Robert Plant

I hate cliché. And when you’re a rock singer in 1966, or whatever it was, psychedelic blues, through to the ’70s, which we know all about, and the ’80s, which was a scramble to hang on in, and the ’90s, which was a great time for experimentation…to get to this place, I’m really still excited. The huge vast diagonals within the music that I’ve been involved with.

My vocal style I haven’t tried to copy from anyone. It just developed until it became the girlish whine it is today.

I think I could sing and shear a few sheep at the same time.

There’s nothing worse than a bunch of jaded old farts, and that’s a fact.

The past is a stepping stone, not a millstone.

Presley was definitely a great inspiration to every guy who ever had a hard-on in the whole of the Western world, I should think. He shook everybody well and true, and we just kept on shakin’. But he started it.

The celebrity thing… I don’t want to sound as if I absolutely don’t want it because that’s not true. If you’re in the entertainment business, you have to be honest. There’s something alluring about it…

His (Freddie Mercury) words got better quickly. There were some very overt lyrics. Don’t Stop Me Now is a good example. He was having a good time, and that was very much a cri de coeur. Some lyrics we wrote together like I’m Going Slightly Mad, which was funny. We had fun coming up with daft things, all those ridiculous phrases. I’d say it was Freddie’s actual musicality which was the cleverest thing of all, the notes, and his harmonic structure was quite brilliant. When he wrote The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, on the second album, he was crossing sections of six-part harmonies, and I thought: “Bloody hell, that is tricky stuff.” Then there’s The March Of The Black Queen, which is almost like prog-rock, and so outrageously complicated that I can’t even remember the arrangement myself. When you write songs that complex, you have to work hard at it, and it did invoke a lot of head-scratching. But then he’d come up with Killer Queen or, later on, lots of simple things like Crazy Little Thing. He had it on all sides. Freddie evolved. I always called him ‘the man who invented himself’. I think the talent was innate, but he dug deep inside himself and forced it out. His determination was quite something.

I love you, yes I do, I love you. If you break my heart I’ll die. So be sure it’s true when you say I love you It’s a sin to tell a lie.

My husband said it was him or the cat. I miss him sometimes.

I wish everybody would treat themselves like a plant.

I don’t know how I feel right now.

We are following other people’s opinions. We are controlled by the media. And today it all changes.

At this point, we aren’t just flirting with disaster; we’re rounding third base and asking if disaster has any condoms.

I may have had a crush on Zac, but we are like brother and sister, so nothing would ever happen.

A friend of mine had this great theory about the “Teletubbies”, that it’s preparing us for being mindless. And getting us ready for living in an underground world. When they build the underground world because we can no longer breathe the air that it will look like Teletubbie land.

There’s no better money to spend than your own.

[on Trump lying] They are self-serving half-truths from a self-serving half-man who has somehow convinced half the country that sacrifice is the same thing as success.

I’m always eager to return to the hospitality of the Southern states….Towns and cities that hold fond memories for me personally, places that gave birth to so much of the music I love.

[on Trump] He’s like the guy drowning but waving off a lifeboat saying, ‘Get out of here, I’m very buoyant. I’m the most buoyant. Everybody talks about my buoyancy. I’m a tremendous floater.’

On the TV show that I just did, I worked with a female director called Ryan Case who is amazing. [But] it suddenly occurred to me on my second day of filming with her that I’ve been doing this since I was nine — so that’s like 19 years now — and she’s the first female director I’ve worked with on screen. And that is crazy. When I actually step back, that is an insane thing.