Robert Plant

Entertainment isn’t just based on the very structured syndrome of European popular music, and it’s great that there are so many thousands of people who are of the same opinion.

[On relationship with Jimmy Page] We’re still good friends, we both enjoy a rather dark sense of humour that comes, I think, from being on the wrong side of the tracks for all those wild years.

If you’re a singer, you can never say this is where the voyage ends, the job is never done. Once you have got it, you cannot sit on it. I have to try and change the landscape, whatever it is. I have to find a new place to ply my trade, to get lost in another place, and locate myself again. I’m an older man now and so it’s even more important.

It may become Bob as time goes on. My dad was a Bob and his father was a Bob. That seems to be the sort of cheery thing that you do to octogenarians, but not yet, no.

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.

In the middle of everything that I’ve done as a singer or as somebody who’s jumped on top of a few old books and turned ‘em into songs about hobbits f*cking vikings, I think I’ve danced a beautiful dance through it all, without becoming too much of a cliche. I’ve enjoyed the two-step. It’s brought me great gifts.

Elections: the only excuse for a grown man to kiss a stranger’s baby and not have the cops called.

[on drumming] There’s something rather nice about spending the evening hitting things.

My mission is to let all women know you don’t have to be like Paris Hilton and shoot a sex tape and three weeks later you have a reality show. You don’t (have) to be like Kim and shoot a sex tape and do Playboy and become this so-called superstar from having a sex tape. Just focus on your talent, the positive things of life that you do!

[On working with Woody Allen] That was a very surreal experience: I had studied the script right down to the punctuation marks, and then he would say ‘we’re not going to say what’s on the page, and you don’t really have to either, try to keep up.’

I’m not very experienced with boys or the whole dating thingy.

So, we come out to Los Angeles. And we met with every network. We met with show runners, directors, writers, everything. And what we had an idea for, they didn’t like. And what they had an idea for, we didn’t like. So, we went home.

[On his belief in soul mates] I hope there is such a thing. I guess it would be quite scary to find a soul mate when you’re young because you’re probably going to mess it up.

I didn’t get on TV until I was 30, which is really fortunate because you are who you are at that point.

All I could think about was, ‘I just wanna blow him away. I wanna make him proud, because I really wanna sign with Timbaland and spend the rest of my career making music with Tim.’

The woman who did the costumes tried to put me in these Waspy clothes, and it just didn’t work. I feel like ethnicity and fashion go together. So, yeah, knockers up and tight skirts. Somehow it’s better.

They made a porn movie about Sarah Palin, and the same actress, Lisa Ann, played me in the porn version of 30 Rock. Weirdly, of the three of us, Lisa Ann knows the most about foreign policy.

All you could do was to see them. We were backstage when the Beatles were on and you could just about hear a noise. It was just literally screaming.

I was a little excited but mostly blorft. ‘Blorft’ is an adjective I just made up that means ‘Completely overwhelmed but proceeding as if everything is fine and reacting to the stress with the torpor of a possum.’ I have been blorft every day for the past seven years.

So I’m you, I’m us, it’s us. It went from Kanye, which means the only one, to just Ye – just being a reflection of our good, our bad, our confused, everything. The album is more of a reflection of who we are.

You just have to play every scene honestly and forget about a reaction and what the audience is going to think. I think the more seriously you take something, the more funny it might be.