Rock legend Robert Plant stunned fans by singing “Stairway To Heaven” for the first time in 16 years during a charity show in the UK on Saturday evening.
The Led Zeppelin frontman performed the number at a fundraiser for the Cancer Awareness Trust, organized by Duran Duran guitarist Andy Taylor, who is battling stage four prostate cancer.
Plant, 75, made the song even more poignant by changing the delivery of the final verse.
Plant’s set begins about 43 minutes into the livestream posted on Facebook and includes a few other Zeppelin tracks as well as a medley centered around Donovan’s “Season of the Witch”:
“I bet I had more fun with that than he did,” Taylor said after “Stairway,” likely a reference to Plant’s mixed feelings about the song.
While fans consider it one of the greatest classic rock songs of all time, Plant didn’t always share that opinion. He said he “couldn’t identify” with the lyrics and once even promised a radio station in Oregon money to stop them from playing it.
It’s possible that until this weekend he had never performed the song live as a solo artist, only with Led Zeppelin – most recently 16 years ago at the band’s 2007 reunion – and during a 1994 television appearance with Zeppelin bandmate Jimmy Page.
But there is one version of the song that made him change his mind: the one performed by Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson with drummer Jason Bonham, son of the late Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2012.
Plant sat in the audience with tears in his eyes.
“It was a spectacular performance. I’m a voyeur now. I’m not responsible for it anymore,” he told Vulture last year. “I don’t get told not to do it in guitar shops. I won’t walk down the aisle at a wedding and play it on the flute. I love the song. It came over me and took away all the years I was part of it. It just rubbed it down to the bone again.”