Robert Plant is one of the great "mediatricians" of the Sixties, and is likely to remain so into the Eighties and Nineties and beyond the year 2,000….

In my estimation Robert's forte is twofold: one, I think, is his ability to be able to understand the forces at work in what we could loosely call the youth culture, and two, not only to understand them but to continue to assimilate them into the nucleus of his art, so that at no time in the last few years has his finger been anywhere other than on the pulse, the pulse of human youth on this planet.

To be that vital is no mean feat….

In one sense, it is hard to talk about Robert's contribution to British art without a reference to Jimmy Page, his great co-pilot, because the vast majority of the musical forms and structures in which their...