By Martin Popoff

Much to my amusement, a couple weeks back I found out that semi-legendary proto-hard rockers DIRTY TRICKS, who recorded three hard-hitting albums for Polydor from ’75 through ’77, are running around the UK – full bloody lineup intact – as STAIRWAY TO ZEPPELIN, the nation’s premiere LED ZEPPELIN tribute act!

“We’ll just keep playing, basically,” laughs vocalist Robert Planet, a.k.a. Kenny Stewart, on plans for his thriving and derived rock combo. “We are booked up all of this year, and we’re starting to book work for next year as well. So yeah, we’re just constantly on the road basically. Sometimes to Ireland and into Europe as well. We’re just busy, busy guys (laughs).”

How deep into the catalogue do you guys go? Have you played almost everything by this point?

“Well, we’ve done all of the big numbers. Terry plays keyboards now as well, so we’re doing ‘Kashmir’ and ‘No Quarter’. These are the two big main numbers. All the stuff you see in the DVDs and everything, we’re doing all of that as well. We have a little acoustic section as well, where we sit down and do the acoustic set. Terry is playing the mandolin as well, so we’re doing two or three acoustic numbers, ‘Going To California’, ‘Bron-Y-Aur Stomp’, ‘That’s The Way’, and sometimes ‘Tangerine’; it depends on the audience.”

It’s hard to believe that if Robert hasn’t been able to sing Zeppelin (since about, oh… 1976), Kenny could do it! “No, no problems at all,” muses Stewart. “Basically what I do, is if we have 22 songs to sing, I’ll go in and practice 32, and then there are the 22 that come easy (laughs). No, no problem with the vocals on any night, except one night when I had a very bad dose of the flu. But it’s been OK, for eight years, no problem. If you think about it, the connection is… we were sometimes that kind of band in Dirty Tricks anyway. Because everybody, you have a band like that who has a singer who… it was all high register stuff anyway, wasn’t it? Bands back then, they didn’t seem to sing out of their boots or sing like grunge, it was always a high-pitched kind of vocal, with lots of range. So it kind of came pretty easy to me, really. I didn’t really sort of think too much about it at that time. We just said let’s do Led Zeppelin, rehearsed it and did it.”

And even more bizarrely, intimates Kenny, “You know something? We’ve never played… in the eight years that we’ve been doing this, we haven’t played a Dirty Tricks number. Even in doing a sound check. Would you believe that? That’s unbelievable is that, when you think about it.”

And that’s likely not changing any time soon. “Yeah, yeah, we’re really busy. I think we’ve got four weeks off in August. But there’s stuff coming in all the time. What you see there is what we have today, but there will be stuff coming in next week and the week after, just filling up the dates throughout the year. So as I say, it does keep us pretty busy.”

Er, are you any good?

“I would say we’re the best. I’m being biased, but see, the thing is, you get all these pub musicians, and because the tribute scene has just grown out of all proportion, they think that they can just get together for five minutes and put an act together. Whereas we rehearsed and planned for three or four months before we even set foot on a stage. I mean, people see Led Zeppelin through rose-tinted spectacles, and you can go out there and do a bad job of it, but you’ll only get yourself a bad name. So we rehearsed the songs right down before we decided to do it in the first place. By the time we took to the road, we had watched all the DVDs, legitimate and bootleg, heard all the audio bootlegs, just to see how they progressed throughout the years, before we put our show together.”

Surreal as it sounds, it’s real. See www.stairwaytozeppelin.com for more, including a video of the band getting all dazed and confused, plus a message from Pagey himself!