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Robert Plant’s personal archive of unreleased music to be made available for free after his death

By | Published on Wednesday 26 May 2021

Robert Plant

Robert Plant has said that an archive of unreleased music and personal items from across his career will be made available to the public for free after his death. Speaking on the latest edition of his Digging Deep podcast, Plant says that organising and cataloguing all these items has been his big lockdown project.

“All the adventures that I’ve ever had with music and tours, album releases, projects that didn’t actually get finished or whatever – I just itemised them all and put everything into some semblance of order. 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”.

Among the personal items was a letter from his mother sent in the mid-60s when he was still a teenager, telling him it was time to give up his dreams of being a rock star.

He explains: “I found a letter from my mum that said: ‘Look, you’ve been a very naughty boy, why don’t you come back? 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?'”

“I hadn’t opened the letter until about three months ago”, he admits. “I opened it up and it just made me feel crazy, because I thought about what a pitch it was in those days to chuck everything up in the air and say, ‘I’m sorry I’ve gotta do this’ and for them to throw the next card down and say, ‘Well, if you do it, you can’t come back here and live the life you wanna live. It’s academia or you’re out’. So I went”.

As for what sort of unreleased music can be found in the archive, he says: “I did some stuff with a guy call Robert Crash, who was a German guy who had a group called the Psychotic Tanks. I did some stuff with him in Paddington, or somewhere, in his room, and it’s insanely brilliant, because it’s, like, 1984, huge Oberheim computers belching out this huge bottom end … and it’s just great”.

So, I hesitate to say that that’s something to look forward to, because it seems a bit like wishing someone dead. I would quite like to hear that music though. Right now, you’ll just have to make do with the alive Plant talking about it, which you can listen to here:



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