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Slipping themselves into the middle of the bill at one of Roger Daltrey's Teenage Cancer Trust shows at the Albert Hall early in 2002, Robert Plant and his new band Strange Sensation offered a tantalising glimpse of the music they'd been working up for Plant's new album, Dreamland. Demonstrating that classic music can always breed fresh possibilities, they resurrected a selection of vintage folk, blues and psychedelic songs, then peeled them open and rebuilt them using Middle Eastern scales, Asian drones and hard rock. Plant, the tumble-haired icon from the Led Zeppelin years, stood at the centre of this eclectic dust-storm like a magician exerting mysterious control over the elements.
"You can probably hear the great future for this band lurking on the fade-outs of the tracks," he says, referring to the 10 pieces he has assembled for the new album. "For instance, the kind of improvisation at the end of Bukka White's "Funny In My Mind (I Believe I'm Fixin' To Die)", is the kind of playing you will experience in a full hour-and-30-minute show. There is a good communion of souls, there's a lot of great guitar-filigree going on, not on a blues base but in that kind of Indo-raga style of playing, somewhere between John Fahey, The Flaming Lips and The Electric Prunes."
Echoes of The Cure can be attributed to former Cure guitarist Porl Thompson, who first signed on with Plant in 1995 when Robert joined up with Jimmy Page for the No Quarter tour. That project may have helped to inspire the music Strange Sensation are currently making, since it involved Plant and Page satisfying their fans' insatiable yearnings to hear the Zeppelin catalogue again, yet in an evolved, expanded form which fired the imagination of musicians reluctant merely to repeat their past.
"It was a major moment for me, the No Quarter project," Plant recalls, "because it was incredibly stimulating and so moving, and we were able to reinvent the past without it being a creative millstone.
Plant has never lost the urge to keep exploring. He takes the view that his past achievements will always be there for anyone who wants to check them out, so now he might as well exploit the freedom his successes now afford him. He doesn't mind ripping everything up and starting again. "My music has got to be an honest reflection of where I'm coming from today."
Since the demise of Led Zeppelin in 1980, he has released a sequence of solo albums which have been frequently impressive and always interesting, not least 1990's Manic Nirvana or 1993's absorbing Fate Of Nations. His plan is for a more spontaneous, improvisatory approach. He had to find musicians who understood where he was coming from, yet also willing to pick up the ball and run with it to destinations nobody could possibly predict. The sprinkling of original pieces on the new album are credited to "Robert Plant and band", reflecting the power-sharing nature of the relationship.
In addition to Thompson and his long-serving ally Charlie Jones on bass, he recruited drummer Clive Deamer (who has run the gamut from Roni Size and Portishead to Jeff Beck and Dr John), keyboards player and string arranger John Baggott (an Emmy-winning soundtrack composer who has also put in stints with Portishead, Massive Attack and Tom Jones), and guitarist Justin Adams, whose own band The Wayward Sheikhs draws from African and blues sources - the perfect training ground for a stint with the inquisitive Plant.
"Justin takes away any chance of it being just rock for rock's sake," Plant enthuses.
There's a family history of connections with the Middle East and North Africa. He plays the ghimbri on "Hey Joe" on the album, it's a three-stringed instrument which changes the whole mood and Justin knows how to play it as it's supposed to be played."
As for the choice of material, Plant's love of the blues has always been matched by his enthusiasm for Sixties folk-rock and the multi-coloured experimentation that was seething through the American West Coast during the psychedelic era. It was a time when an entire youth culture was up for grabs, and anything seemed possible. "You'd get amazing bills in those days," he remembers. "You'd get Pacific Gas And Electric, It's A Beautiful Day, Jefferson Airplane, Led Zeppelin, John Lee Hooker and Jerry Lee Lewis for a day. People were just lying there on the floor and we were a bit of background noise for their state of mind."
Arthur Lee and Love, Tim Buckley, Jimi Hendrix, Moby Grape, Neil Young and Crosby Stills & Nash have been part of Robert's musical landscape for 30-odd years, although you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell that from listening to the Zeppelin catalogue. However "maybe you can hear a little of it in "Down By The Seaside" or "Going To California", or "That's The Way."
For this new project, the challenge was to capture the music's original spirit and build something fresh and unexpected from it. Plant eased himself into the process gradually. Before Strange Sensation took shape, he tried out potential material with the enigmatically-named Priory of Brion. This was a band he put together with his old mate Kevyn Gammond, with whom he'd played in the Midlands-based Band Of Joy alongside drummer John Bonham in the pre-Zeppelin era. On their own magical mystery tour which took them from Tromso in Norway to the balmy air of Sardinia, they experimented with a wide range of material, from Donovan's "Season Of The Witch" to Love's "A House Is Not A Motel", Dylan's "Girl From The North Country" to Neil Young's "Southern Man".
Plant wanted to avoid huge gigs and superstar expectations. "I just wanted to take it easy. With no pressure, no road crew to speak of - and just kick back a bit and sing those songs while I could still sing."
By the time he'd assembled Strange Sensation for some American dates last year, the picture was becoming clear. US critics noted the way Plant might "engage guitarist Porl Thompson in an Arabic-inflected duel of descending scales" on "Morning Dew", or deliver "Hey Joe" in "a dramatic funereal reading, thick with spacey electronic sounds." Somebody coined the term "cosmic jukebox" to describe their music, which Robert found pleasingly apt.
Years ago Plant first met folk singer Tim Rose, co-author of "Morning Dew", back in the Band Of Joy days, but his new version of the song seems to loom out of some prehistoric mist.
Plant isn't the first artist either to cover Tim Buckley's "Song To The Siren", but in collusion with his bandmates he has stretched it into a diaphanous mirage, hovering in perfumed slow motion. Bob Dylan's "One More Cup Of Coffee" sounds like an Old Testament lament, Plant wearily moaning the lyric as if he has a thousand miles of burning desert to cross while the musicians sound as if they're hallucinating in the heat.
If you're familiar with Jimi Hendrix's recording of "Hey Joe", you probably won't recognize Plant's version until you get to the part where the band hurriedly scribble in the Hendrix riff, just for reference. "Love did it before Hendrix" Plant points out (and, he might have added, so did The Byrds). But I think the version of "Hey Joe" that we do is so removed from all the other versions that it's got its own life."
And there had to be some blues, though this bunch drag Arthur Crudup's "Win My Train Fare Home" out of the gutbucket and into a laboratory where they stick electrodes in it and subject it to experiments in modal jazz and ambient swirls.
"I guess we can go anywhere we want to go," Plant ponders. "I don't know whether there's a place for me within contemporary pop culture or if there's a place for it in my head now, but I know there's an energy about this music and a style which is worth pursuing and pushing a bit more. There's a kind of musical empathy I haven't been aware of for a long time."
Nobody can predict how far Strange Sensation might travel, but the Dreamland album suggests countless possibilities for further mystic exploration.
Tune in, and catch it while you can