Technically speaking, lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar represents Robert Plant’s recorded debut with The Sensational Space Shifters. However, most of the personnel involved had already forged a strong bond as The Strange Sensation, with whom the ex-Led Zeppelin legend had recorded two acclaimed sets, Dreamland and Mighty ReArranger, during the early 2000s. With this new album, however, the restless, nomadic Plant underwent yet another audacious reinvention, bending sound to his own ends…
Listen to ‘lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar’ here.
The backstory: “There’s no boundary where we can and cannot go”
Released in September 2014, lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar arrived in the wake of Plant’s two recent Americana-flavoured releases, 2007’s Grammy-winning Alison Krauss collaboration, Raising Sand, and 2010’s Band Of Joy, yet lullaby… again found him changing tack. Indeed, as he revealed in interviews at the time, Plant felt emboldened by The Sensational Space Shifters, who offered him the freedom to pursue any creative direction he so desired.
“There’s no real boundary to where we can and cannot go,” he enthused in an interview with Uncut magazine. “There are cues within the songs and yet the contributors are all the players. It’s not like a band where there’s a guitarist and a bass player, a drummer and a singer. It’s like the give and take between [Liam] “Skin” [Tyson guitarist] and Justin [Adams, guitar], it’s magnificent.” Also praising his rhythm section – keyboardist Johnny Baggott, bassist Billy Fuller and drummer Dave Smith – Plant declared himself to be in “a real, real excitement zone” with his new band.
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Perhaps because they had such disparate backgrounds, The Sensational Space Shifters collectively offered something significantly removed from rock’s norm. Another key member, multi-instrumentalist Jules Camara, hailed from The Gambia, in West Africa, while Tyson had featured in Britpop-era Liverpudlians Cast, and Adams had made up part of the second incarnation of Jah Wobble’s Invaders Of The Heart. Whether by design or not, the latter outfit’s adventurous, world-music-inclined sound provided a template of sorts for lullaby and…The Ceaseless Roar, giving Plant’s long-standing love of the British folk tradition a unique edge.
The album: “I wanted to carry on from the ‘Band Of Joy’ record”
The headiness of the Shifters’ fusion-based sound immediately made its mark on lullaby…’s opening track, a radically overhauled cover of the traditional folk song Little Maggie. As Plant explained, it was chosen to kick off the record for a reason.
