Legendary LED ZEPPElIN vocalist Robert Plant discusses his BAND OF JOY in a new interview with A.V. Club. An excerpt is available below:

Q: What are your earliest memories of the original Band Of Joy? Do you remember what year it actually started? There are conflicting accounts, everything from 1965-1968.

Plant: "It started in late ’66, early ’67. There were several groups before that, but the Band Of Joy that inspired me to resurrect the title was in ’67 with John Bonham. Paul Lockey played bass, who later went on to play in THE FOUNDATIONS. Kevyn Gammond played guitar and he was in a kind of country-rock band called BRONCO. We probably spent about a year starving and thinking that we were part, I suppose, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, and part HOWLIN' WOLF, if you like. And without any success at all to speak of, we had about two or three hotbeds where people actually got some kind of plot. And we were very good, you know? It was a great band, and a lot of extended musical passages and a lot more free-form passages, which would change nightly, which is how it was moving in those days. We were a kind of British second cousin to what was going on the Bay Area, I suppose. I think had we been another 5,000 miles west of where we were trying it out, we would’ve had a lot more of a rapport with a lot more people."

Q: Did you give Buddy Miller a free hand to pick out the other players in this incarnation?

Plant: "He discussed it with me. I’m British—ostensibly British—but I don’t know where I really belong, you know? I belong in Britain because I sail under several flags, but you know, I love the environment, my friends, the sort of little crazy world that I’ve got around me. But I seem to be far more hooked up with the memory banks and the knowledge of the people I’ve met in Tennessee. They can feed off my nonsense and the knowledge I have of my world, and we exchange tales of how we came upon certain artists that have impressed us. I guess for Buddy and I, there’s a cut-off point in our mutual comprehension of music and I can’t go too far into the kind of—where rock ’n’ roll became country or where country was always country. So I can get Clarence Ashley and the stuff coming out of the hills, which was as black as it was white as it was gray, you know? I can hear all those songs that one minute were at a sukey jump with Leadbelly and then the next minute, they were at some white hoedown. I get all that. But the actual contemporizing of the Nashville sound, all that great stuff that came around the RCA studio and all those magnificent characters and players, I only had a smattering of knowledge of."

Go to this location for the complete interview.

According to Billboard.com, LED ZEPPELIN legend ROBERT PLANT's new album Band Of Joy opens its pan-European chart run at No. 5 as 35,000 buyers give Plant a No. 3 UK start, and the set is in at No. 3 in Norway, No. 6 in Flanders, No. 8 in Ireland and up 22-10 in Wallony.

Plant's Band Of Joy - which entered the US Billboard charts at #5 this past week and Canada's Soundscan chart at #7 - will be released on double vinyl in the US and Canada on October 25th by Rounder/Universal Music.

Band Of Joy features the following tracklisting:

'Angel Dance'

'House Of Cards'

'Central Two-O-Nine'

'Silver Rider'

'You Can’t Buy my Love'

'I’m Falling In Love Again'

'The Only Sound That Matters'

'Monkey'

'Cindy, I’ll Marry You One Day'

'Harms Swift Way'

'Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down'

'Even This Shall Pass Away'

An Amazon pre-order can be found below:

Plant is the only original member of his pre-Zeppelin group BAND OF JOY (which also featured soon-to-be Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham from 1967-1968) but he’s joined by Patty Griffin on vocals, Darrell Scott - multi instrumentalist/vocals, Byron House - bass/vocals, Marco Giovino on drums and percussion/vocals, and co-producer Buddy Miller, guitar/vocals.

The first video from Plant's Band Of Joy album is for the lead-off track 'Angel Dance' - click below to view: