Robert Plant Glastonbury Festival 2014

1 Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You 2 Tin Pan Valley 7:20 3 Black Dog (Led Zeppelin IV) 14:40 4 Rainbow 20:32 5 Going to California (Led Zeppelin IV) 25:50 6 The Enchanter 7 Little Maggie 8 What Is and What Should Never Be (Led Zeppelin II) 9 Fixin’ to Die 31:13 10 Whole Lotta Love (Led Zeppelin II) 11 Rock and Roll (Led Zeppelin IV) (Reimagined) 38:58 On June 28, 2014, former Led Zeppelin lead vocalist Robert Plant, backed by the Sensational Space Shifters, was live in concert at Glastonbury Festival, Worthy Farm, Pilton, England. review: For a second, it really feels like he might do it. As the opening flamenco flurries of Joan Baez’s Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You – covered by Led Zeppelin on their 1969 debut – give way to a burst of pastoral arpeggios, a field full of blues-rock space cadets psychically will it as one: “make it Stairway …” Even Robert Plant himself, staring reverently at the whirling fingers of Liam “Skin“ Tyson – a man with a beard James Hetfield might hunt – seems to want it to happen so he can forget all the mystical world-blues guff and pile into a full-throttle Zep-only set that would upend the Tor. Instead, Plant grabs a shallow drum and announces “a jam of country and eastern music”, but one with enough twists to stop it being banished forthwith to the West Holts stage. On exotic instruments strung, bowed, plucked and thumped, Plant and his Sensational Space Shifters build storm-summoning moods on Tin Pan Valley, carve out affecting Afrobeat pop on the new track Rainbow and tinker with a handful of Zep classics. Black Dog becomes a dark, hippy vision of Glastos of yore, Going to California a mandolin meander, and What Is and What Should Never Be fracks directly into the ley line and syphons off the stone circle’s elemental charge. And just as the swampy blues numbers, played on guitars encrusted in actual moss, are getting to be too much, Plant ploughs into Whole Lotta Love – mashed into an Afrobeat Who Do You Love? – like a man at one with remoulding his own history to suit his whims. Hero. High point: The #glastonbury crowd chant Plant back onstage for “One! Last! Song!” only for him to announce they’ll do an “old English folk song”. It’s #ledzeppelin Rock and Roll. The cad. Low point: When #robertplant launches into a precise and pretentious handclap solo as if his palms were hand-carved by Stradivarius. In a tweet: No Stairway!