Credit: Robert Plant
Wed 26 August 2026 21:30, UK
“Light and shade”, that’s how Jimmy Page described the sound of Led Zeppelin, or at least, how he described the sound he wanted them to go for.
He’d had years to think about what kind of music the band he started would make, as he would often think about the different genres and styles he could blend and still have it come out coherent. When he was working as a backing guitarist, a session musician and playing in The Yardbirds, his head was full of ideas that he wound up grabbing by the horns and running with.
He said, “I wanted Zeppelin to be a marriage of blues, hard rock and acoustic music topped with heavy choruses, a combination that had never been done before […] Lots of light and shade in the music”, and while it’s all well and good having those different ideas, it’s another thing entirely pulling it off.
With the power of hindsight, we can pretty confidently say that Led Zeppelin nailed it; however, this wasn’t because of Page alone. He needed to have the right band behind him, who could adapt to whatever sound they would be running with and keep an open mind when exploring various genres, and he certainly found this in Robert Plant, arguably the only singer on Earth who could have fronted a band like Led Zeppelin.
He had the kind of voice that he could mould to what was asked of him, but arguably his best characteristic was how much he liked to listen to various styles of music, and was open to experiencing whatever the new craze was. Even when there was music that didn’t touch him immediately, he was happy to sit in pockets of sound and give them time to marinate.
A lot of music fans can learn something here, as we are quick to dismiss certain songs and genres in the modern age, but if you allow them to grow on you for a while, you might find yourself peeling back layers you didn’t initially recognise.
One of the styles that took Plant a while to come round to was some of the more blues-inspired hippie music that was coming out of the West Coast of America. For a short while, these bands were completely taking over the world, but he couldn’t understand the appeal until after the fog started to clear, and the Led Zeppelin frontman got what people were resonating with so deeply. He spoke specifically of the song ‘Flying on the Ground is Wrong’ by Buffalo Springfield when talking about coming around to this genre of music.
Further reading: From The Vault
“I remember the first time I heard Buffalo Springfield’s ‘Flying on the Ground is Wrong’. I thought: ‘That sounds like nothing at all’, and then I heard it again and thought: ‘There’s something more to this’,” he recalled, “The lyrics at the time weren’t astounding, but there was something there. Then I got the album, and it was great because it was the kind of music you could hare around to or you could sit down and dig it, and I thought, ‘This is what an audience wants; this is what I want to listen to’.”
Plant didn’t just grow to like it either, but he became so attached to it that a lot of the older blues music he used to listen to religiously didn’t have the same impact. Buffalo Springfield and bands of that ilk were more than just growers for the Zeppelin vocalist; they completely changed the way he heard sound as a whole.
“All that music from the West Coast just went ‘Bang!’,” he claimed, “And there was nothing else there after that. I love good blues, but all of a sudden I couldn’t listen to any old blues any more and say it’s OK”.
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