the robert plant story

In the spring of 1981, I was finishing my third year as a PhD student in the Law Department at Warwick University. My 90,000 word thesis, centered around how the state controls dissent in a democracy, was languishing, unfinished and unloved, while I spent most of my time either listening to bands like The Clash, The Jam, The Specials and Echo and the Bunnymen, or going to see them live around the Midlands or back home in London, sometimes with a smuggled camera, and (sadly) often without.

So it was that on May 5th 1981, Robert Plant and his new band The Honeydrippers somehow came to play a benefit show for the International Year of the Disabled in our Student Union building. It wasn’t really a performance venue so the stage was small and the lighting was almost non-existent, but of course I took some photos of this noteworthy musical event (little had been heard of Robert Plant since the split of Led Zeppelin the previous December), and later that night I processed the film and made a few prints in our well-equipped student darkroom.

The next day I took the bus from Coventry to Victoria Station in London, headed straight to the nearest pay phone, and spent a few minutes deciding whom to call… my beloved New Musical Express? Nope, too cool for Robert Plant. Melody Maker? Nope, a little staid for my tastes. Sounds? Definitely not my favorite of the three but, I thought, the most likely to be interested in publishing one of my black and white photos of The Honeydrippers. I looked up the phone number in the phone book, cold called, and was put through to the Photo Editor, Eric Fuller, who said yes, come over to our office in Covent Garden.

After I showed Eric the photos, and my little portfolio, he said they could use one of the Robert Plant pics on the news page (not actually the one above, the one on the left - the negative of this photo has completely deteriorated over the past forty-plus years, although it does now look rather ethereal), and asked me for fifty words to caption it. And so began my career as a photographer.

In May 2023 I told this very story to Robert Plant, who had just played at New Orleans Jazz Fest and was standing behind me in the hallway of Preservation Hall, where he was about to perform an impromptu set with their legendary Jazz Band.

He looked at me like I was nuts.