‘No Quarter: Jimmy Page And Robert Plant UnLedded’: How The Led Zeppelin Legends Reclaimed Their Past

During their Led Zeppelin days, Page and Plant had recorded versions of two classic songs, Four Sticks and Friends, with indigenous musicians in Bombay (now Mumbai), in India, and both musicians viewed the MTV UnLedded project – and its subsequent spin-off album, No Quarter – as a way to reopen doors and cross-pollinate musical genres. Consequently, they chose to follow in the footsteps of jazz great Ornette Coleman and The Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones, and record with musicians from a Moroccan ethnic group – in this case, the Gnawa.

“We’d never met the Gnawa when we went there, but they were very patient, and smiling is a great currency,” Plant recalled in an interview with Rolling Stone. “There was a lot of that going on. Establishing some kind of spiritual relationship comes when you are making the music to some degree. But these people are spiritual tradesmen, so they know how far to go to get the results they need – and what they were doing with us was having a morning jam. And that’s about as far as it went.”

Nonetheless, this impromptu meeting of minds resulted in some fascinating new music. Page’s guitar and Plant’s keening vocals meshed seamlessly with the Moroccan drummers and a guembri (bass lute) player on the acoustic-based numbers City Don’t Cry, Wonderful One and Wah Wah, while a fourth new song, Yallah, was built on drum loops and a snaking Page guitar riff that sounded like vintage Led Zeppelin.

Indeed, Page and Plant were so pleased by this initial Moroccan foray that they even began to question whether they needed MTV’s backing. In the end, however, the desire to revisit the past while looking to the future won out.

Despite wondering whether “it might be nice to just make a new record and be counted along with everybody else in a totally contemporary form without using the past and reiterating it”, as Plant later put it, the duo were eventually lured by “working with the Egyptians and making Kashmir, Four Sticks and Friends the way we’d always dreamed of”.

The MTV ‘UnLedded’ special: “Jimmy and I went in a room together and it was back”

The “Egyptians” Plant referred to were an Egyptian orchestra who – along with a Moroccan string band – were drafted in to supplement the rock ensemble the duo assembled to nail the MTV UnLedded TV recordings in August 1994. This group primarily featured musicians from Plant’s solo band, among them bassist Charlie Jones and drummer Michael Lee, though they were further augmented by the former Cure guitarist Porl Thompson, organist Ed Shearmur, hurdy-gurdy man Nigel Eaton, and Jim Sutherland on mandolin and bodhran.

Footage for the UnLedded TV special was largely shot in the London Weekend Television studio, with some performances filmed in a slate quarry in North Wales. The music was both heady and sublime, and all the Led Zeppelin classics the band revisited were easily recognisable yet decisively reinvented.

Indeed, some of the songs’ new arrangements were radically different from their studio originals, with the Houses Of The Holy track No Quarter being stripped back to its acoustic backbone and Presence’s hard-hitting Nobody’s Fault But Mine emerging as a redemptive, drone-laden blues. Elsewhere, the likes of Led Zeppelin III’s Since I’ve Been Loving You, Led Zeppelin II’s heartfelt Thank You and an astonishingly intense version of III’s Gallows Pole were fitted with superchargers and equalled the impact of their fabled originals.

Elsewhere, Indian vocalist Najma Akhtar took on Sandy Denny’s mantle with aplomb on a full-blooded run-through of The Battle Of Evermore, from Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album, while Physical Graffiti’s already epic Kashmir was further enhanced by layers of swirling strings, Bedouin percussion and Page briefly quoting another Zeppelin classic, Black Dog, while bringing the duo’s historic MTV UnLedded broadcast to a suitably monumental denouement.

The ‘No Quarter’ album: “One of the most ambitious and mind-altering experiences”

First broadcast on 14 October 1994, Page and Plant’s 90-minute MTV UnLedded extravaganza was an absolute triumph. It had been billed as arguably the rock reunion of the decade, and it didn’t disappoint. Tracking down the exact viewing figures proves elusive, but the show is generally believed to have drawn the largest audience of any of the MTV Unplugged specials, and the majority of Page and Plant’s performance found a spot on that same month’s No Quarter: Jimmy Page And Robert Plant UnLedded: 80 minutes’ worth of compelling music which was hungrily embraced by fans old and new.

Later appearing in numerous publications’ end-of-year album polls, No Quarter also connected on the international stage, going Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic, pulling in a clutch of gold and platinum discs, and priming Page and Plant to reconvene for 1998’s high-profile, Steve Albini-produced studio album, Walking Into Clarksdale. Indeed, the fact that the UnLedded project allowed both these legendary musicians to align past, present and future wasn’t lost on either of them.

“The will and the eagerness with UnLedded were fantastic and [Page] was really creative,” Plant enthused in a 2009 interview with Uncut magazine. “Jimmy and I went in a room together and it was back. His riffs were spectacular. To take it as far as we did, and the tour we did – it’s been one of the most ambitious and mind-altering experiences.”

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