Bonham walked out on the Crawling King Snakes. He had been lured back to his previous band, the Way of Life, by the promise of more money, and this he needed since his wife Pat was now pregnant.
With Bonham’s departure the Crawling King Snakes dissolved. Yet Plant would not have to wait long for his next gig. While DJ-ing at the Old Hill Plaza, he spotted a band called the Tennessee Teens. A three-piece, they played blues and Tamla Motown covers, and had recently returned from a resident club gig in the German city of Frankfurt. Plant introduced himself to their guitarist, John Crutchley.
“He asked me if he could sing with us,” Crutchley recalls. “That’s how it started. We were doing the Plaza three or four times a week; it would always be the last venue of two or three we’d do each night. When we got there, Robert began to get up and do a song with us; some blues stuff, some Chuck Berry, Solomon Burke’s ‘Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.’ I can’t remember who asked whom but we agreed to make it into a band.
“He stuck out, even then. He liked to wear bomber jackets and he’d got this big, blond, curly hair. We were working-class lads and he came from a completely different background to us. We used to have to go and pick him up on a Saturday night. I remember his mum was quite prim and his dad being an ex-sergeant major type. His dad seemed a nice chap but neither of them was at all supportive of what he was doing. They never came to see him play.”
Watching their son go off with yet another band, Plant’s parents tried one last time to reason with him. The fall-out resulting from this encounter led to him leaving home at seventeen. He went off to live with his new bassist Roger Beamer, whose parents ran a bed and breakfast down the road in Walsall.
At the beginning of 1966 the Tennessee Teens changed their name to Listen. The band members had also thought up nicknames for each other, although it seems unlikely this over-extended their imaginations. John Crutchley became “Crutch,” drummer Geoff Thompson’s bulk led to him being christened “Jumbo,” while the rationale behind making Roger Beamer “Chalky” and Plant becoming “Plonky” is lost to time.
In a short press biography they put together at the same time Plant listed his hobbies as motoring and listening to soul records. “Mod girls” and clothes were foremost among his likes, “phonies” his biggest dislike. He soon revealed a flair for publicity, too.
Plant fed a story to John Ogden, the pop columnist at local newspaper the Express & Star . He told Ogden he had won a dance competition judged by Cathy McGowan, the alluring host of TV pop show Ready Steady Go! Plant claimed McGowan had accepted an invitation to come and see his new band, and had then asked them to perform on her show. Listen, said Plant, had declined as the proposed date clashed with a gig—“And we don’t break bookings like that,” he nobly added. It was enough to get them into the paper, Ogden’s piece running on March 3, 1966, in the week the Rolling Stones topped the U.K. charts with “19th Nervous Breakdown.”
“They came into the office and we had a chat in the works canteen,” Ogden says. “It wasn’t at all surprising to me that Cathy McGowan would go for him—she wasn’t alone. He looked great. There was something special about Robert, although not everyone saw it at the time.”
Listen’s beginnings were otherwise decidedly small-scale. Fashioning themselves as a mod group, their first gigs were mostly in pubs such as the Ship and Rainbow and the Woolpack in Wolverhampton, alongside the now-traditional warm-up engagements on the Reagan circuit. Yet Plant had by this stage developed into an impressive performer. He had learned to better control his voice, although it remained very much a strident blues roar. And he had gained enough confidence to unveil the dance moves he had honed strutting his stuff at mod clubs.
“Oh, he was
With Bonham’s departure the Crawling King Snakes dissolved. Yet Plant would not have to wait long for his next gig. While DJ-ing at the Old Hill Plaza, he spotted a band called the Tennessee Teens. A three-piece, they played blues and Tamla Motown covers, and had recently returned from a resident club gig in the German city of Frankfurt. Plant introduced himself to their guitarist, John Crutchley.
“He asked me if he could sing with us,” Crutchley recalls. “That’s how it started. We were doing the Plaza three or four times a week; it would always be the last venue of two or three we’d do each night. When we got there, Robert began to get up and do a song with us; some blues stuff, some Chuck Berry, Solomon Burke’s ‘Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.’ I can’t remember who asked whom but we agreed to make it into a band.
“He stuck out, even then. He liked to wear bomber jackets and he’d got this big, blond, curly hair. We were working-class lads and he came from a completely different background to us. We used to have to go and pick him up on a Saturday night. I remember his mum was quite prim and his dad being an ex-sergeant major type. His dad seemed a nice chap but neither of them was at all supportive of what he was doing. They never came to see him play.”
Watching their son go off with yet another band, Plant’s parents tried one last time to reason with him. The fall-out resulting from this encounter led to him leaving home at seventeen. He went off to live with his new bassist Roger Beamer, whose parents ran a bed and breakfast down the road in Walsall.
At the beginning of 1966 the Tennessee Teens changed their name to Listen. The band members had also thought up nicknames for each other, although it seems unlikely this over-extended their imaginations. John Crutchley became “Crutch,” drummer Geoff Thompson’s bulk led to him being christened “Jumbo,” while the rationale behind making Roger Beamer “Chalky” and Plant becoming “Plonky” is lost to time.
In a short press biography they put together at the same time Plant listed his hobbies as motoring and listening to soul records. “Mod girls” and clothes were foremost among his likes, “phonies” his biggest dislike. He soon revealed a flair for publicity, too.
Plant fed a story to John Ogden, the pop columnist at local newspaper the Express & Star . He told Ogden he had won a dance competition judged by Cathy McGowan, the alluring host of TV pop show Ready Steady Go! Plant claimed McGowan had accepted an invitation to come and see his new band, and had then asked them to perform on her show. Listen, said Plant, had declined as the proposed date clashed with a gig—“And we don’t break bookings like that,” he nobly added. It was enough to get them into the paper, Ogden’s piece running on March 3, 1966, in the week the Rolling Stones topped the U.K. charts with “19th Nervous Breakdown.”
“They came into the office and we had a chat in the works canteen,” Ogden says. “It wasn’t at all surprising to me that Cathy McGowan would go for him—she wasn’t alone. He looked great. There was something special about Robert, although not everyone saw it at the time.”
Listen’s beginnings were otherwise decidedly small-scale. Fashioning themselves as a mod group, their first gigs were mostly in pubs such as the Ship and Rainbow and the Woolpack in Wolverhampton, alongside the now-traditional warm-up engagements on the Reagan circuit. Yet Plant had by this stage developed into an impressive performer. He had learned to better control his voice, although it remained very much a strident blues roar. And he had gained enough confidence to unveil the dance moves he had honed strutting his stuff at mod clubs.
“Oh, he was
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