Musician

There's a similarity between European and North African folk musics.

I realized what Led Zeppelin was about around the end of our first U.S. tour. We started off not even on the bill in Denver, and by the time we got to New York we were second to Iron Butterfly, and they didn't want to go on!

There's no point stepping up to the golden platform if you're going to repeat yourself.

If I didn't do what I do, I wouldn't be as young as I am.

You would find in a lot of Zep stuff that the riff was the juggernaut that careered through and I worked the lyrics around this.

I wanted my voice to be a tenor sax, really.

I'm just lucky because my kids are grown-up - I love them, very proud of them, and we are in close contact as big-time friends, but they don't need me that much now and I can actually enjoy this wonderful world of music.

So for a long time I closed my eyes to the possibility of America having a white voice.

I can't moan about any of it. I had a great time in the goldfish bowl.

It's a two-dimensional gig being a singer, and you can get lost in your own tedium and repetition.

We are trying to communicate a fulfilled ideal. Does anybody remember laughter?

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

All over the world, the idea of creating an melange of international musics, it's a very healthy thing.

I don't know how much more expressive you can get than being a rock and roll singer.

I like to comprehend more or less everything around me - apart from the creation of my music. It's an obsessive character trait that's getting worse. I don't switch the light on and off 15 times before I leave the room yet, but something's going wrong.

You have to ask these questions: who pays the piper, and what is valuable in this life?

The kind of vocal exaggeration that I developed was based on what key songs were in.

I know that bands that haven't put out a record for 10 years are playing to 20,000 people a night. But that's not the achievement.

Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.

There have been people I've warmed to over the years but, as the situation I'm in is so fleeting and transient, I've always known it's going to be over kind of real quick.