Flaxen-tressed rock lothario in roots music shock

Ah, more rock legends. Some would say that this one stands as tall in the pantheon as Neil Young and has, arguably, moved around his musical styles more frequently and with greater flexibility than the previously experienced wonder. Others might argue that he has a lot to answer for with the increasingly hysterical (how ever you want to interpret that word) rock behemoth Led Zeppelin leading astray all sorts of impressionable youth and other musicians. Yes it’s our old friend Percy aka Robert Plant who has taken to the road in the civilising company of Alison Krauss and T Bone Burnett to perform their blend of roots and old classics to the masses. You will recall that they have a mega selling album out. Which may explain the choice of venues for this tour, most of them soul-less hangar-dromes, which may get the punters in but don’t lend themselves to the sort of music heard on the album. Maybe they were the bookings for the rumoured but so far unrealised Zeppelin reunion.
Anyway, off to the Cardiff International Arena for one of the early nights of the Europe end of their tour. Now the CIA – as it’s known – is a curious building being coloured an imaginative shade of brown on the outside (imaginative in the sense that you have to ask what on earth they were thinking of to paint it such a depressing colour) and being a vast open space on the inside. We were positioned almost level with the side of the stage and were able to appreciate the full enormity of the place.
But enough, onto the music. A brief blast of the support act had us scurrying to the bar until the main act appeared. Unfortunately if you’re playing an enormodome you need to work very hard on getting the acoustics right and particularly so if your line up includes fiddle, banjo and mandolin. Sadly they hadn’t got it fixed. But looked at differently this worked fantastically well on some of the ethereal Alison Krauss solo tracks – Down To The River To Pray was unbelievably haunting and magical as the echo floated around behind the voices. But on the other stuff it sounded less good. The album was all fine, the old Zeppelin tracks even worked well although the tribute to Sandy Denny was handled better on the burst of Matty Groves that materialised out of the ether (there’s those weird acoustics again – but I hold that it hadn’t been specifically set to produce that effect) rather than the specific dedication to Ms Denny.
Ultimately I have to resort to ambivalence. The band (fine performances from all but special mentions to T Bone Burnett himself, Buddy Miller and Stuart Duncan), Alison Krauss, even tea-swilling Robert Plant were all great. The venue was as uninvolving as it is possible to be with them on stage and us in our seats and a chill barrier between the two and this all fed back to the stage and you felt they were doing their jobs because they couldn’t feed off anything coming from the crowd and so there was no rapport. If it had been in an intimate – or even something half the size – venue then all this would have been resolved. But they wouldn’t have made as much money.