News Robert Plant names the band that gave America its “own punk”
Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant has seen many musical zeitgeists come and go. Most of this spectatorship has occurred from the very top of the industry, meaning that he has more insider knowledge of the significance of eras than most.
Over his career, Plant has seen the likes of blues, rock, and psychedelia rise from the underground. With Led Zeppelin, he is also credited with pushing rock music as a whole in a more expansive direction. The quartet took the baton from The Beatles as the most exciting band of the late 1960s and moved into the 1970s with verve, providing a host of widely-influential highlights.
However, by the second half of the 1970s, the cultural significance of established groups such as Led Zeppelin started to severely wain, given the emergence of punk, a movement with the established order in its crosshairs, decrying their outdated and contemptible behaviour outside of music. As a testament to Zeppelin, though, they managed to survive the emergence of punk relatively unscathed.
They were to release a new album after what is now their final studio effort, 1979’s In Through the Out Door, and tour America to signal their second coming after a period of internal and commercial floundering. However, after the tragic death of John Bonham in 1980, the surviving members knew they could not continue without their late friend, and thus, it was the end.
Since that gloomy period, Plant has continued to find success as a musician, both in the solo context and with an array of projects, including Page and Plant – with Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page – and the resurrected Band of Joy. In addition to these exploits, the frontman has always kept his finger on the pulse and is a fan of the most exciting sounds in music, which features being a fan of early Faith No More. This position as a musical great with brilliant taste has made him one of the best suited to comment on music history.
One widely significant movement that Plant saw unfold first-hand was the arrival of grunge in 1991. Spearheaded by Nirvana and featuring the trio’s Seattle peers, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, it changed the trajectory of music and popular culture forever. However, its time in the limelight was brief, as the music industry cashed in by signing droves of pretenders, with its actual cessation sounded by the suicide of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in 1994.
Following the death of Cobain, in an interview in the 1990s, Plant reflected on grunge and controversially said that Nirvana and the genre gave America its “own punk”. This will undoubtedly irk the American proponents of the scene, as they fervently claim the genre was born there in the 1970s and not in Blighty.
Plant said: “Punk came up… you know what it was in England? That was the last time anything really important happened in England or came from England to affect anybody. You know what happened is that punk said, ‘We’re fed up of Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, the sort of skeleton of the Beatles, let’s have some music from the street,’ and what’s happened in America in 1991-90 is that you finally got your own punk.”
