In the olden days, you could listen over and over again to your musical heroes doing their thing, yet go for years without hearing them speak. The songs themselves gave few clues to the real accents of the singers. Singing seemed to iron out regional vowel sounds so that, in song, everyone sounded the same – rather American. I was aware that Slade and (half of) Led Zeppelin were from the same neck of the woods as me, but I struggled to pick up any trace of Walsall in Noddy Holder’s singing voice or any hint of West Bromwich in Robert Plant’s. It was years before I heard either of them talking properly in their own proper Black Country accents. I loved it.
I’m talking about the 1970s here, when there were fewer radio or television interviews, and very little in the way of what came to be known as reality shows. Even when the 70s turned into the 80s and I was old enough to go to concerts, the spoken words of British frontmen and women, when they found something to say between songs, sounded at best neutral and at worst mid-Atlantic. Over the years, with all the touring or living in the States, their original English accents could even desert them completely.
