ROCK / Back on the stairway to heaven: Led Zeppelin's Plant and Page tell Adam Szreter why they are back together

If new versions of old songs are anything to go by, then Page and Plant, temporarily at least, are back at the top of the music business after an absence of 14 years. Then it was Led Zeppelin, a four-piece band; now it's a double-act.

With the current surge of middle-aged come-backs, it's easy to imagine that a reunion was always inevitable - and Robert Plant and Jimmy Page are working together again both in the studio and on stage. But until very recently, according to Plant, a combination of loyalty to their late drummer, John Bonham, and a reluctance to rake over old ground looked likely to prevent it.

That problem was solved when an old friend sent him some tapes of drum patterns. Page admits that he had 'been wanting to work with Robert again for a long time. And now the time was right. We were both agreed that if we were going to do something then it had to be new, and that if we were to look at the old material, we'd have to treat it as an old picture ready for a new frame.'

It is by no means certain that their old partner, John Paul Jones, would have accepted an invitation to work with them, but Plant's existing band included a ready- made rhythm section in Michael Lee and Charlie Jones, and there seems to have been little temptation to try to resurrect the old relationship: 'Once we got started we were a two-piece. We were a guitarist and singer who'd written loads of songs already, so we knew very quickly if we didn't like what we were doing. But if you bring in a third imagination it can take longer to reach the same point, and it can be uncomfortable. I much prefer being in the middle of that than churning it out in a four-piece.'

Although the new album, No Quarter, contains only a handful of new songs, it is undoubtedly as ambitious a project as any they have undertaken. Even for those of us who appreciated the fine musicianship that was sometimes hidden behind Led Zeppelin's larger-than-life image (and No Quarter's fusion of influences - rock and classical, Arab and Western, Indian and blues, acoustic and electric - develops ideas already apparent in the Seventies) it all comes as a surprising delight.

No Quarter is due out on 7 November, and there are plans for a tour of the US - though, no contracts have been signed yet. In the meantime, the only visible evidence of the new Plant-Page partnership is the film to be screened on MTV tomorrow.

It's a characteristically eccentric combination of studio performances, footage of the duo playing to bemused Moroccans in Marrakesh, and a trip into the Welsh hills with a hurdy-gurdy and Porl Thompson from the Cure.

Plant, Page and Thompson? It doesn't quite have the ring of Led Zep. Whether out of respect for their dead friend, or as part of their way forward, they insist on leaving the title behind. But in the minds of most of their fans Plant and Page were, and will remain, Led Zeppelin.

'Robert Plant and Jimmy Page: No Quarter' will be repeated on MTV on Saturday at 8.30pm, part of the channel's Led Zeppelin weekend