Another week, another raft of will-they-won't-they stories surrounding Led Zeppelin and a possible reunion. This week it's Jimmy Page complaining about the attitude of Robert Plant, telling the New York Times: "I was told last year that Robert Plant said he is doing nothing in 2014, and what do the other two guys think? Well, he knows what the other guys think. Everyone would love to play more concerts for the band. He’s just playing games, and I’m fed up with it, to be honest with you."

That accords with something I heard earlier this year from someone who knows Page: that Plant had mentioned to Page that if the wind was right, and the Lord was willing, maybe – just maybe – he could get back together with Page and John Paul Jones. To which Page's response, I was told, was along the lines of: we've been waiting around for you for years, and we're not going to bother anymore.

Plant has always been the reason Zeppelin won't reunite. Page has done very little new work in the 34 years since Zeppelin's drummer, John Bonham, died: an album with Roy Harper, two with ill-fated "supergroup" the Firm, one solo album and one soundtrack to a Michael Winner film, and an album apiece with David Coverdale and Robert Plant. He's devoted the greater part of his energies to nurturing the Zeppelin legacy, overseeing remasters and reissues, films and DVDs. While Plant's total of nine solo albums (with another to come later this year) plus three collaborative studio albums doesn't look that much greater, he's the one who's forged a genuine solo career, independent of the legacy of Zeppelin. He's the one of the two who would have to make the more sacrifices to reunite.

But there's another thing, too, which is Plant's ambivalence about Zeppelin. There's the distance that comes with age, for one thing. He pointed out to me in 2012 that his lyrics from that time were the words of a young man who's long disappeared. "Dylan’s early work, no matter where he took it from, no matter what was going on, he’ll be able to do that forever and know that there’s always a relevance to that. But for me, I was a rock pastiche guy, I was into Eddie Cochran, I was into little vignettes and stories that were coming out of 1950s music," he told me. He described the 2007 reunion show at the O2 as "revisiting the patient … I think I was, definitely".

There's also the question of how tarnished the memory of the band might be by the horrors – both personal and professional – of its later years. On the personal side, in August 1975 – at the band's peak – Plant and his then-wife Maureen were seriously injured in a car crash. Two years later, his five-year-old-son Karac died of a stomach infection while Plant was on tour with the band. "I think, really, my boyhood was over," Plant told me of that period. "I was 27 and flattened. A little premature, but that was it. It was over. Whatever happened after that was going to be different. And so it was."

Those who've read Barney Hoskyns' oral history of Led Zeppelin, Trampled Underfoot, will know of how decadent, macabre, violent and unpleasant the Zeppelin organisation had become in the last few years of the band's life. Plant's distaste for that comes through in the book: it's possible that for him, Zeppelin is not just about the music, it's freighted with memories he might rather not revisit for any concerted period.

I've twice interviewed Page and Plant for Zeppelin projects. Both times, Page was in luxury hotels in central London; both times, Plant was in his local in north London. It's hard not to see that as him deliberately keeping his distance from the entity that is Led Zeppelin. And while his occasional flirting with the possibility of returning to the fray with his old bandmates might infuriate Page – who surely feels it's never going to happen, so why be coy and bat eyelids? – it's hardly surprising he might want to dip his toe in the well of the past without actually immersing himself fully. As I said, he's ambivalent – not dismissive.

Plant told me: "I have to be in some brand new zones quite regularly. Otherwise, what am I doing?" And in a remark that perhaps summed things up more succinctly: "It’s an insane thing to do, to go back."

Zeppelin reforming? I'd be astonished. As astonished as I am that there are still people who think it might happen.





