Page and Plant traveled from Great Britain to Africa on No Quarter
By NICK TAVARES
STATIC and FEEDBACK Editor
As hard as habits can be to break, I really try not to get stuck on the same musical roads.
It’s not easy, though. I have my favorites and my comfort zones, and as much as I try to remain open to new sounds, sometimes those inversions or reinventions of the familiar be more difficult to grasp.
So it went for years with No Quarter, the “Unledded” concert special and album by the then-recently reunited Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, taking their first real steps together on record since Led Zeppelin’s untimely demise 14 years earlier. 1994 saw the duo approached by MTV to record an entry in their Unplugged series, but they went a step further in an effort to break down some of their classic material while also carving out a creative future for themselves outside of their towering triumphs with the band.
For me, this was a music club purchase, one of five or seven CDs bought in bulk for probably $7.99 and another notch in the Zeppelin collection belt. Date this to around the late 1990s, when 1998’s Walking into Clarksdale had already been released and “Most High” was kicking ass all over radio. This album shows up, free of context other than it’s a live album with half of the band that is eating up most of the obsessive corners of my brain. And I play it and I think it’s okay. It’s not bad, but it’s not quite right. The songs don’t sound the same. Plant’s voice is different. The new songs don’t hit as well as anything on In Through The Out Door, even.
It’s a curiosity that I had on my shelf for years, played a couple of times, then filed away. I’ve had a number of these, to be honest, but most of them found their way out of the house, off the shelf to be given away or sold in bulk. But No Quarter lingered.
From then to now, I’ve grown to appreciate Walking into Clarksdale even more for the dark, determined statement of progress it is. Two artists with an impossible legacy to live down, blazing forward to make new music on their own terms. As their producer, the late Steve Albini, noted, “the end result, the record, was inevitably going to be compared to Led Zeppelin records — that is, inevitably gonna be held up against half a dozen of the best records EVER — so I think in that sense it couldn't help but disappoint some people. But it wasn't made for them; it was made for Jimmy and Robert.”
For all the people that just want Led Zeppelin or the closest they can get to it, the music is still there, still in print and available and accessible to anyone who wants to devote the time. But the two artists here have this entire body of work worth exploring here. And much of it is fascinating. Yet I had this album filed away gathering dust the entire time.
So one day, I saw the DVD of Unledded on sale — the remastered 2004 version — and I picked it up. And again, I filed it away on the shelf, saving it for some quiet Saturday or Sunday night, intent on giving it the time it was never really given by me in the past. Of course, that was two years ago, and last night, I finally pulled it down and put it on and watched it front-to-back.
And it was incredible. In the way that scattered YouTube clips can be fun but rarely fully satisfying, it was remarkable to see how the story the laid out, traveling from Wales to London to Marrakesh and back, served as a shorthand of their travels in and out of Zeppelin.
In Marrakesh, “The Truth Explodes,” or “Yallah” as I knew it on the original release, is a wild romp through this Moroccan city square, with just Plant and Page making a tremendous racket through a drum machine, a Les Paul and whatever theremin-esque gadgets Page had running through his rig. The riff is mean and Plant is at the perfect crossroads of his Golden God era and his later treks through the road less traveled, all performed with glee and abandon.
This is the more reckless of the Moroccan selections, with Page and Plant seated and in much more traditional territory for “City Don’t Cry” and “Wah Wah” on the video release. And back in London, they take some more new material along with more Zeppelin tracks put through this blender of their own creation.
The band assembled is a marvel. Watching Michael Lee just gleefully thrash those drums during “Four Sticks” or on the climax of “The Rain Song” adds so much context to the chemistry of the musicians. Seeing the faces on the Egyptian Ensemble or the London Metropolitan Orchestra — at one point almost delightedly laughing while the core band extended “Kashmir” with pieces of “Black Dog” — drove home what a special and unique moment this was in the careers of both musicians.
And I thought back to how, at 16 years old or so, I did not understand what Plant was doing at the beginning of “Kashmir,” and how, with minimal accompaniment, he was able to sing the beginning of the song in an almost devotional, sufi style and do it competently, bringing the song from Morocco back to near its namesake, in what feels like a sincere attempt to bring all these worlds together through music.
Plant’s career since the Page/Plant partnership ended has only furthered this, drawing from all these pockets of the globe to create a blend of east and west, folk and rock, delicate and thundering, and I’ve been on record with the notion that, of all the legends in and around his generation, his latter act has been my favorite. His records have been restless and full of adventure, happy to hint at his past without leaning too heavily on the hammer of the gods and all that.
I wasn’t ready for this all those years ago, though. I was still in the throes of Physical Graffiti and in total awe of this band that seemed to exist for eternity and also in the blink of an eye. I mean, I still am. But now, I’m much more open to traveling all the paths diverging from that incredible road.
Aug. 11, 2025
Email Nick Tavares at nick@staticandfeedback.com