"Pictures At Eleven" : Robert Plant's debut album

Robert Plant was asked to join X YZ (“ex-Yes and Zeppelin”, as the world’s shortest-lived supergroup was fleetingly known), but demurred. He decided instead to separate from his memories of the mothership by embarking on a lower-profile project, with its sights set more on the beer garden than Madison Square - assembling local musicians he christened The Honeydrippers, to play favourite R&B covers on the club and university circuit. The Robert Plant of 1981 in fact, doesn’t seem that much different to the Plant of 2022: a music enthusiast, reconciling with his past, digging deep and trying to forge new connections with the music he loves.

Except that evidently something changed. Did all those shouts for “Rock And Roll” remind him of the record biz megabucks he’d left behind? Or did he realize there were simply different ways available to make a break with his past? Whatever, by the time of his debut album, he had foregone deep bluesy cuts for a full 1980s makeover. Haircut. Suit jacket. No socks. Even, for a memorably awkward few hours (“A really good video: Visage, ‘Mind Of A Toy’...”), a slot as an MTV VJ.

Having spent a long time in Zeppelin’s myth-inspiring anonymity - this was a band who seldom put their name on their records, nevermind prostituted themselves by releasing singles - Plant was now game to enter the commercial fray. He even made videos: in the promo for “Burning Down One Side” (a UK No 75) Plant throws himself into character as a suburban commuter whose unsatisfactory home life compels him to prowl the streets of Soho in search of female company. He takes one glamorous woman out for dinner. All seems to be going well until someone leaps on the table in Invisible Man bandages to play a guitar solo.

Confused? Imagine how Robert Plant felt. On one hand he was a tremendously successful 32-year-old with a healthy ego and Ahmet Ertegun on his side. On the other he was unmanaged, inexperienced as a solo artist and mindful of recent changes in the world of music. Assembled with what must have been an understandable mix of humility and pride, his band included the kind of strong unknowns he himself had once been (Robbie Blunt, a ’60s veteran was retained from The Honeydrippers on guitar; Jezz Woordroffe, lately Black Sabbath’s offstage keyboard player, then running a music shop in Birmingham, supplied synth skills). On the drums, however, where there were big shoes to fill, there was Phil Collins, and when there wasn’t, there was Cozy Powell. Paul Martinez, whose name you’ll remember from Led Zep at Live Aid in 1985, was on bass.

With an accomplished midlands engineer, Pat Moran, a veteran of Queen, at the controls, Plant himself - possibly unwisely - took the producer’s chair and along with it his share of any blame. In the last few years, Plant has been apologetic about his most unashamedly 1980s material, which might give the impression that it’s bad, which Pictures... actually isn’t.

We’re simply neither fully popped in, or completely rocking out. At times (especially the vocal effects which can render entire verses unintelligible) it can feel as if the production is trying to force the singer into pleated trousers when he clearly prefers flares. At others, it seems to be about compromise: modernizing without alienating old Led Zeppelin fans. One imagines it was a large number of this demographic who propelled the album to the Top 5 on both sides of the Atlantic.

For them, there was certainly some continuity to be found. Like Jimmy Page’s solo debut from a few months later in 1982 (the soundtrack to Death Wish II, a film directed by his neighbour Michael Winner), the LP was on Zeppelin’s label, Swan Song. Not only that, it preserves some of the rocking languidly of their last album, In Through The Out Door. Opener “Burning Down One Side”, for example, retains a flavour of “In The Evening”, and it’s not the only track to draw inspiration from the past. “Moonlight In Samosa” (it’s in Papua New Guinea) has a flavour of “All Of My Love”, if with rather more Spanish guitar flourishes. More daringly, “Like I’ve Never Been Gone” (one of the two Cozy Powell numbers) confronts full-on something like a classic Zep song: “Since I’ve Been Loving You”, bluesy solos, yearning vocal and all.

New things are also tried. “Fat Lip” is a thin and slinky pop riff. “Pledge Pin” from its transatlantic title to its Police-style arpeggios arrives just in time for last orders at the New Wave Inn, and to be released to radio as a promo-only single, where intrigued listeners would have learned what The Knack’s “My Sharona” might sound like with proggier interludes and a sax break. “Worse Than Detroit”, meanwhile, is an AOR rocker which suddenly breaks off into an acoustic guitar passage from another song altogether. Closing track “Mystery Title” pretty much defines the big finish, being a fusion of “Trampled Underfoot” and “Sick Again”, albeit heard through a whole Miss Selfridge of now-dated sonic fashions.

If there’s a problem, it’s in the execution, as if Plant as producer was unsure of which way to go and felt happier applying a chrome finish to his music rather than reconsidering and rebuilding the entire vehicle. However, at the end of side one, the eight minute “Slow Dancer” suggests a more generous reading of all this. Moodwise it’s Physical Graffiti meets Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here and nods both to “Kashmir” and to the mesmeric singing of Umm Kulthum. The song is all about drift but makes a gentle progress, employing an unselfconscious merging of influences, and Plant’s key strength, to vocally rise above and go with the flow, like a master of ceremonies.

If you squint a bit through the glare coming off the shiny production, you can recognize rather more of Robert Plant in this than you might have expected. Instead of an artist who wants to have his cake by changing, and eat it by staying the same, you instead recognize the beginnings of the globally influenced fusion roots direction he has gone on to pursue. Following something to an uncertain destination, ultimately all about the vibe.