Robert Plant Felt This Led Zeppelin Classic Suffered From “Naïveté”

There were always many different sides of Led Zeppelin. Pegged as the harbinger of hard rock, the maestros of metal, the band blended those cataclysmic riffs with something softer. Indeed, Zep’s folk side is essentially a catalogue of its own, often blending bizarre guitar tunings and melodies hewn from Eastern culture into the mix.

Take ‘The Battle Of Evermore’. A true centrepiece on the band’s fourth album, it was pieced together in one long session, with Jimmy Page and Robert Plant working cheek-by-jowl, eye-to-eye. As the guitarist recalled: “‘Battle of Evermore’ was made up on the spot by Robert [Plant] and myself. I just picked up John Paul Jones’s mandolin, never having played a mandolin before, and just wrote up the chords and the whole thing in one sitting.”

Robert Plant let the words flow, borrowing references from JRR Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy in the process – witness lines like, “The drums will shake the castle wall, the Ringwraiths ride in black”.

A deeply individual piece, the trance-like music is split by two vocals, with Robert Plant joined by English folk goddess Sandy Denny. The sole guest vocalist in Led Zeppelin’s catalogue, she plays a town-crier against Plant’s whirling vocal.

Robert Plant later told Uncut: “[F]or me to sing with Sandy Denny was great. We were always good friends with that period of Fairport Convention. Richard Thompson is a superlative guitarist. Sandy and I were friends, and it was the most obvious thing to ask her to sing…”

Yet he was also critical of the song. Often his own worst criticRobert Plant has a rounded take on ‘The Battle Of Evermore’ and his own performance: “If it suffered from naivete and tweeness—I was only 23—it makes up for it in the cohesion of the voices and the playing.”

Revisit ‘The Battle Of Evermore’ below.

Related: Robert Plant Once Revealed His Favourite Led Zeppelin Album

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