On this night, Robert Plant was a constant name-dropper – which is probably the closest I will come to criticising a superlative musical experience, co-ordinated and masterminded by the former Led Zeppelin frontman turned far-travelled, wise and eclectic musical magpie.
When I say name-dropping, I don’t mean his old pals Page, Jones or Bonham (the late great). I mean Ralph Stanley, Donovan, Richard Thompson, and outfits like The Incredible String Band and Moby Grape (not to mention Lulu in panto – a comic interlude quickly nipped in the bud). Plant was keen to unpack some memories and pay credit to his inspirations as he led us on a journey full of pure, uncut gems, traditional treats and some more recent numbers, with his freshest outfit, Saving Grace, including superb co-singer Suzi Dian as well as multi-instrumentalists Matt Worley and Tony Kelsey, plus drummer Oli Jefferson. Dian contributed, too, on bass, piano accordion and percussion.
Since his Zep days, Plant has forged a number of albums/outfits to take adventurous delves into blues/folk/roots/world music, be it Band Of Joy, Strange Sensation, the Sensational Space Shifters and others. And then there is his multi-award-winning pairing with country/bluegrass singer/fiddler Alison Krauss. The bottom line of all these collaborations involves a certain knack for recruiting the best bandmates to produce and maintain genuine all-round excellence.
The poised, almost primitive one-two opening of Gospel Plow and The Cuckoo quickly had the Aberdeen audience rapt and it was more or less uphill from then on. Let The Four Winds Blow, from that Strange Sensation album, Mighty ReArranger, and a blistering version of Thompson’s House Of Cards were among the highlights. When the guitars were cranked up to full electric and Jefferson brought his kit to extravagant, extraordinary life, the results were simply spectacular.
Plant and Dian stood apart front of stage and often roamed and high-stepped, almost dosey-doe’d and square danced, around and away from each other. Plant’s footwork, seemingly in slow motion at times, added a touch of studied theatricality to the performance. His leonine head, with a profile not lacking the majesty of the great buffalo pictured on the stage backdrop, topped a still lean frame. Always willing to give other band members their chance to shine, Plant was undoubtedly the star of this show, but Dian further enhanced her superior harmony-singing performance by taking the lead vocal on Too Far From You and others, with Worley showing his own singing class on Out In The Woods.
Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down and Low’s Monkey (another late great, Mimi Parker) resurfaced from Plant’s Band Of Joy and revealed again how this new collective can effectively rework almost anything to make it, somehow, specially their own. Zep fans may have expected more of the Led but Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down offered merely a hint of In My Time Of Dying, before Black Dog raised its head briefly during an extended version of Donovan’s Season Of The Witch – with Dian entertainingly adding her own brief take on Upside Down (as in “… boy you turn me,” by Diana Ross). Is Plant simply a “better” singer now, at age 74, than he was back in the day? If not “better”, more nuanced, subtle and fine-tuned? Perhaps you had to be at the Tivoli to answer that question – I was there, and I’m only asking it. He will certainly, by now, know his limitations, and his equipment, so much more, even if he spent much of the gig kicking the mic cable out from under his feet.
Plant gloriously prowls and stomps the stage among the spirits of that special realm where blues, country, rock ’n’ roll and the rest intertwine. It was writer Nick Tosches (yet another late, great) who perhaps said it best in Where Dead Voices Gather, his book about “trick-voice”, blackface performer Emmett Miller. Tosches quoted John, 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word,” as he surveyed an otherworldly, primordial swamp of influences, iterations and interpretations in search of the pre-recorded, raw essence of that “deep magic and slow, hard, grave-digging rhythm”. Blues aficionado and icon Plant similarly talks of music that goes “way back”. He has surely been baptised in that primordial swamp, ducked under in the traditional manner, and has come up smelling authentically of Appalachian moonshine and Hillbilly hooch (“I love you, but Jesus loves you the best/ And I bid you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight …”).
This tour of relatively intimate venues may or may not lead to a Saving Grace album (you tell me?), but, in music, familiarity can breed convivial camaraderie. If playing live together helps enhance a future recording, this will have been a very special tour and it will be a very special LP.
After the main event, Plant & Co found an even more intimate venue with an impromptu performance at the open mic night in the Granite City’s very own watering hole, Under The Hammer. The support act at the Tivoli and on other dates on the Saving Grace tour was Scottish singer-songwriter Rory Butler.