Robert Plant, the Led Zeppelin vocalist, has assertively dismissed all talk of a group reunion, whilst taking a swipe at other ageing rockers who go back on the road only for financial reasons.
Plant, who played a one-off concert in 2007 with guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist John Paul Jones in London, has long made his feelings clear about a tour reunion, despite any hints of that by Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones.
He didn’t hold back in a recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine promoting the release of earlier recordings by the band, which officially split up in 1980.
‘You’re going back to the same old shit,’ he told the magazine in a London interview.
‘A tour would have been an absolute menagerie of vested interests and the very essence of everything that’s shitty about big-time stadium rock. We were surrounded by a circus of people that would have had our souls on the fire,’ he said.
‘I’m not part of a jukebox,’ Plant declared.
Asked if he was not tempted by the huge fortunes that other ageing rockers make on tour, he said: ‘Good luck to them.’
‘I hope they’re having a real riveting and wonderful late middle age,’ he sneered, without mentioning any performers by name.
‘Somehow I don’t think they are.’
There is however good news for fans as Led Zeppelin’s guitarist Jimmy Page has revealed he is planning to work on releasing more of the band’s unheard material once his current project is complete.
Last week Led Zeppelin unveiled two previously unheard recordings ahead of the re-issue in June of the band’s first three albums.
The band are due to release deluxe editions of their first three albums, ‘Led Zeppelin’, ‘Led Zeppelin II’ and ‘Led Zeppelin III’, on June 3, and now guitarist Jimmy Page has revealed he might put together compilations of rare songs in the future.
He teased in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine: “There’s certainly more things that can be done. But these reissues took a lot of time, and I don’t want to start proposing another project, because it’ll take me another six months or a year.”
Jimmy spent years scouring through the band’s archives in a secret west London vault to find tracks that hadn’t been heard by even the most hardcore of their fans, including a cover of ‘Keys To The Highway’ and versions of ‘Immigrant Song’ and ‘Whole Lotta Love’.
He explained: “I was pretty diligent with my detection work. I asked a guy that runs one of the fanzines if he’d heard any of this material before, and he told me hadn’t. That was a good feeling.”
The group have launched an extensive reissue program of all nine of their studio albums in chronological order, each remastered by Jimmy.
However, they have ruled out all possibilities of a live Led Zeppelin show to coincide with the album releases.
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