Robert Plant and John Lydon were fixed in the public mind at the age of 20. Plant, a golden-haired lad who had grown up in Worcestershire, became the leonine singer of Led Zeppelin in 1968, a self-proclaimed ‘golden god’. Lydon, a scrawny kid from Holloway, who had been hospitalised for a year with meningitis as a child, became Johnny Rotten, and in 1976 helped deliver ‘the filth and the fury’ – as the Daily Mirror put it – on the nation’s TV screens as a quarter of the Sex Pistols.

Both, it would be fair to say, have ambivalent relationships with their pasts. After Zeppelin’s demise in 1980, Plant spent a couple of decades being active, but without much direction. This century, though, he has concentrated almost entirely on folk and Americana and the kind of West Coast music he loved before he met Jimmy Page. He’s more or less gone back to being a hippy.

After leaving the Pistols at the start of 1978, Lydon formed PiL and with that band’s original line-up he pretty much invented post-punk even as everyone else was still catching up with punk. These days, he and the other three-quarters of the Pistols aren’t really on speaking terms: he tried........

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