Words by Riley Fitzgerald
Graphic by Getty Images

In conversation with host Mike Everitt for regular podcast Digging Deep, Led Zeppelin‘s Robert Plant has discussed his decades-long fascination with Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum.

Kulthum was foremost amongst the artists which inspired Plant to record songs such as Physical Graffiti‘s ‘Kashmir‘.

“I’d always been following the orchestration of Umm Kulthum, the Egyptian singer who had this fantastic orchestra in Cairo throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s,” he shared. “The orchestral arrangements on some of those songs and those albums by her [are] insane.”

“The Space Shifters have moved into that space quite often,” he adds, “and in my case probably [from] Zeppelin III onwards.”

Throughout his career Plant has often been spotted sporting an Umm Kulthum t-shirt.

“It’s emotive,” he says of singing in a style similar to Kulthum’s, “there’s a certain feeling of awkward satisfaction when you get to the end of something like that because it’s certainly not [the Beatles] ‘She Loves You’ you know? But it’s poignant and it has the sad thud of an old heart.”

He also provided insight into his current approach to creating music.

“Each guy In our co-operative creates ideas and send them me or to each other,” he shares. “There’s a lot of sketches. … some of them are back or white and some of them are going into color. And that’s how all these songs are developed… Quite often a section of one song, that we now know as a song, has come from another idea somewhere else and been.”

He then shares that he tends to connect these fragments not by what musical key they are in but by the moods and tones that they evoke.

“The two parts may have been in different keys but you can modulate,” he enthuses.

“It’s not really the same thing where everyone is in the same room playing at the same time,” Plant continues, turning his mind to the more do it yourself approach modern technology offers. “That sometimes takes place but more recently we’ve been pinning the donkey’s tail with a blindfold on and seeing what happens. We have hundreds of hours of ideas. I’ve got an unlimited amount of stuff that sounds amazing.”

It’s only after a considerable amount of back-and-forth that Plant and band will formally meet to record.

“[Then] we go down to this little studio in near Peter Gabriel’s,” he states, “and we piece it all together.”

In the podcast, Plant also talks about the most recent album Carry Fire, maintaining a romantic heart in old age and the importance of avoiding formula.

You can listen to Digging Deep in full here.