ROBERT PALMER : Music & Style

I always fell hard for a great voice. The artists I tended to believe in the most had singing voices I found irresistible. It all goes back to Jackie Edwards and Steve Winwood. I had been a big fan of an English band called the Alan Bown Set, an earthy, early mix of rock, soul, Hammond organ and horns. Bown was not the singer but a trumpet player and bandleader who hired various frontmen.

There was a chance in 1970 for me to sign the Alan Bown Set. I wasn't too interested in them by then, to be honest, as their time seemed to have passed. But, when I went to see them in some packed, grungy club, I was quite taken by a glamorous couple who swept confidently into the venue, looking completely out of place. Everyone else present looked like poor, scruffy students, but this couple could have been on their way to St Tropez.

It turned out the male half of this spiffy pair was Robert Palmer, the new singer for the Alan Bown Set, arriving with his wife, Sue. Already dazzled by his looks and the fact that his clothes had no creases in them, I was even more dazzled by his voice. Over time, I would also be endlessly dazzled by his knowledge of music, which seemed to take in everything from obscure jazz to the most cutting-edge soul and funk. Robert was also the first person I ever heard talk about African music; he turned me on to King Sunny Adé.

After we became friends, Robert explained to me that he had lived in Malta when he was younger and was able to pick up African music stations on his radio. He was incredibly well-informed about music from all over the world and throughout his life he continued introducing me to artists I knew nothing about. He wasn't a musical virtuoso in terms of playing an instrument - his bass-playing was competent but nowhere near as graceful as Andy Fraser's - but, as a listener, he was virtuosic. I think he knew more about records than anyone I ever met besides Guy Stevens.

I had to bide my time to sign Robert as a solo artist, waiting for him to get though his Alan Bown Set phase and then a stint in a band we signed to Island called Vinegar Joe, another Guy Stevens coinage. In the end, I had to bribe Robert to leave that band - I made him a gift of a house in the Bahamas, where I was building my new Compass Point Studios near Nassau. A pad in the Bahamas was something the suave, high-living Robert couldn't resist. My mum was in the bungalow next door and he was right by the sea.

Robert made himself at home in the Bahamas, a picture of elegance, his hair and clothes always immaculate. He still managed to get hold of the obscure music he wanted, sending out carefully compiled lists of his latest favourites, and he still made sure the most up-to-date equipment he needed to write his songs was flown in to order. Every so often he made an album and set off for some travel around the world. It was a lifestyle that suited him before he decided drugs needed to be a part of his life.

I once had some visitors pay me a call at Compass Point who didn't know what I looked like. They eventually found Robert working in one of the studios, in crisp luxury linen and a pair of immaculate espadrilles. He was so tanned and cool-looking, with such luxuriant hair, that they naturally assumed he was the boss, me, the owner of the whole complex. Moments earlier, they had walked right past me, a seeming vagrant in crumpled shorts and old flip-flops, hair in need of a comb.

Given his stylishness, it was entirely appropriate that we gave Robert a bespoke band suited to his needs for the first album. It ended up being a dream-scenario collective that included New Orleans masters of funk the Meters, legendary piano man Allen Toussaint, the great New York rhythm and blues musicians Cornell Dupree on guitar and Bernard Purdie on drums, Barry White collaborator and string maestro Gene Page, and the superb guitarist and leader of Little Feat, Lowell George. It was the kind of band you could see backing Elvis Presley.

Steve Winwood turned up as well, on the last, twelve-minute track, Through It All There's You, which is ideal if your dream of the perfect groove is to imagine Traffic jamming with Louisiana's finest in Allen Toussaint's Sea-Saint Studios in New Orleans.

It was a short-term supergroup and everyone rose to the occasion, Robert not at all intimidated by working with such a class collection of musicians. The black musicians quickly noted that Robert was no white English flake. He wasn't what they thought he was when they first saw him, a dilettante in oddly conservative clothes with some record-company money behind him.

He had the kind of confidence that persuaded them to give their all because he felt this kind of company was where he belonged; the first three tracks are written by Lowell George, Robert Palmer and Allen Toussaint and it flows together beautifully. He'd been taking his time for more than ten years, never following an easy route, and now he was ready.

Commercially, Sneakin' Sally Through The Alley was a noble failure; but, as a representation of Robert Palmer, it was perfect. I'm not sure how you would label the music - which would always be a problem with the genre-fluid Robert - and the sleeve didn't offer many clues, except that he lived an exciting life leaping from adventure to adventure, usually with a model wearing very little or, on the next Steve Smith-produced album, Pressure Drop, nothing at all apart from a pair of stilettos. Robert liked to have a good time all the time, even when he was having his photograph taken.

Pressure Drop didn't sell as well as I hoped, either. Robert seemed to be in a zone with David Bowie and Bryan Ferry's English take on American soul, but he wasn't seen to be as specific, even as sincere, which was peculiar considering how arch and conceptual Bowie and Ferry were being. There was something about the fact that there was an authenticity about what Robert was doing that strangely appeared inauthentic.

Nonetheless, Robert cruised through his next few records the way he appeared to cruise through life, as though he were showing off his eclectic knowledge, his constantly updated musical smartness as he skipped from rock and roll to disco to heavy metal, from romantic crooning to big-band swing to electro-pop. Always, as part of his unorthodox mixing and matching, his albums featured the sophisticated white funk with the perfect groove that he was as great as anyone at perfecting. There were the occasional hits, including a very cool upbeat song written by Andy Fraser, Every Kinda People, which we gave a Caribbean swing, and a breakthrough American hit, Bad Case Of Loving You, which gave just the right sense of the hedonistic high life he was surely living.

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