Robert Plant

The Irish Times - Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Kevin Courtney

Olympia, Dublin

Here’s one old bull they can’t corral. Robert Plant has stubbornly resisted all attempts to cajole him into a Led Zeppelin reunion tour, preferring to plough his own furrow, which these days runs somewhere between Nashville, New Orleans and Haight-Ashbury. Still, most of the fans at the Olympia are holding out hope that, among the country-rock, gospel and Americana nuggets he pulls out tonight, a few crumbs of Zeppelin will drop too.

Even when singing with superhuman restraint, Plant dominates the stage, his long tresses tumbling down over his bear-like torso, and his voice commanding the attention. He’s backed by the Band Of Joy, playfully named after the band he and John Bonham were in before Jimmy Page poached them for the New Yardbirds. Lead guitarist Buddy Miller plays the psychedelic sidekick, all decked out like Naboo in The Mighty Boosh , while vocalist Patty Griffin looks like she could blow away on a light breeze – until she starts singing up a storm.

Many of the songs are built on a single-note refrain that builds up in intensity, then suddenly releases – Plant’s face tightens as he draws in all the tension from the song; when the band lets it all go, it’s like a noose has just been cut. Los Lobos’s Angel Dance and Richard Thompson’s House Of Cards are fine choices of song, allowing Plant to weave his voice around the instruments in a nifty hoedown through musical history. There’s a nod to his and Alison Krauss’s Grammy-winning Raising Sand album in Please Read The Letter , but already Plant has moved on from that collaboration, rambling on wherever his wanton muse takes him.

A twanging, rockabilly arrangement of Misty Mountain Hop takes the crowd by surprise, but by the end of the song, everyone is singing the end refrain of “I really don’t know/ I really don’t know. . .” Well, if he was gonna do them by the book, he might as well have gone ahead and rejoined Zeppelin. Tangerine needs no rejigging, just a little pedal steel to add Appalachian flavour, while Gallows Pole kind of cries out for a different arrangement each time.