Robert Plant - The Boardwalk, Sheffield, Britain, 9-25-1999

The other day, I posted a Robert Plant concert that mostly consisted of him singing fairly obscure cover songs. That reminded me of this concert, which entirely consists of Plant singing fairly obscure cover songs. There isn't a single Led Zeppelin or Plant solo song in sight, unless one counts "We've Gotta Groove," which is a song that Led Zeppelin covered and put on their album "Coda."

The backstory behind this is fairly interesting. Around 1967, a year before Plant joined Led Zeppelin, he was in a band called the "Band of Joy." They mostly did cover songs, especially folk rock from the West Coast of the US. They never had much success, and only recorded a few songs in the studio. By 1999, it seems Plant was tired of being a musical superstar and playing his same hits over and over in concerts. instead, he got involved with musical programs at Kidderminister College. That's a pretty obscure college in Britain, but it's very near where he grew up. He even briefly took chartered accountancy classes there before dropping out and becoming a musician. 

The main connection was that guitarist Kevyn Gammond had been in the Band of Joy with Plant in the 1960s, but went on to become a professor in the Kidderminister College music department. Plant ended up forming a band with Grammond and other professors and students from the college. They called themselves the "Priory of Brion." The name combined "Priory of Zion," a supposed ancient French secret society made famous in Dan Brown novels like "The Da Vinci Code," with "The Life of Brian," a classic Monty Python movie.

At first, in 1999, Priory of Brion was very low key. They played small venues in Britain of only a few hundred people. They were billed just as "Priory of Brion," so few knew that it was really Plant's latest band. They only played cover songs of the type the Band of Joy played back in the 1960s. But the word about them slowly grew, and they began playing larger venues. By 2000, Plant's involvement was well known, and the band played big festivals and the like. But still, they only did relatively obscure covers. 

Plant broke up the band by the end of 2000, and he has never released any material by the band, either live or in the studio (with an obscure exception I'll detail below). However, he did carry over some of the songs with his next band, the Strange Sensations. And when he put out his next studio album in 2002, "Dreamland," there were some Priory of Brion covers on it, including two songs played here, "Morning Dew" and "Darkness, Darkness."

So this is a relatively lost chapter of his music career, but a particularly interesting one, I think. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there is only one Priory of Brion bootleg with excellent soundboard sound quality, this one. I wish there were more, because the band played at least 40 different cover songs, and there are only 17 here. The band also recorded three of those songs in the studio, but they've only come out on extremely obscure various artists compilations that were linked to benefits related to Kidderminister College. 

Although this bootleg generally sounds great, it did have some flaws. I had to edit four songs enough that I put "[Edit]" in their names. For instance, "Morning Dew" had a blast of loud noise in the middle of it that lasted a couple of seconds. I managed to patch it up with a section from elsewhere in the song. "Early in the Morning" had some very small skips in it, some of them less than a second. I closed them as best I could, and patched up the second where most of them were. So it went for the others. And some songs ended abruptly, with no applause. So I added applause taken from the ends of other songs to those.

However, there was one serious flaw I couldn't fix. The last song, "High School Confidential" is brutally cut off. It lasts less than a minute. And this was a song played as a special request for a friend. I couldn't find any other instances of Plant ever singing it, so there was nothing I could do to fix the short length. I considered dropping it altogether, but Plant had some interesting comments leading up to it, and it is super rare, so I kept it in.

But that meant the concert ended on a disappointing note. So I added one more song to the end, taken from a different Priory of Brion concert (Rome, Italy, in September 2000). The sound quality is worse than the rest, but still decent. It's one of my favorite obscurities, "Flames," originally by Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera. Hopefully with that song, the concert ends in a more satisfying manner.

Plant must have particularly liked that song too, because it was one of only three songs Priory of Brion recorded in the studio, as I mentioned above. I recently discovered recordings of those three songs. I'll probably add them to a stray tracks collection someday, but in the meantime I'm including them as bonus tracks here. They're all from really obscure compilation albums released in the early 2000s, but I've put 2000 for the year in the mp3 tag, because that's when they were recorded. As if they weren't obscure enough already, for the song "Flames," Plant used the pseudonym "Johnny Volcano!"

This album is an hour and 20 minutes long. That does include the extra song from a different concert at the end, but it does not the three studio bonus tracks.

Here's a list of the original artists for each song (some numbers are skipped due to the talking tracks):

02 Season of the Witch - Donovan
03 Morning Dew - Bonnie Dobson
04 A House Is Not a Motel - Love
05 Wondrous Place - Billy Fury
07 Girl from the North Country - Bob Dylan
08 If I Were a Carpenter - Tim Hardin
10 Darkness, Darkness - Youngbloods
12 Think - "5" Royales / James Brown
14 Early in the Morning - Ray Charles
16 We're Gonna Groove - Ben E. King
17 Baby Please Don't Go - Big Joe Williams / Them
19 No Regrets - Tom Rush
20 Gloria -Them
21 Trouble in Mind - Richard M. Jones / Muddy Waters
22 Evil Woman - Spooky Tooth / Canned Heat
24 High School Confidential - Jerry Lee Lewis
26 Flames - Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera

Here's the usual song list:

01 talk (Robert Plant)
02 Season of the Witch (Robert Plant)
03 Morning Dew [Edit] (Robert Plant)
04 A House Is Not a Motel (Robert Plant)
05 Wondrous Place (Robert Plant)
06 talk (Robert Plant)
07 Girl from the North Country (Robert Plant)
08 If I Were a Carpenter (Robert Plant)
09 talk (Robert Plant)
10 Darkness, Darkness (Robert Plant)
11 talk (Robert Plant)
12 Think [Edit] (Robert Plant)
13 talk (Robert Plant)
14 Early in the Morning [Edit] (Robert Plant)
15 talk (Robert Plant)
16 We're Gonna Groove (Robert Plant)
17 Baby Please Don't Go (Robert Plant)
18 talk (Robert Plant)
19 No Regrets (Robert Plant)
20 Gloria (Robert Plant)
21 Trouble in Mind [Edit] (Robert Plant)
22 Evil Woman (Robert Plant)
23 talk (Robert Plant)
24 High School Confidential [Incomplete] (Robert Plant)
25 talk (Robert Plant)
26 Flames (Robert Plant)

Morning Dew (Robert Plant)
Evil Woman (Robert Plant)
Flames (Robert Plant)

https://www.imagenetz.de/bGAKS

I couldn't find any really good pictures of Plant in concert in 1999. This one is from August 2000, in Belgium, when he was still backed by the Priory of Brion.