‘LULLABY AND… THE CEASELESS ROAR’: HOW ROBERT PLANT SILENCED CRIES FOR MORE LED ZEPPELIN

Recorded with an adventurous new band, ‘lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar’ saw Robert Plant deliver a rich, diverse and highly cohesive album.

Technically speaking, lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar represents Robert Plant’s recorded debut with The Sensational Space Shifters. However, most of the personnel involved had already forged a strong bond as The Strange Sensation, with whom the ex-Led Zeppelin legend had recorded two acclaimed sets, Dreamland and Mighty ReArranger, during the early 2000s. With this new album, however, the restless, nomadic Plant underwent yet another audacious reinvention, bending sound to his own ends…

LISTEN TO ‘LULLABY AND… THE CEASELESS ROAR’ HERE.

THE BACKSTORY: “THERE’S NO BOUNDARY WHERE WE CAN AND CANNOT GO”

Released in September 2014, lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar arrived in the wake of Plant’s two recent Americana-flavoured releases, 2007’s Grammy-winning Alison Krauss collaboration, Raising Sand, and 2010’s Band Of Joy, yet lullaby… again found him changing tack. Indeed, as he revealed in interviews at the time, Plant felt emboldened by The Sensational Space Shifters, who offered him the freedom to pursue any creative direction he so desired.

“There’s no real boundary to where we can and cannot go,” he enthused in an interview with Uncut magazine. “There are cues within the songs and yet the contributors are all the players. It’s not like a band where there’s a guitarist and a bass player, a drummer and a singer. It’s like the give and take between [Liam] “Skin” [Tyson guitarist] and Justin [Adams, guitar], it’s magnificent.” Also praising his rhythm section – keyboardist Johnny Baggott, bassist Billy Fuller and drummer Dave Smith – Plant declared himself to be in “a real, real excitement zone” with his new band.

Perhaps because they had such disparate backgrounds, The Sensational Space Shifters collectively offered something significantly removed from rock’s norm. Another key member, multi-instrumentalist Jules Camara, hailed from The Gambia, in West Africa, while Tyson had featured in Britpop-era Liverpudlians Cast, and Adams had made up part of the second incarnation of Jah Wobble’s Invaders Of The Heart. Whether by design or not, the latter outfit’s adventurous, world-music-inclined sound provided a template of sorts for lullaby and…The Ceaseless Roar, giving Plant’s long-standing love of the British folk tradition a unique edge.

THE ALBUM: “I WANTED TO CARRY ON FROM THE ‘BAND OF JOY’ RECORD”

The headiness of the Shifters’ fusion-based sound immediately made its mark on lullaby…’s opening track, a radically overhauled cover of the traditional folk song Little Maggie. As Plant explained, it was chosen to kick off the record for a reason.

“I wanted the album to start with this impression of carrying on from Band Of Joy,” he told WNYC’s New Sounds programme in 2014. “And as the track develops, you get an idea that we mean British business, and African business, as well… A lot of the North and West African music has deep parallels with the Celtic music that ended up on the west coast of Scotland and Ireland.”

However, while this Afro-Celtic crossover also permeated songs such as Pocketful Of Golden, the hypnotic, shape-shifting Embrace Another Fall and Poor Howard’s joyful reworking of the Lead Belly song of the same name, lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar was more than happy to embrace all manner of diversity. Indeed, the tracklist also made space for material as disparate as Turn It Up’s Tom Waits-esque junkyard blues, the stripped-back piano ballad A Stolen Kiss and even more traditional, rock-related songs such as the spangly, Byrdsy Somebody There and the misty psychedelia of House Of Love.

THE RELEASE AND LEGACY: “HIS UNIQUENESS HAS NEVER BEEN MORE APPARENT”

Crucially, though, despite its eclecticism, lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar hung together beautifully. The fact that Plant himself was in exceptionally fine vocal form was also rightly acknowledged in the almost uniformly positive reviews that greeted the album upon its release, on 9 September 2014: Record Collector magazine suggested that “Plant’s own production places his voice high in the mix, often sounding like he’s whispering in the listener’s ear”, while Uncut noted that “Plant is still on his quest, still grappling with the intricacies of love, still seduced by distant, misty mountains. His uniqueness has never been more apparent.”

Buoyed by such fulsome praise, lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar more than held its own in the marketplace, rising to No.2 in the UK and also going Top 10 in the US. Despite Led Zeppelin’s triumphant one-off London show in December 2007, Plant proved himself entirely vindicated in his decision to remain focused on his solo career, confidently silencing the noise for more Led Zeppelin reunions with lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar.

“It’s really a celebratory record,” he told Ireland’s RTÉ News at the time of the album’s release. “Powerful, gritty, African, trance meets Zep. The whole impetus of my life as a singer has to be driven by a good brotherhood. I am very lucky to work with The Sensational Space Shifters.”