Robert Plant has revealed that he has assembled a large personal archive, including unreleased music from a number of personal projects, that will only be released after his death.
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Plant made the revelation during the first episode of the fourth season of his Digging Deep podcast, in which he told his co-host, Matt Everitt, the recent lockdown had allowed him to “put my house in order”.
“All the adventures that I’ve ever had with music and tours, album releases, projects that didn’t actually get finished or whatever it is, I just put them, itemised them all, and put everything into some semblance of order,” he explained. “So I’ve completely changed the setup.”
He added: “I’ve told the kids when I kick the bucket, open it to the public free of charge. Just to see how many silly things there were down the line from 1966 to now. It’s a journey.”
Alongside the unreleased music, Plant revealed that this archive also includes personal items from his collection. “[I] found a letter from my mum that said: ‘Look, you’ve been a very naughty boy, why don’t you come back, because Sue wants to know where you’ve gone. And also, the accountancy job is still open in Stourport-on-Severn. Why don’t you just come back home and we’ll just pretend all this stuff didn’t happen?’
“And I hadn’t opened the letter until about three months ago!” he said.
Another correspondence Plant has included are notes sent by the late Atlantic Records boss Ahmet Ertegun. One was a fax sent when John Bonham had “won this really serious musician award alongside Louis Armstrong, Tony Bennett and stuff like that, in Playboy magazine.”
Plant reflected: “Isn’t it amazing how, despite all the kind of rumpus that was Led Zeppelin, this guy transcended it? Bonzo went right across everybody’s appreciation of music. You could cut away all the clamour and just listen to how he was contributing his part to what we used to do.”
Listen to the full episode of Digging Deep below.