Robert Plant

          When I was young, I was a huge Led Zeppelin fan.

          I was more Jimmy Page than Robert Plant: I did admire Percy`s vocal range but found his onstage contortions , and his tummy, a bit off putting. Jimmy was darker and weirder.

          Makes it all the more cringey and painful to tell this tale. In 1987 I left my job in the design department of Tyne Tees TV and joined a new crew at Pinewood Studios to begin a new Channel 4 music series titled *Wired*. This was meant to be a leaner, better, cooler version of The Tube which had just ended.

           I was employed by an infuriating little man called Willy, or Alasdair, depending on what day it was and who was asking. Within a couple of weeks of working with him I realised he was either working on two or three other films at the same time or , more likely, on the run from somebody.

           He had designed a set for the show which, among other anomalies, featured an incongruous and completely impractical  sloping stage, and then simply abandoned it, and me, and disappeared, never to be seen again. Needless to say any road crew that arrived to set up found this more than annoying as it made setting up equipment quite a challenge. Anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of physics would know this was not going to work. And because my boss was entirely absent when the shouting started, I, being his assistant, had to face the flak from numerous sweaty disgruntled crewmembers as amps and snare drums slid gently off the stage with alarming frequency.          After a couple of weeks of this crap, during which I was shouted at by backline from Ry Cooder to the Style Council, I realised this was a job I would not be enjoying for much longer.

           Then one fine Monday morning I was informed that Robert Plant and his new band would be doing a *special* in Studio 8. Now, if you were me,and this was an ordinary situation, and you were fourteen, and happy at your work, this would definitely be something to write home about. A lot of squeeeeeeeeeing and fainting.

But no.

            I had spent most of the morning being yelled at down the phone by somebody or other followed by a lengthening queue of people making utterly unreasonable demands, followed again by people wanting to know where my boss was and more importantly what was his real name.

           By noon I was grumpy,fractured, tetchy and exasperated as I marched up and down the corridors of Pinewood muttering about having quit better jobs than this. I stamped into my office , slammed the door and sat at the drawing board, seething with resentment.

           Then came a gentle *Tap tap tap* on the door and before I could yell at them to feck off, Robert Plant poked his head round the door.

            "Hi babe. Mind if I use your phone?"

"Er. Yes. Of course. Work away. I'll just clear off out of your way then" hastily gathering up my bits of shredded paper and hate notes.

"No, no, you work away babe", which I did; I remember drawing skulls and crossbones, and bad words, all over the sheet. Which was supposed to be for a Joni Mitchell special. I didn't care.

          And there I was, hunched over my drawing board, hacking and scratching all my hate and loathing on the paper with my cheap standard issue 2H pencil , held in my hand like an ice pick, as Robert Plant, leonine rock God of the luxuriant hair and the alarmingly cropped britches, chatted on the phone beside me.

            When he`d hung up he leaned back in the chair (one of those rubbishy plastic chairs) and asked me what I was up to. I mumbled something like "Oh, nothing much. Just, you know, erm..."

            "You look as if you`re having a bad day, babe" said he, and before I had a chance to bore him to death with my tale of woe, and also ask him did he call everyone babe or just me, and was there any chance at all that Jimmy might show up, he immediately said

            "You know,I think I can help you babe. I wrote a song once about times like this. When everything`s going wrong...called *In the Light* ...do you know it?" and began to sing. Robert Plant was in my office, singing to me. 

            "Though the winds of change may blow around you, but that will always be so.....
....er,

...um......

.....erm......

         Then there was this... silence... that grew louder and louder as I realised that not only had he forgotten the lyrics but so had I.

        Suddenly he jumped up out of the cheap plastic chair, patted me on the shoulder and said,

       "So anyway, babe, gotta go. Thanks".

        And, with that, he was gone.