Power Play

Publié le par olivier

Power Play

Robert Palmer scores the biggest hit of his career with Addicted To Love.

"It was... anxious," confesses Robert Palmer, his mellifluous baritone uncharacteristically raw as he recalls the previous night's sold-out concert at Boston's Opera House, the premiere of his first American tour in three years.

"I threw in three new numbers and rearranged the set the afternoon of the show," Palmer explains. "But having spent more or less the last three years doing all the other nonsense - writing, producing, traveling around the world to stand before film cameras - it's an absolute thrill to be let off the hook to do what I actually do. Which is sing."

Opening-night-jitters aside, Robert Palmer couldn't have chosen a more auspicious moment to do just that. Riptide, his ninth and best-selling album, went gold the day of the Boston gig, while the crunch-groove single Addicted To Love was challenging Prince's Kiss for the Number One slot on the Billboard's Hot 100. The torrid Addicted To Love video, featuring Palmer fronting a sensual-sinister band of pouting vixens, was inundating MTV. And tickets for his summer tour - which will include a side trip to the Far East, with shows in Tokyo and Guam - were selling briskly. Not bad for a guy whose last US hit, a raucous version of Moon Martin's Bad Case Of Loving You, barely scraped the Top Twenty in 1979.

Robert Palmer finally at the Number One slot on the Billboard Hot 100 (May 3, 1986)

Robert Palmer finally at the Number One slot on the Billboard Hot 100 (May 3, 1986)

"It hasn't really sunk in," admits the thirty-seven-year-old Palmer of his belated solo success. But his breakthrough has meant coming to grips with a rather spectacular bit of "other nonsense" from his three-year hiatus - which, of course, is the Power Station. Conceived as a between-albums diversion, the unlikely combination of Palmer - who had completed most of Riptide when he joined the project - Duran Duran's John and Andy Taylor, former Chic drummer Tony Thompson and Riptide producer Bernard Edwards ended up with a platinum album and three Top Ten singles.

That some of the songs on Riptide bear more than a passing resemblance to the Power Station's "R&B heavy metal" - particularly Addicted To Love and the album's failed first single, Discipline Of Love - has heightened the inevitable comparisons between the albums. The upshot is that Palmer - having finally struck pay dirt on his own - finds himself deflecting suggestions that Riptide is riding the crest of a wave started by a band that, as he puts it, "wasn't really a group."

"Well, it's a chicken-and-the-egg situation," sighs Palmer with the sometimes brittle politesse he reserves for discussing the subject. "The Power Station was an event. The proportion attached to it is something I can't do anything about."

Power Play

"If the Power Station had been the reason for the success of Addicted To Love, we would have had a bigger hit with Discipline Of Love," says Jim Swindel, vice-president of sales for Island Records, Palmer's label for the past fifteen years. "Robert's a class act, and the world was ready. It was the right record at the right time."

Whatever role the Power Station played in introducing Palmer to the American mass market, he was overdue for some across-the-board success of his own. Since his first album Sneakin' Sally Through The Alley, Palmer's blue-eyed good looks and libidinous vocal delivery have made him a seeming shoo-in for superstardom. Yet he has foiled such predictions by releasing albums laced with such ahead-of-their-time influences as reggae  and electronic dance syncopations.

Though Palmer's approach has produced occasional hits (1978's Every Kinda People, 1983's dance smash You Are In My System), large-scale exposure eluded him until the intervention of the Power Station - and then Addicted To Love.

Power Play

The irksome Power Station connection notwithstanding, Riptide does live up to Palmer's reputation for stylistically protean albums. Opening and closing with the title song - the plaintive 1935 Gus Khan-Walter Donaldson torch classic - Riptide charts a meandering course through New Orleans-style funk (Earl King's Trick Bag), purring dance patterns (I Didn't Mean To Turn You On, the next single and video) and scorching distorted-guitar excursions (Hyperactive).

"I work entirely by instinct," says Palmer, whose musical affinities of late are divided somewhat improbably between the heavy metal of groups like AC/DC and the Scorpions and the torchy ballads of Lena Horne and Nat "King" Cole that he first heard over the American Services Network during his childhood in Malta. Characteristically, Palmer says his next album will be an "almost photographic negative" of Riptide called Heavy Nova, combining heavy metal with... bossa nova? "Hence, the title," he says. "These circumstances going down now are reaffirming that direction."

After the tour, Palmer plans to pack up his wife, two children, satellite dish and sophisticated home studio from his longtime base in the Bahamas ("It's got a bit rock & roll down there, and I need a safer hidey-hole") to new digs in Switzerland. "There's an atomic-bomb shelter in the basement - which, in light of current events, might come in handy," he says, deadpan. "I'll make music despite Qaddafi."

Power Play

Michael Walker (Rolling Stone - June 1986)

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