Robert Plant: What Led to Him Performing ‘Stairway’ After 16 Years

Robert Plant made headlines this week after he performed "Stairway To Heaven" for the first time in 16 years. Now, we're learning more about what led to this performance.

The performance, itself, took place on October 21 at an event organized by Duran Duran's Andy Taylor to benefit The Cancer Awareness Trust. In November 2022, Taylor shared he was battling stage 4 metastatic prostate cancer.

Guitarist Kenwyn House performed with Plant during this charity event. He told LedZepNews he was recruited for the event on October 15 after Taylor injured his hand, leaving the event in need of another guitarist. The next day, House met with the other musicians performing at the event to rehearse. Not only did he find out he had to learn a bunch of songs for the event, this is when he learned one of those songs was "Stairway To Heaven."

So, what led to the inclusion of "Stairway" into the charity set? House revealed, "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."

The iconic Led Zeppelin frontman has an interesting relationship with "Stairway to Heaven" decades after its release. He reflected on it in an interview with Vulture published in January. In this interview, he touched on watching Heart's Ann and Nancy Wilson and Jason Bonham perform the song at the 2012 Kennedy Center Honors.

"It's just a magnificent performance to watch, and it kills me every time," Plant said. "It kills me in two or three different ways."

The feeling of awe is a mutual one. In December 2020, Vulture asked Ann Wilson about the magical cover. She said, "I actually felt every second of it as a real, not to overstate it, but pretty damn close to orgasmic in terms of bliss. I felt wide awake and alive, and I felt the emotional content of the song all the way down to the ground.

Led Zeppelin and their catalog as a whole have become more beloved and revered with time as they've been passed down through generations and become standards for which future bands are measured.

So, how do you honor one of the greatest, most influential bands of all time? Hunker down with a fifth of Jack Daniel's, a 2-liter of Coke and dive headfirst into the "Zep-a-Thon." Dubbed so by Jack Black when the band received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2012, the "Zep-a-Thon" is a musical binge session where you listen to all of Zeppelin's eight studio albums (plus the 1982 compilation album Coda) in one sitting.

"Led Zeppelin: The greatest rock and roll band of all time," said Black. "Better than The Beatles, better than the Stones, even better than Tenacious D."

Black continued, "If you don't agree with me, it's because you never did the 'Zeppelin Marathon.' The 'Zep-a-Thon' is when you sit your ass down and listen to all nine Zep albums in a row ... [It's] the thing every true fan must do at least once in their lifetime. The pilgrimage to heavy metal Mecca."

For the author, this binge wasn't all for pleasure, even though it was oddly fulfilling. The purpose of doing this was for research in order to rank all 92 original Zeppelin tracks.

Exhausting? Yes. A bit much? Maybe, but crazier things have likely been committed in the name of Zeppelin throughout the past five decades. We're positive a simple Google search will yield many things that prove this statement correct. However, we're almost too afraid even to find out what those things are.

Where do your favorite Zeppelin tracks rank? Scroll through the gallery below to find out!

Additional song descriptions by Brian Ives.