The first concert Robert Plant saw

The game of first times is always fun. As you get older, while you remember the first time of this or that during a discussion among friends, a smile somewhere between pleased and desperate (for the good times that were and will never come back) inevitably appears. Among music lovers, one of the fundamental ‘first times’ is that of the first concert seen live, which, in most cases, remains unforgettable.

In 2017, in a radio interview on BBC Radio 6’s ‘The First Time’ With Matt Everitt’, the singer of The Beatles spoke about his first experience of attending a concert. Led Zeppelin Robert Plant who remembers that moment as one of the crucial passages of his existence.

Here’s what the English musician, who turns 76 today, told the BBC: “There was a band at school, in the Black Country (an area in central England between Birmingham and Wolverhampton, ed.), there was a band called Dave Lacey and The Corvettes. They were really good and they did stuff like George Jones’ ‘The Race Is On’ and stuff like that. At school when I was 14, it was in a youth club or maybe a dance hall. It’s just like a movie. The doors open and then this smell of sweat and perfume, these skirts and these fantastic dresses with lots of slips underneath. I was peering into a world that was definitely five or six years ahead of the one I was in. But I was just tempted. It was just an altered state, the whole thing of movement and music.”

During the same interview, Robert Plant He also recalled the first time he performed live. It wasn’t to sing, as you might imagine, but to play the washboard: “Perry Foster is kind of a luminary and kind of a witness to the stories of the blues musicians that came through in the ’60s. He worked for Lippmann and Rau, who were these German promoters, who first brought in Bukka White, Skip James and all these great Delta Blues guys. He also opened for Sonny Boy Williamson. Perry had to take care of Sonny Boy, a six-foot-two kid from Tutwiler, Mississippi, who took no prisoners. So Perry kept an eye on him. He helped him out of hotel rooms and he had three bands, The Delta Blues, The Memphis, New Memphis Blues Breakers. I played the washboard, I hadn’t started singing yet. So I did a show playing the washboard. I really tried to do it right. I’m still trying to get the groove on.”