All language subtitles for Interview

Don't forget my wages.

Jimmy, what in your view
caused all this to happen?

Personally speaking, l've been wanting
to work with Robert for a long time.

ln the past, it had just been in dribs
and drabs on certain record projects.

Playing on Robert's album
and he sang on one of mine.

And then Live Aid and this sort of thing.

The time was right
and we discussed a lot of areas

of how we could get things together.

We both agreed that we would have
to do something that was within a new light.

Maybe if we did the old numbers,

then it would be like possibly set the same
picture but within a different frame.

A good way of putting it.
That comes onto the next question.

ln this new territory that you talked about,
there is an awful lot of old material.

Did you find that much of the old landscape
resonated anew for you, so to speak?

Since l've Been Loving You, for instance,
does that mean something new?

l think it was one of our more successful
songs live, that we ever pulled off.

lt's a great feeling to try
and get near it again

for the sake of it being
once upon a time magnificent.

lt's a great sort of marriage
for the two of us

to phrase against each other
vocally and guitar wise.

This is something that, if you like...

it puts us back in one of
the very familiar roles that we play.

lt's quite consoling, cos l was worried
about that being a cliché

but when you're doing it, it's great
and it can be different every night.

What were the criteria
for choosing old songs to redo?

Well, we had so many songs
that we could work on.

I think BIack Dog and those sort of numbers
from way back in the past,

as most of them are,

didn't give us your media stimulus
to rework them,

whereas things like Friends certainly did.

lf you're going to do that again, it's either
got to be tongue in cheek or subtle.

What made appropriate ones appropriate?

The fact that we could fashion a lot of them

into a new, more interesting form
than what might have been expected.

And by bringing in Nigel Eaton
on the hurdy-gurdy

and Paul Thompson.

He came in from a very refreshing
and supportive angle.

So just the fact that we could actually take
Gallow's Pole or Battle Of Evermore

and really bring
real new, sharp, bright focus to it.

No matter what we did
actually get our teeth into,

we really thought about it
and l think that tells.

What did you expect to find
in Marrakech first of all?

Well, a couple of articles of clothing l'd left
behind three weeks before at the hotel.

The whole Moroccan,
North African adventure musically

has been a great sort of helter-skelter
of hopeful opportunity and failure

because originally we wanted to work with
a very famous orchestra out of Rabat

and rework a couple of
Zeppelin songs that way.

And that fell on its face, didn't it?

Morocco is a land
of a million contradictions.

One of the contradictions that
we came across was, ''Yes, that's fine.''

Then you get there
and there's nobody there.

lt's a Moroccan joke. We've experienced it
for 20 years. ''Everything you want.''

Then you get there and there is
nothing there. There's nobody there.

You make every single fax, every point
of logical liaison and they don't work.

So we went on a wing and a prayer
and a phone call to meet the Gnawa.

And that was so much more natural
and we wrote songs with them,

which was amazing.

Their music is very trance-like

and also they have the facility and the
capability of healing within their music.

And they play for hours and hours
and hours and hours and it's a therapy.

They also make cassettes
that you can buy for 15 dirham.

The Gnawa are true bIack Africans,

whereas the Moroccans are
a mixture of Arab and Berber

and a lot of the civilisation movements
that went along north Africa

and along the Mediterranean generally.

So the Gnawa has something
much more of a root with Mississippi

than it would do
with Damascus and with Egypt

and Cairo and the whole Arab thing.

So, yeah, l think that the sound
of the gimbri and the drum...

it's definitely like that sort of field chant stuff
from northern Mississippi

that Alan Lomax recorded years ago
for the Library of Congress.

They were just so honest
and their music was just a truth

and you couldn't help but be touched.

Then you went to Wales.

We spend so much time in Wales.

l live not far from the Welsh border.

Just to be away in an area where
you know there's been some activity

that isn't easily explained nowadays.

You know, tribal stuff, cultural stuff.

The poetry of the Welsh, the Welsh triads,
Taliesin, the whole thing is there.

lf you have the eye for it, it's still there.

When we started working together again,
we were working with tape loops.

Martin Messonnier made them up for us.

And when we worked with
Messonnier's loops originally,

within a couple of days, we got ideas.

We got four or five ideas
in a couple of afternoons.

And the slant was,
with the Arab drum loops that we'd cut

and the cross rhythm playing that Jimmy
was applying and my vocals on the top,

we'd already got completed songs.

We've moved on from the loops and worked
with Michael and Charlie as a four piece

and we got about
another seven songs out of that.

And it's developing into something
that's got quite a blue, exotic edge to it.

You know? That's outside
of what we're dealing with now.

That's stuff that we can go and work on
next week. That's reaIly encouraging.

Last night, I saw a rush of Kashmir
and there was a cIose-up of the soIo vioIin

in the middIe of Kashmir

and the man's face, he was so proud.

You know? And it's great to work with
musicians who are so proud of their roots

and they're normally not in
a position to extend it into this.

Therefore their pride is so much food for us.

lt's great. lt's really positive.

Having those Egyptian musicians
playing the counter rhythms

and to have that mood on stage, where the
English orchestra, when they're not playing,

they were in a frenzy,
just moving along with it themselves.

That means it's working beyond
anything l could have wished for really.

You could get shivers. l was getting shivers
listening to the Egyptians playing.

The whole texture of what was going on.

As l say, we know that we've achieved that
and yet there's so much more we can do.