Robert Plant Website Message Prompts New Round of Led Zeppelin Reunion Rumors
A cryptic message on Robert Plant's website has resulted in the latest batch of Led Zeppelin reunion rumors. The latest has them playing the 2017 installment of Desert Trip, the classic rock-focused weekend festival. It must be noted that this is coming from someone citing anonymous "well-placed sources." Until there is more chatter, as there was in the run-up to last year's Guns N' Roses' reunion announcement, these rumors should be treated with no small degree of skepticism.
It started a few weeks ago when Plant changed his website to a black page with "Any time now..." and no way to further navigate the site. It's been known since January 2016 that he's been working on a new album with the Sensational Space Shifters. so it could simply be that Plant is preparing his online home for a redesign to come with the announcement of his next solo project.
Typically for Plant, few official details have come out about the album. LedZepNews has pieced together information from various social media posts. They note that they've held sessions in Llanuwchllyn, Wales; Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios in Wiltshire, England and possibly New York's Electric Lady Studios.
However, Raul Rossell II at Feel Numb claims that insiders have told him that Plant has agreed to the reunion. It was reported last year that Plant turned down $14 million to perform at the inaugural Desert Trip, but Rossell adds that Goldenvoice, the promoters of both Desert Trip and Coachella, have sweetened the deal considerably, and that Plant is eager to find a way to celebrate Led Zeppelin's upcoming 50th anniversary.
But if there's one band that has never based reunions around the prospect of a big payday, it's Led Zeppelin, with Plant in particular being the main holdout. In 2014, he unambiguously shot down a call for them to get back together. “You’re going back to the same old s---,” he said. ”A tour would have been an absolute menagerie of vested interests and the very essence of everything that’s s---ty about about big-time stadium rock. We were surrounded by a circus of people that would have had our souls on the fire. I’m not part of a jukebox!”
The three surviving members, Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, have only publicly reunited three times since John Bonham's death in 1980: The first was at Live Aid in 1985, followed three years later at the Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary concert and the 2007 Celebration Day concert -- the only full-length show and itself a tribute to Atlantic co-founder Ahmet Ertegun, who had passed away a year earlier. Page and Plant used their own names for the 1994 No Quarter live album and tour and the Walking Into Clarksdale studio project four years later.
Again, it remains to be seen if these latest rumors have any weight to them.
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