When you listen to Led Zeppelin, you’re listening to complete professionals. While they might sound fantastic as a collective, as individuals, they are all exceptional musicians. Jimmy Page is an excellent guitarist, John Paul Jones is one of the best bass players in the world, John Bonham is one of the greatest drummers to ever pick up sticks, and Robert Plant has the best voice in rock and roll.
Plant is a true vocal acrobat. Led Zeppelin was never afraid to play around with style and genre, and Plant was always able to adapt. When you listen to some of their biggest songs, like ‘Stairway To Heaven’, it starts slow and subdued; his vocals are held back and sad. However, as the track progresses, he starts screaming in a way that he manages to keep in tune. It’s a great example of his power and versatility.
There is a reason why Plant has continued to have the most successful solo career out of all the Led Zeppelin members. His versatility means that even with age, he continues to have a fantastic voice that fans can’t get enough of. It may not be as aggressive as in Led Zeppelin, but it still sounds great.
When you consider the skill of Robert Plant, it seems impossible that there are any performances he’s not a fan of, but there are a few Led Zeppelin vocals he can’t stand. For instance, in some of the earlier Led Zeppelin tunes, Plant says he was insecure and listens back to them through gritted teeth.
For instance, he says he was still finding his style when you recorded the song ‘You Better Run’. “I realised that tough, manly approach to singing I’d begin on ‘You Better Run’ wasn’t really what it was all about at all,” he said. He was also critical of his performance on ‘Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You’, saying, “I find my vocals on there horrific now. I really should have shut the fuck up!”
Plant also criticises his performance on ‘Achilles Last Stand’, which he says is massively overshadowed by the three musicians he was playing alongside. “I was so fortunate to be around so many amazingly gifted players,” he said, “If you think about Led Zeppelin as being a trio, really, with a kind of wedding singer stuck at the front, that’s how [I saw it].”
There are other vocal performances that Robert Plant hates, too, but rather than because he doesn’t like how they sound, it’s because they were difficult to record. This was a track he recorded as a solo artist alongside Alison Krauss. They performed a cover of the Dillard & Clark song ‘Polly Come Home’, which he remembers as one of his biggest challenges in vocal performance.
“It’s just the most difficult piece of music to sing at the tempo that we sang it at,” he said, “It’s one of the toughest calls I’ve had.”