Drive: Original Reviews

BBC : He emotes, he urges and, above all, he convinces.

Robert Palmer must really regret ever making that video for Addicted To Love. Forever burned into the public consciousness as the lounge lizard with the leggy backing band; few people seem to remember the time when, for blue-eyed soul, he was the great white hope and what a complex, erudite artist he really is. Unfortunately this eclecticism has kept the general public at arms length. Easy classification can't take into account his flirtations with electronica (Clues), reggae (Pressure Drop), calypso (Pride) and even proto-trance. No he's just Bobby the suit. Which is why Drive will both astound and impress...

For a man who's spent much of his career as a soul singer it seems odd that only now does he get around to tackling R'n'B in its purest form. Yet, by his own admission, he has remained ignorant of much of the Delta blues and gritty early rock 'n' roll that makes up most of this collection. Maybe that's why it sounds so fresh. There's nothing like an excess of respect to kill some music stone dead (cf: Chris Rea's worthy but dull Charley Patton homage, Dancing Down The Stony Road, and just about all of Eric Clapton's recent output), but Palmer can never give us a straight rendition. Witness the splendid rendition of Willie Dixon's 29 Ways with rattling drums and middle eight consisting of Ellington's Caravan or the Tom Waits-like evisceration of Lieber and Stoller's Hound Dog.

People expecting the smooth crooning that's afflicted his recent crowd-pleasers will be frankly startled by the opening bars of Mama Talk To Your Daughter. His voice hasn't sounded this invigorating since his early years when he was hanging around with the Meters and Little Feat. A wonderfully stripped-back production allows all of his great inflections and grunts to shine. On the aforementioned Hound Dog he screams fit to bust, while his version of Little Willie John's I Need Your Love So Bad puts paid to the notion that Peter Green's version was the ONE. He emotes, he urges and, above all, he convinces. It's about as far as you can get from dodgy UB40 collaborations.

Of course the idiosyncracy is never far away. The rollicking calypso of Stella and the skewed lament of Nicolai Dunger's Dr Zhivago's Train remind you of his unerring sense of a great song to cover. It's the latter that stands as one of Palmer's greatest achievements, with its spooked, odd meter and metaphorical loneliness. Yet, above all, it's the sense of fun and rejuvenation that makes Drive such a pleasure. Proof, at last, that Robert has much more than sartorial talents to offer the world.

Chris Jones (BBC - 2003)

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The Independent: An inspired, enjoyable work from an artist at ease with himself ****

Few pop singers, these days, are quite as unhip as Robert Palmer. The suits, the style, the general air of smarmy ladykiller smugness – all militate, for many, against sympathetic consideration of his efforts. Indeed, so inextricably linked has the former Wakefield soulboy become with the discredited era of Eighties excess that he's unlikely ever to force his way back into mainstream public approval, whatever his efforts.

Kudos to him, then, for Drive, which sounds as though Palmer, acknowledging his own chart unfriendliness, has been liberated by it to ignore such commercial considerations and just make the kind of album he'd like to listen to himself. Not that he's exactly held back in this regard in the past: his 1994 offering Honey, for instance, was a bizarre collection of songs whose wildly diverse approaches took in African, Caribbean, and Latin American modes alongside house, heavy metal and rockabilly. It all but killed off his deal with EMI, who were doubtless hoping for another MTV-friendly anthem in the vein of Addicted To Love.

Drive is less eclectic, but lots more fun. Inspired by his contribution to the 2001 tribute album Hellhound On My Trail: The Songs Of Robert Johnson, this is Palmer's full-blown blues album, which he describes as "the first record I've made which I play for my own pleasure". Although admittedly, Palmer's definition of the blues is somewhat elastic, incorporating the swamp-funk of Crazy Cajun Cake Walk Band and even the soca flavour of Stella, in which steel pans accompany the hapless protagonist's wry accession to the eponymous Stella's advances.

The old masters are well represented: JB Lenoir's Mama Talk To Your Daughter opens proceedings with a taut, buzzing boogie riff and bracing bluesharp break, while Willie Dixon's 29 Ways – embellished with a piano quote from the jazz standard Caravan – features Palmer's multi-tracked tenor and baritone backing harmonies as well as his lead vocal. His Hound Dog owes rather more to Big Mama Thornton than Elvis, while his Need Your Love So Bad is surely the best version of Little Willie John's heartbreaker since Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac chose it as their second single.

It's not all old material, though: twangy Jew's harp brings added bounce to the duetting acoustic guitars on Keb' Mo's Am I Wrong?, while Dr Zhivago's Train, by Nicolai Dunger, features full, warm 12-string guitar and an enigmatic, time-signature that's as hard to pin down as a Lightnin' Hopkins groove. And Palmer brings conviction to the droll lyric of ZZ Top's TV Dinners, as if it were a real blues plaint to equal the more usual hardships of heart and poverty.

The playing is exemplary throughout. It's Palmer's arrangements, however, that really make the project work, with Why Get Up? especially noteworthy for its blend of country-blues mandolin and National steel guitar with New Orleans-style piano and marching-band tuba.

Drive is an inspired, enjoyable work from an artist at ease with himself: if you let yourself be swayed by past antipathies, you'll miss out on one of the year's more unexpected successes.

(The Independent - May 2003)

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The Guardian: Grittier and gutsier than you might have imagined possible ***

I daresay that some of you may have forgotten that Robert Palmer ever existed. Having knocked about with the Power Station and been all over MTV in the 1980s with Addicted To Love, he gradually subsided under a syrupy tide of big-band orchestrations. 

However, he started off singing R&B, and Drive finds Palmer sounding grittier and gutsier than you might have imagined possible.

There's one Palmer original, Lucky, among a batch of blues and R&B standards, but he's had the good sense to hire a small squad of no-bullshit musicians and keep the playing rough and loose.

His Caribbean vocal in Stella is frankly ridiculous, but he does much better on the raucous knees-up of Mama Talk To Your Daughter and a gutbucket reworking of Hound Dog, and sounds positively Mississippian in the slithery acoustic blues of Am I Wrong?

Adam Sweeting (The Guardian - May 2003)

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MusicOMH: Classic arrangements played skilfully and produced to a modern level of clarity and quality

The first reaction of many on hearing that Robert Palmer is releasing an album of blues covers will be negative. This is largely due to the fact of his slide from ’80s pop star into relative obscurity was heralded by a similar “focus” project – one based around orchestral music – and also because who can swallow the idea that the man who sang in the Addicted To Love video can sing the blues?

However the new album Drive is a different kettle of fish to his orchestral attempts and to the world of guitar-playing MTV models. In many ways Palmer is returning to his roots by taking on the Blues, as before Power Station and Addicted To Love he was actually more of an R&B man than anything else.

Drive very much focuses on the B in R&B, with 15 of the 16 tracks being Blues standards or ‘bluesy’ cover-versions, and only one of the tracks being written by Palmer himself. This original piece, Lucky, with its mid-tempo accordion pop, blends neatly into the album thanks to some traditional sounding instrumentation.

And instrumentation is a major attraction across all of Drive. Palmer found a number of quality musicians such as Carl Carlton, Franco Limido Dr Gabbs, and his own son Jim and he let them do their thing. It is a pleasure to hear some classic arrangements played skilfully and produced to a modern level of clarity and quality, while still keeping the essence of that ‘bluesy’ feeling. No crackling records or white noise here!

A key instrument in this sort of music is of course the voice, and believe it or not Robert Palmer can sing the Blues. Right from the start, where his gutsy voice rips its way through Mama Talk To Your Daughter, it is clear that Palmer is not holding back on going for the full Blues vocal. And he pretty much pulls it off, with other great performances on TV Dinners, Hound Dog and Crazy Cajun Cake Walk Band.

Further interpretations worth watching out for here are Who’s Fooling Who, Am I Wrong, I Need Your Love so Bad, and 29 Ways (To My Baby’s Door), but one to avoid is Stella, the low point of Drive. Here Palmer takes the whole thing a little too far, trying to sing over the steel drums with a Caribbean voice – not a good idea.

Despite Palmer’s ’80s pop image and the high production values on this album, Drive has a real sense of integrity and unity. In fact, if anything, the high production values help to re-illuminate some well-loved songs, and Palmer’s profile will help to introduce a wider audience to the joy of classic Blues.

Alexis Kirke (MusicOMH - May 2003)

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Uncut: England's blue-eyed soul boy goes back to his roots

Palmer's contribution to the recent Robert Johnson tribute disc Hellhound On My Trail inspired this stripped-down, spontaneous album completely at odds with the extravagantly produced material which brought him such fame in the mid-’80s.

Akin to his eclectic earlier albums such as 1974’s New Orleans-inflected Sneakin’ Sally Through The Alley or 1980’s Gary Numan team-up Clues, here he mixes up R&B, funk, cajun and rock with this mixture of self-penned new songs and covers (including It Hurts Me Too, Mama Talk To Your Daughter, Hound Dog, and bizarrely ZZ Top’s TV Dinners).

Self-produced and with Palmer on bass throughout, this is more like it.

(Uncut - July 2003)