Jimmy Page & Robert Plant - Promotional Interview For 'Unledded' (Street Of London 1994)
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00:00Jimmy, what in your view caused all this to happen?
00:21Personally speaking, I've been wanting to work with Robert for a long time.
00:26In the past it had just been in dribs and drabs on certain record projects, playing
00:32on Robert's album and he sang on one of mine, and then the sort of live aid and this sort
00:38of thing.
00:39And the time was right really, and we discussed a lot of areas of how we could get things
00:45together and we both agreed on the fact that we would have to do something that was within
00:52a new light.
00:53If we were to do the old numbers then it would be like, possibly set the same picture but
00:57within a different frame, you see.
00:58That's a good way of putting it.
01:01Well that comes on to the next question, because in this new territory that you talked about,
01:07there is an awful lot of old material, old landscape.
01:10Did you find that much of the old landscape resonated anew for you, so to speak?
01:17Since I've Been Loving You, for instance, does that mean something new?
01:20I think it was one of our most successful songs live that we ever pulled off.
01:26It's a great feeling to try and get somewhere near it again, for the sake of it being, once
01:31upon a time, magnificent.
01:51I don't think that's right.
01:55I don't think that's right.
02:26It's a great marriage for the two of us to phrase against each other vocally and guitar-wise.
02:34It's something that, if you like, it puts us back in one of the very familiar roles
02:41that we play.
02:42It's quite consoling, really, because I was quite worried about that being a cliché,
02:45but when you're doing it, it's great.
02:48And it can be different every night.
02:51What were the criteria for choosing old songs to redo?
02:56Well, we had, obviously, so many songs that we could work on.
02:59I think Black Dog and those sort of numbers from way back in the past, as most of them
03:07are, didn't give us the immediate stimulus to rework them, whereas things like Friends
03:17certainly did.
03:18If you're going to do anything like that again, it's either got to be incredibly tongue-in-cheek
03:21or very, very subtle.
03:23So what made the appropriate ones appropriate?
03:25The fact that we could fashion a lot of them into a new, more interesting form than what
03:32might have been expected.
03:34And by bringing in Nigel Eaton with Herdy Gerdy and Paul Thompson, he came in from a
03:43very refreshing and supportive angle.
03:46So just the fact that we could actually take Gallows Bowl or Battle of Evermore and really
03:53bring real new, sharp, bright focus to it.
04:13No matter what we did actually get our teeth into, we really thought about it, and I think
04:41that really tells.
04:42What did you expect to find in Marrakech, first of all?
04:45Well, a couple of articles of clothing I'd left behind three weeks before.
04:49The Hotel El Sadi.
04:51The whole Moroccan, North African adventure, musically, has been a great sort of helter
05:01skelter of hope for opportunity and failure, because originally we wanted to work with
05:07a very famous orchestra out of Rabat and rework a couple of Zeppelin songs that way.
05:15And that fell on its face, didn't it?
05:17Yeah.
05:18You know, Morocco is a land of a million sort of contradictions, and one of the contradictions
05:24most that we came across was, yes, okay, that's fine, and then you get there and there's
05:29nobody there.
05:30Right.
05:31It's a great Moroccan joke.
05:32We've experienced it for the last 20 years.
05:34Oh, yeah, everything.
05:35Everything you want.
05:36Then you get there, and not only is there nothing there, but there's nobody there.
05:40You make every single fact and every point of logical liaison, and they don't work.
05:45So we went on a wing and a prayer and a phone call to meet the Ghanawa.
05:53And that was so much more natural, and we wrote songs with them, which is amazing.
06:05Oh, city, don't cry.
06:12Oh, city, don't cry.
06:17It's only a virtue to turn to love.
06:22All your dreams of freedom are in love.
06:27It's only praise and love, justice and so much more.
06:32Oh, city, don't cry.
06:41Their music is very trance-like, and also they have the facility and the capability
06:47of healing within their music.
06:49Right.
06:50They play for hours and hours and hours and hours, and it's a therapy.
06:55But they also make cassettes that you can buy for 15 dirham.
06:59The Ghanawa are true black Africans, whereas the Moroccans are a mixture of Arab and Berber
07:08and a lot of the movements, civilization movements that went along North Africa
07:14and along the Mediterranean generally.
07:16So what you've got with the Ghanawa is something that has much more of a kind of root
07:20with Mississippi than it would do with Damascus and with Egypt and Cairo
07:25and Umm Kulthum and all the whole Arab thing.
07:27So, yeah, I think that the sound of the gimbrey and the drum,
07:33well, it is definitely like that sort of field chant stuff from northern Mississippi
07:38that Alan Lomax recorded years ago for the Library of Congress in America.
07:57They were just so honest and, you know, their music was just a truth
08:23and you couldn't help but be touched by that.
08:25Then you went to Wales.
08:26We didn't spend so much time in Wales.
08:28I mean, I lived not far from the Welsh border.
08:31Just to be away in an area where you know there's been some activity
08:35that isn't easily explained nowadays, you know, tribal stuff, cultural stuff,
08:41the poetry of the Welsh, the Welsh triads, the whole Taliesin,
08:45the whole thing is there.
08:48If you have the eye for it, it's still there.
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