Robert Plant honored for Record Store Day

Robert Plant’s new honor was unveiled not at an arena or a museum, but inside Spillers Records in Cardiff, a shop founded in 1894 that is widely described as the world’s oldest record store. Record Store Day named Plant its 2026 “Record Store Legend” and installed a plaque there ahead of this year’s event on April 18. (recordstoreday.com, wales.com) That location is part of the point. Spillers is an independent shop in Cardiff’s Morgan Arcade, and its owner Ashli Todd said the award was meant to honor Plant not just as a famous singer, but as someone record shops know as a lifelong digger for music. (recordstoreday.co.uk, wales.com) Plant’s public image was built with Led Zeppelin in the late 1960s and 1970s, but this award is tied to a different habit: spending decades in record stores looking for old folk, blues, and regional records that later fed into his solo work. Record Store Day’s own announcement frames him as a customer and collector as much as a performer. (recordstoreday.com, officialcharts.com) Record Store Day itself started in 2008 as a campaign to draw people back into independent record shops with one-day exclusive releases and in-store events. The 2026 edition is set for Saturday, April 18, and the official release list is already live. (recordstoreday.com, themusicuniverse.com) Plant is not just lending his name to the event. He is also using it to release a four-track 12-inch vinyl extended play record called *Saving Grace: All That Glitters...* through Nonesuch on April 18. (recordstoreday.com, nonesuch.com) The record is credited to Robert Plant and Saving Grace with Suzi Dian, which matters because Saving Grace is the band Plant has been touring and recording with in recent years. Nonesuch says the group includes singer Suzi Dian and musicians from the English countryside where Plant lives. (nonesuch.com, recordstoreday.com) The extended play record includes four studio tracks: “Blackest Crow,” “Poison,” “Orphan Girl,” and “She Cried.” The song list leans toward traditional material and outside songwriters like Bert Jansch and Gillian Welch, which fits the folk-and-roots direction Plant has followed far from hard-rock radio. (recordstoreday.com, recordstoreday.co.uk) Record Store Day lists the release as an exclusive title with a run of 3,500 copies on 12-inch vinyl. That makes the honor and the record part of the same ritual: celebrate the artist by sending fans into an actual shop to find an actual object on a specific Saturday. (recordstoreday.com, recordstoreday.com) So the story is less “rock star gets plaque” than “one of rock’s biggest voices is being honored in the exact kind of store that shaped his taste.” Plant’s award, the Cardiff ceremony, and the limited vinyl release all point back to the same idea Record Store Day sells every year: discovery still happens one bin at a time. (recordstoreday.com, officialcharts.com)