Robert Plant- Rockin’ at Midnight- Birmingham UK 9-85

When Robert Plant performed this toe-tappin’, finger snappin’ “Rockin’ at Midnight” in concert in Birmingham England in September 1985, he had already successfully lifted the curtain on Act Two of his lengthy post-Led Zeppelin career. Midway through the Eighties Robert Plant was trying to outrun the long global shadow cast by serving at the front of the incomparable Led Zeppelin for a decade. That shadow turned out to be the size and speed like some rock solar eclipse, from which Plant would struggle to escape for the rest of the Eighties. Robert seemed positively liberated by the 1984 one-off EP project The Honeydrippers precisely because there could be no comparison of their big band horn-driven swing to Zeppelin’s Hammer of the Gods. -Redbeard