The Great Presenter

One of our finest pop creators hid in plain sight behind the image of a singing gentleman of leisure. But beneath the expensive tailoring lay a fiercely dedicated, eternally curious music lifer.

In the summer of 1983, I worked in a record shop where one of our favourite things to blast on the stereo was a compilation cassette of lesser-known Robert Palmer tracks: from sexy early single Give Me An Inch - featuring an extraordinary bass performance by James Jamerson - the slinky You Overwhelm Me and woozy, Eastern-sounding Found You Now, to that year's The Silver Gun, a strange, shape-shifting song sung entirely in Urdu. Everytime you played this tape, customers would drift to the counter to ask what it was. When told it was Robert Palmer, they'd most likely to say, "Who?", or perharps occasionally, "What?!" Whatever their foreknowledge of him they had no idea he sounded like this - and we could usually sell them an album.

It's not surprising that someone's personal distillation of his work showed it off well, as mixtapes were Palmer's preferred medium for enjoying music. He'd stuff them with everything from Fred Astaire to African folk, and his albums ran a similar course. 1983's Pride (his eighth), took in electro-calypso, reggae, proto-techno, disco pop and a yearning, eearie ballad, Want You More, regularly punctuated by the sound of someone diving into a swimming pool. It followed another fine album, Clues, that covered Gary Numan, sequencer-driven funk, the superb Johnny And Mary, boogie metal and powerpop. Previous records had expertly handled New Orleans funk and Philly soul and featured The Meters and Little Feat among the players. They'd won Palmer a large cult following that understood his thirst for all musics. Critics at the time, however, mistrusted him, crying 'dilettante' and 'inauthentic', while praising fellow changelings like Bowie and Ferry to the skies. Palmer could be their equal as a songwriter (Johnny And Mary? Come on! Ferry himself has covered it) but never recieved a tenth of their attention.

However, three years after my record shop stint, everyone knew Robert Palmer. In early 1986, he'd just come out of supergroup The Power Station with members of Chic and Duran Duran, when he and Island founder Chris Blackwell sat down together to watch photographer Terence Donovan's video for Addicted To Love, the third single from his ninth Island album Riptide. in his autobiography, Blackwell states Palmer wasn't on set when the models shot their sequence, so didn't know what they'd done until he saw the finished cut. (If that's true, the combining of the two shots was ingeniously done for its time). He was as riveted as anyone else by what Blackwell calls the models' "glorious indifference". The male gaze is Donovan's; Palmer behaves like it's another day at the office. When a TV interviewer called the video sexist, Palmer replied in a broad Yorkshire accent, "There's nowt wrong wit' being sexy." On the surface it came across as dense and oblivious, but he knew perfectly well what he was doing. His noncommittal stance wound people up, as did his refusal to stay in one lane. He didn't seem to care what people thought, but he didn't want to be categorised.

In 1978, around the excellent Double Fun (a co-production with Tim Moulton), Palmer described himself as a "presenter of music". "I can write songs, arrange music, produce records and take a show on the road. It is a more abstract venture; it's not just being a singer." Fundamentally, he was a fan. Blackwell ranked Palmer as the most knowledgeable music nut he'd ever encountered, acquiring a taste for obscure sub-genres and new trends long before anyone else. Raised partly in Scarborough, partly in Malta (his dad was in naval intelligence), he was exposed very early on to the curious mix of sounds that floated over that island: soul and rock from American Forces Network, Italian pop, African highlife and calypso. He also became obsessed with the smart Italian naval uniforms he witnessed, striving to make his school uniform just as sharp.

That all instilled a deep-seated understanding of style that stayed with him. It was what Blackwell first spotted, in the crowd at a smoky club on the outskirts of London in 1970, waiting for The Alan Bown! to perform. The band's singer was late. Enter a glamorous couple who stood out among the Afghan coats and dungarees, looking like they'd arrived from St Tropez. It was Palmer and his wife Shelly. And he was the singer they'd been waiting for. When he stepped on-stage and employed a husky, nicotine-steeped tone, Blackwell knew he'd found something special. He subsequently signed him to Island as part of Vinegar Joe - a promising rock'n'soul troupe that never quite gelled - but was convinced he'd fare better as a solo artist, encouraging him by offering him a condominium in Nassau, where Island subsequently opened a studio complex, Compass Point, in 1978. This gave Palmer instant access to a workspace while keeping him away from distractions (he loved to party), enabling him to focus on his eclectic instinct.

The carnival of styles that passes before you on the mercurial records he made for Island, all nine of which are deftly remastered and annotated here, can be off-putting- Some of his enthusiams haven't aged well. Sculpting your own route through his work is advised. But as you do, you'll notice that Palmer's ability to tease out the inspirational threads connecting his wide-ranging choice of covers - Kinks, Kool & The Gang, Allen Toussaint, Todd Rundgren - was uniquely playful and smart, and his own writing frequently surprising (Addicted To Love's lyric doesn't fit its melody, requiring some stunt scansion) and ran deeper than you'd think ("Mary counts the walls" - such a great line).

A full-throttle lifestyle - 60 cigarettes a day, martinis for breakfast, and a rumoured affair with Princess Diana (possibly the insipration for Simply Irresistible) - caught up with him at the age of only 54 in 2003. Too soon. Reassessment of his legacy is long overdue. Let's hope this box helps. OK, Addicted To Love is still an elephant in the room, but the rest of the menagerie he created - Pterodactyls! Dolphins! Unicorns! - is well worth a visit.  

Back Story: Suits You Sir

Born In Batley, Robert Allen Palmer (1949-2003) had previously recorded with Vinegar Joe, The Alan Bown! and 12-piece rock band Dada. This album-sized box contains all all nine solo albums for Island on CD, remastered with bonus tracks. Players include Bernard Purdie, Lowell George, Steve Winwood, Bernard Edwards and Tony Thompson. Former art student Palmer agreed that his early album covers, depicting him as an international playboy hanging out with semi-naked women, looked a bit naff, so asked second wife Susan Thatcher to be his art director from 1979's Secrets onwards.

The Island Years 1974-1985 (Edsel/Demon): ****

Jim Irvin (Mojo, mars 2023)