Robert Plant: A Life Read Online Free PDF

that nightly put on live music, earning more than their fathers did for going to work in the factories. Each of these bands aspired to get on the Reagan circuit, as it came to be known. The local acts that passed an audition for Ma Reagan could expect to perform regularly at all of her venues, often in a single night and for good money.
    In July 1963 the Shadows’ producer Norrie Paramor pitched up at Birmingham’s Old Moat House Club to audition local bands for EMI, which was by then desperate to unearth another Fab Four, and he subsequently signed six Birmingham acts to the label. Although none came close to being the next Beatles, he did at least give the Midlands scene a name, christening it “Brumbeat,” a knowing adaptation of Liverpool’s then reigning Merseybeat sound.
    One band just then starting out on the Brumbeat scene was to have a direct influence on Plant. The Spencer Davis Group had debuted at a Birmingham University student dance in April 1963, performing a set of blues and R&B covers. The band was a tight one and the undisputed star was their singer, Stevie Winwood, a white schoolboy with the voice of a black soul man. Like Plant, Winwood was then fourteen years old but he was moving faster.
    In September 1963, at the start of the academic year, King Edward VI’s students were gathered together for a school photograph. In this picture Plant can be seen standing toward the center of the group, six rows back. He alone among the many hundred students looks as if he is posing for the camera—his curly hair is rustled up into its habitual quiff, a look of practiced insouciance on his face. To his right stands Gary Tolley, appearing to be somehow much younger and less worldly wise.
    Yet it was Tolley, not Plant, who by then had formed a first band with two more of their friends, Paul Baggott and John Dudley. Tolley played lead guitar, Baggott was on bass and Dudley on drums. A further pair of boys from their school year completed the lineup: Derek Price on guitar and the singer Andy Long. This school group had begun playing in pubs and youth clubs, calling themselves Andy Long and the Jurymen. They performed contemporary pop and rock ’n’ roll covers and dressed up in maroon suits with black velvet collars. Plant would often accompany them to these gigs.
    “He sort of followed us around for a long time,” says Tolley. “He’d come to see us play but he’d carry our gear as well. Derek Price’s dad would drive our van and he lived just up the road from Robert. He’d pick Rob up first and then the rest of us.”
    “It sounds daft but he was more of a hanger-on than anything at that stage,” adds Dudley. “It only slowly dawned on us that what he wanted to do was sing.”
    The Jurymen’s nightly engagements soon brought them to the attention of Headmaster Chambers. He saw a piece on the fledgling band that ran in the local newspaper, the Express & Star , one that made much of the fact that they were playing in places in which they were too young to drink.
    “Because of the way things were for kids then, if you had hair an inch too long and were playing in a band, the figures in authority did look down on you,” says Dudley. “Chambers had us all up before him. He pulled Robert in for that, too, because he knew that he would have been with us. He told us we were nothing more than a rabble—but because he couldn’t pronounce his ‘r’s, it came out as a ‘wabble.’ That may have been the start of the masters disapproving of Robert.”
    For Plant, however, the world was now expanding beyond the gates of his grammar school and 64 Causey Farm Road. Down the road in Stourbridge something was stirring. Blues, jazz and folk clubs had started to spring up around the town; so too coffee bars. The Swiss Café became the main meeting place for local teenagers. Later, a local singer named David Yeats opened the Groove record shop, catering for R&B enthusiasts like Plant.
    In the pubs and clubs one