leonine Led Zeppelin leader, his dad-like denims failing to de-sexify him completely even in his seventh decade, has – while the world wonders whether the 2007 reunion of his most famous band will ever be repeated – decided instead to revive an even earlier act. This was the Band of Joy, with whom he gigged around the Midlands before Jimmy Page invited him to join up with the rump of the Yardbirds.
It features no original members, but a number of seasoned old pros such as Patty Griffin, Buddy Miller and Darrell Scott, and the project is a return to roots in every sense. The sextet specialises in sunny, Seventies-style harmonic country-rock with strong infusions of blues, folk and gospel, using such archaic instruments as a washboard, upright bass, pedal steel and what looks, from a certain angle, like an elephant's leg of kebab meat hanging behind the drum kit.
Their album, despite the handicap of its truly appalling desktop publishing graphics, is flying out of the shops. "You know you've made it," he wryly states, "when your album is a Tesco Special ...." It's dominated mainly by covers dredged from Plant's exhaustive knowledge of American traditional music, as is the live show, with added non-album tracks like "Twelve Gates to the City" by Blind Boy Fuller. Why were so many bluesmen blind? Is it like piano tuners? Does the loss of sight make you more receptive to 12-bar song structures?
It's all wholesome, tasty fare, if not quite as exciting as Page stuttering into "Communication Breakdown", Bonzo bashing into "Kashmir" or JPJ doing whatever JPJ does. We do, however, get countrified reworkings of a scattering of Zeppelin tracks including "Tangerine", "Houses of the Holy" and an everyone-on-their-feet encore of "Rock and Roll".
And, despite the deceptively casual stance of a tall man crouching, Plant knows how to work a crowd, from his sword-fencer's facility with a mic stand to his cleverly localised banter. The man who recorded some of his best-known work in the Welsh hillsides acknowledges applause with a "diolch yn fawr", reminisces about the original BOJ opening for Jeff Beck in Llanelli in 1965, jokes about one song originating from "the Delta of Machynlleth" and explains "Misty Mountain Hop" as "a flippance in Snowdonia ... it's a bit like a bustle in a hedgerow".
Can he still hack it at 62? He seems as relieved as anyone to find that he can. As he says: "I haven't needed the defibrillators yet ...."
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 21090.html
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