Alfie Boe’s number one debut with ‘Alfie’ on the Billboard Classical Chart has given Robert Plant his first ever Classical number one in America.
Alfie Boe - Photo By Ros O'Gorman
Plant is better known for Classic Rock than Classical, but the ‘Alfie’ album features a duet with the former Led Zeppelin singer on ‘Song To The Siren’.
This is how it came about. “I was sitting in this bar in London checking out the room, seeing who was there in the middle of Soho,” Alfie Boe tells Noise11.com. “The doors opened, smoke through the door, bright lights and Robert Plant walked in and it was (sings) ‘Dream Weaver’. He walked to the bar and I thought ‘I can’t miss this opportunity. I can’t miss this guy and not speak to him’. He is one of my heroes”.
Continuing the ‘a rock star walks into a bar story’ Alfie says, “I went up to him and told him I was a big fan of his work. We happened to be with the same label. What I thought would be a 5-minute conversation turned into an hour talking about his days in Led Zep and his days with the other guys with Jimmy Page, John Bonham and John Paul Jones”.
It became a surreal moment for Alfie. “He was telling me all these fantastic stories of being on tour and all that was going through my mind was “hey hey mama see the way you move gonna make you sweat gonna make you groove”.
After that the two became friends. “We kept in touch and I took some courage to phone him and we started talking about football and I’m like ‘I can’t believe I’m talking to Robert Plant about football’. Then we got onto the real reason that I phoned and that was for him to duet with me on ‘Song To The Siren’ because its on one of his albums. He said ‘send me a demo’. Cutting a long story short, Plant liked it and they recorded it for Alfie’s album.
‘Alfie’ debuted at number one on the Billboard Classical Chart last week.
Watch the interview with Alfie Boe here.
