Album Review: Robert Plant, "Manic Nirvana"

You can't keep a good man down and that applies to Mr. Robert Plant. Percy's back with a follow-up to Now And Zen. This isn’t predictable, radio-friendly corporate rock. Percy might be on the wrong side of 40 but he's always been willing to experiment and tune into a diverse range of styles.

One moment we're presented with a series of counter-melodies, then next some stop/start funk-rock workouts like Your Ma Said You Cried In Your Sleep Last Night…and then it's Woodstock revisited for Tie Dye On The Highway, which is very clever and well executed.

Percy also makes a few passing nods, usually humorous ones, in the direction of Led Zeppelin. The atmospheric Anniversary of Love's Decay, one of the album's outstanding tracks, includes a military snare-drum, feverish blues guitar and Plant's vocals become seriously anguished. Plant's still one of the leading exponents of the epic as a track like Watching You testifies – complete with the sampled Arabian chants! Percy Plant also produced his album and he creates a rich, cinematic soundscape. Some credit is to Phil Johnstone, Plant's keyboardist and co-writer on much of the album. You may find that this platter isn't immediately accessible, but stick with it and it will reveal its many treasures.

Mark Liddell
Riff Raff
May, 1990

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!