Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant top winner at Grammys
Feb 9 2009 By James Marshall
BRITISH musical talent stole the show at this year’s Grammy Awards with former Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant the top winner.
Plant, from Kinver, together with bluegrass star Alison Krauss, won five Grammys including that of Record of the Year and Album of the Year.
Elsewhere it was a good evening for Coldplay who won three awards including Song of the Year and 20-year-old Adele who picked up Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.
Plant bagged more Grammys in one night than he ever did with the legendary outfit that made him famous – Led Zeppelin.
Although he picked up a Grammy lifetime achievement award with the band in 2005 – they failed to win one of the prestigious gongs while together from the late 60s until 1980. In fact the hard-rocking outfit was famously battered by critics such as Rolling Stone in its time, despite selling hundreds of millions of albums and breaking box office records.
It took Plant’s inspired collaboration with the critically-acclaimed bluegrass singer Alison Krauss for the 60-year-old to enjoy a major haul of the prestigious US awards.
Their album Raising Sand has sold more than one million copies since being released in 2007.
Critics raved about the combination of Krauss’ “honey-sweet” voice and the lived-in, whispered tones of the ageing rocker. Krauss and Plant first met in 2004, at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tribute to bluesman Leadbelly.
Apparently he was so amazed by her knowledge of American Roots Music that they began talking about recording an album together.
Wolves fan Plant – whose famous golden locks are more greyer these days – enjoyed a memorable Led Zeppelin concert reunion with Page and John Paul Jones in 2007, but spurned the chance of a mega-bucks tour, opting to go on the road with Krauss.
Led Zeppelin’s album sales have topped 300 million, and their anthem Stairway To Heaven is consistently voted one of the greatest rock tracks of all time.
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