MUSIC / 'Robert Plant? I'm not a huge fan': Led Zeppelin's original tight-trousered frontman is back with a new album. Andy Gill reports

'I'M pleased with how ridiculous I am,' admits Robert Plant graciously. 'I like me.'

Then, as if realising how much more than ridiculous this might sound, he quickly adds a disclaimer: 'Though I'm not a huge fan. I know when to switch me off.'

That's just as well. As the prototype for hundreds, probably thousands, of heavy metal vocalists, Plant bears responsibility for some of the most ridiculous squawking and bleating ever to stretch the term 'singing'. Few examples, admittedly, come close to the hysterical perfection of his own shrieking variant on the blues. For his part, Plant offers little comment on his former colleague Jimmy Page's recent Coverdale-Page project, beyond the dutiful bland platitudes about being happy for Jimmy and all that. Of David Coverdale's vocals, nothing is said. They sound, I suggest, rather tightly trousered . . .

'Absolutely]' agrees the original tightly trousered frontman. 'What else am I going to tell you? I can keep a straight face.' And indeed, he can.

The difference between Plant and his imitators is that, essentially, he views his style as an extension of that of the blues singers to whom he used to listen in his youth. This includes the guttural moan of Ray Charles doing 'Drown in My Own Tears', or the falsettos of Otis Rush and Don Covay, and the similar, all-too-brief brushes with perfection of such as Otis Clay, O V Wright, Tyrone Davis, Vernon Garrett - 'all these people who became happening for a moment on the soul scene'.

As a result, there's always been a discernible root to Plant's work, an emotional conductor back to the blues, even when he's singing about squeezing his lemon till the juice runs down his leg.

He refuses to regard his Led Zeppelin years as a millstone, even though his post-Zep work hasn't created anything like the same buzz or comparable sales. Indeed, it's not even created as big a buzz as the recent Australian compilation of covers of 'Stairway to Heaven'. Ever the sport, he's generous about it: 'I thought some of the lounge shit was terrible, but the choir was really good, a bit pompous, but quite moving - I got a bit of a lump and thought, I'd better not play this to me mum. I thought the Beatles take-off was excellent, too.'

But wasn't it a bit hard going, after 20 different versions?

'It's pretty hard going in its original form.' Boom boom]

Asked whether he wasn't just a little bit flattered by the tribute, Plant suggests I ask Howlin' Wolf whether he liked Zep's version of 'Killing Floor'. This is difficult, to say the least, since the Wolf died in 1976, but one takes his point.

'All the riff-mongering that Willie Dixon and Hubert Sumlin and the Wolf and all those guys developed in Chess studios was taken on and developed for a white, acned audience,' he continues, 'and they must have thought, Jesus Christ, that's only a pasteurised version of what we're doing. If you listen to 'Little Red Rooster' . . . with all the best will in the world - and I am a Stones fan - the Wolf one is, well, wow] But whoever was distributing Chess when the Stones put out their version . . . the Wolf wouldn't have been in there with a shout at all. You couldn't put the Wolf out, because the Wolf would have frightened everybody] How would Jack Jackson have dealt with that? Even Fluff - nor'arf] - would have had a bit of a job on to make it stick.'

These days, the real blues is still something to be searched out - unless, of course, you have a father like Plant, who admits his teenage son can already spot a Robert Johnson track at a hundred yards. But Plant's not just a superannuated bluesman, not by a long way. His new album, the grandly titled Fate Of Nations, leans more towards the diverse influences of the hippy years, to West Coast groups like Buffalo Springfield, Moby Grape and Love, and to singer-songwriters like Tim Rose and Tim Hardin, and the exotica of world musicians such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

'I don't think it's 'world music', that's such a donkey term for it,' Plant says. 'It's just music that comes from Small Heath in Birmingham as far as I'm concerned. It's part of what you hear if you've got your window down. So was 'Kashmir', and 'Calling to You' on this album.

'It was easier for acoustic music and rock music to co-exist in those days,' he continues. 'You could have a concert featuring Pentangle, Roy Harper, Deep Purple and Blodwyn Pig, or whatever, all together. And especially on the big American festivals we used to play, there was a lot of what we'd consider impossible billing these days: The Doors, Zeppelin, Woody Herman, John Lee Hooker - you'd never believe those combinations.'

The new LP tries for what he calls the 'natural intensity' of acoustic music, Plant aiming for a kind of 'power-folk' feel.

'I like to make the acoustic stuff powerful. 'Come into My Life' on the new LP is a good example of that: when the riff comes in, it's just drums and acoustic guitar, but it's heavy as hell. As was 'Ramble On', or 'What Is and What Should Never Be', in Zep.

Ultimately, though, whatever power the new album has resides mainly in that voice, recorded in full analogue glory just like on the early Zep albums. 'I've tried digital before,' Plant admits. 'It suits some projects, and it's very clean. But I'm not really that clean any more, I've taken all my beads and bangles off recently, but I just want to do something I feel comfortable with - and I remember the glory of 8-track, like on Led Zep I & II, where you have to sing on the guitar solo track, so you've got to stop singing just before Page starts playing - I love that kind of ramshackle, shit-or-bust style. Now that has gone, to a degree, but parts of it live on, and I think I'm harking back to it in approach, and certainly in temperament. But though my performance is spontaneous, the arrangements are all well worked out beforehand. I've learnt lots of things, one of which is Never Waste Time.'

In studios, time is money.

'At my time of life, time is time]'

(Photograph omitted)