A Painful departure: Led Zeppelin legend Robert Plant announce his retirement due to the return of…

Robert Anthony Plant CBE (born 20 August 1948) is an English singer and songwriter. He was the lead singer and lyricist of the rock band Led Zeppelin from its founding in 1968 until their breakup in 1980. Since then, he has had a successful solo career, sometimes collaborating with other artists such as Alison Krauss. Regarded by many as one of the greatest singers in rock music, he is known for his flamboyant persona, raw stage performances and his powerful, wide-ranging voice.

Plant was born and raised in the West Midlands area of England, where, after leaving grammar school, he briefly trained as a chartered accountant before leaving home at 16 years old to concentrate on singing with a series of local blues bands, including Band of Joy with John Bonham. In 1968, he was invited by Peter Grant and Jimmy Page to join The Yardbirds, which Grant and Page were attempting to keep going after it had broken up (a breakup that became public knowledge by early July at the latest). The new version of The Yardbirds changed their name to Led Zeppelin, and from the late 1960s to the end of the 1970s, the band enjoyed considerable success.

Plant developed a compelling image as a charismatic rock-and-roll frontman, comparable to other ’70s contemporaries such as Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, Roger Daltrey of the Who, and Jim Morrison of the Doors. After Led Zeppelin dissolved in 1980, Plant continued to perform and record continuously on a variety of solo and group projects. His first two solo albums, Pictures at Eleven (1982) and The Principle of Moments (1983), each reached the top ten on the Billboard albums chart. With his band The Honeydrippers he scored a top-ten single hit with a remake of “Sea of Love”, which featured former Led Zeppelin bandmate Jimmy Page on guitar. Solo album Now and Zen (1988) was certified 3× Platinum and is Plant’s biggest-selling solo album to date. In the 1990s, another reunion project called Page and Plant released two albums and earned a Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance in 1998 for “Most High”. In 2007, Plant began a collaboration with bluegrass artist Alison Krauss, releasing the album Raising Sand, which won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 2009 and produced the hit song “Please Read the Letter”, which won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year the same year. In 2010, he revived the Band of Joy (which shared its name with an early band he performed with in the 1960s), and in 2012 formed a new band, the Sensational Space Shifters, followed by a reunion with Alison Krauss in 2019.