Stairway to Heaven: the song Robert Plant stopped singing

Some songs fade out of a band's set. "Stairway to Heaven" was the other way round: for nine years it was the song Led Zeppelin built the end of the night around, and then its singer spent most of the next four decades declining to sing it. This is the live life of the song, from a cold debut in Belfast to a six-figure charity bid in 2023.

A cold start in Belfast

The song was begun in December 1970 at Island's Basing Street studios in London. Robert Plant wrote the lyrics at Headley Grange, the Hampshire house where the band were working with a mobile studio, and Jimmy Page went back to Island to record the guitar solo. Plant later told Rolling Stone that he and Page had got "the themes and thread of it" at Headley Grange one evening while John Bonham and John Paul Jones were out.

Its first audience heard it months before the record existed. On 5 March 1971, at the Ulster Hall in Belfast, Led Zeppelin played it sixth in a 13-song set, straight after "Dazed and Confused". The band's own site notes that the night was also the first public performance of "Black Dog", "Going to California" and "Rock and Roll". Page played a Gibson double-neck so he could switch between 12 and 6 strings, and Jones covered the recorder parts on a Mellotron. The reception, as Jones remembered it for BBC Radio 2, was not ecstatic:

“They were all bored to tears waiting to hear something they knew”

— John Paul Jones, on the Belfast debut, BBC Radio 2

The untitled fourth album came out on 8 November 1971. "Stairway" was never sold as a single at the time: the band never authorised an edit, and their manager, Peter Grant, turned down Atlantic Records' requests in 1972 and 1973. There was only a promotional single for American radio. The song's first chart placing came 36 years later, in November 2007, when downloads took it to No. 37 in the UK.

Every night for nine years

setlist.fm logs 269 Led Zeppelin performances of the song, from Belfast in 1971 to a single night in London in 2007. Its archive of the band's 1970s shows is incomplete, so that is a floor rather than a career total, but the pattern is clear: in every touring year it appears in almost every setlist on record. In 1973 it is in all 61. Wikipedia's summary is that it was played at almost every Led Zeppelin concert after Belfast, left out only on the rare nights when a show was cut short. By 1975 it was the finale.

Berlin, 7 July 1980

The band's last tour was a short one: 14 shows across Europe between 17 June and 7 July 1980. "Stairway" closed the main set every night except one. In Nuremberg on 27 June, the show ended after the third song when John Bonham collapsed on stage. The final night, at the Eissporthalle in Berlin on 7 July 1980, ended the main set with "Stairway to Heaven" before encores of "Rock and Roll" and "Whole Lotta Love". The band's official site lists it simply as the final Led Zeppelin performance. Bonham died later that year, during rehearsals for an American tour.

“The band didn't exist the minute Bonzo had gone, to me.”

— Robert Plant, Rolling Stone, 1988

The reunions that went wrong

The first time the surviving members played it again was at Live Aid, at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia on 13 July 1985: Page, Plant and Jones, with Phil Collins and Tony Thompson on drums and Paul Martinez on bass, playing "Rock and Roll", "Whole Lotta Love" and "Stairway to Heaven". There had been little rehearsal with the two drummers, Page's guitar was out of tune and Plant's voice was hoarse. Plant was blunt about it three years later:

“there are a lot more important things to want than Page and I staggering around in Philadelphia, me hoarse and him out of tune.”

— Robert Plant, Rolling Stone, 1988

In 2004 the three refused to let the performance appear on the Live Aid DVD, saying the sound and reproduction had been "sub-standard". Their second attempt, at Atlantic Records' 40th anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden on 14 May 1988, had John Bonham's son Jason on drums, and ended a five-song set with "Stairway".

"I wouldn't dream of it"

Two months before that show, Rolling Stone asked Plant whether he had considered doing "Stairway to Heaven" on his solo tour.

“I wouldn't dream of it. I actually wouldn't enjoy doing it. I could do it, I suppose, with Page now and again.”

— Robert Plant, Rolling Stone, 24 March 1988

In the same interview he called it "a nice, pleasant, well-meaning, naive little song, very English", and said it was not the definitive Led Zeppelin song: "Kashmir" was. When Page and Plant reunited in the 1990s, their No Quarter concerts and tours played most of the famous Zeppelin songs, but not that one. Rolling Stone records a single exception, an acoustic version on Japanese television in November 1994, and Page would tease its opening notes at the end of "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You". Page, meanwhile, had played it on his own as an instrumental: setlist.fm logs 44 times between 1983, starting at the ARMS charity concert at the Royal Albert Hall, and 1988.

The O2, 10 December 2007

The one full Led Zeppelin concert after 1980 was the Ahmet Ertegun Tribute at The O2 in London on 10 December 2007, with Jason Bonham on drums again. "Stairway" was the 11th of 16 songs, between "Dazed and Confused" and "The Song Remains the Same". The show was released in 2012 as Celebration Day, and Wikipedia records it as the last time the three surviving members performed together. On setlist.fm it is still the most recent Led Zeppelin "Stairway".

Watching it from the balcony

In December 2012, Jones, Page and Plant were honoured at the Kennedy Center in Washington. The finale of their tribute, broadcast on CBS on 26 December, was Heart's Ann and Nancy Wilson singing "Stairway to Heaven", with Jason Bonham on drums, strings, horns and choirs. Ultimate Classic Rock described it as "a performance that had Robert Plant on the verge of tears". Ten years later, Plant explained to Vulture what it had felt like:

“I'm now a voyeur. I'm not responsible for it anymore. I'm not in guitar shops being told not to do it. I'm not going down the aisle at a wedding playing it with a flute. I love the song.”

— Robert Plant, Vulture, January 2023

The lawsuit

The song also spent six years in court. In May 2014, the trustee of a trust set up by Randy Wolfe, Spirit's guitarist, sued, claiming the opening borrowed from Spirit's instrumental "Taurus", on the band's 1968 debut album. A jury found for Led Zeppelin on 23 June 2016. An appeals panel ordered a new trial in 2018, but in March 2020 the full Ninth Circuit court ruled for the band again, and on 5 October 2020 the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case, ending it. The appeals court's opinion opens:

“Stairway to Heaven has been called the greatest rock song of all time. Yet, hyperbole aside, nearly 40 years after the English rock band Led Zeppelin released its hit recording, the song is not impervious to copyright challenges.”

— US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 9 March 2020

Once more, for charity

On 21 October 2023, at a fundraiser for the Cancer Awareness Trust at Soho Farmhouse, organised by the former Duran Duran guitarist Andy Taylor, Plant sang "Stairway to Heaven" for the first time since the O2 show, sixteen years earlier. It happened because a guest paid for it. The band's guitarist, Kenwyn House, told Led Zep News:

“Someone bid a huge amount of money for him to sing this song... That raised a six figure sum for the charity, that one song.”

— Kenwyn House, via Planet Rock, October 2023

It is the only performance setlist.fm credits to Robert Plant alone. Asked by Rolling Stone a few months later whether that had been the last time, he said it probably was.

So does Plant hate it?

No: he says the opposite. What he has said, more than once, is that the words no longer belong to him. In 2019 he told Ultimate Classic Rock's radio show that the musical construction was "very, very good", but:

“Lyrically, now, I can't relate to it, because it was so long ago.”

— Robert Plant, Ultimate Classic Rock, November 2019

That is the whole arc in one line. The song was played almost every night for nine years by a band that, to its singer, stopped existing in 1980, and the words were written more than half a century ago. Other people sing it now; Heart did, in front of him. The man who wrote the words, by his own account, is happy to watch.

Plant isn't the only one to step away from a signature song. Radiohead haven't played “Creep” since 2018, and Depeche Mode left “Useless” out of their sets for 19 years.