ROBERT PALMER : Music & Style

Why did you title your latest album 'Heavy Nova'?

RP: 'Heavy Nova' was a mixture of Heavy Metal and Bossanova. I know that's pretty silly but that's the kind of idea.

Were you satisfied with the results on 'Heavy Nova'?

RP: More satisfied than anything I've done before, without reservation really. There's nothing I can think to fix on it anymore. I spent the right amount of time on the right amount of things and the pre-production I did was spread over a long period of time. Not through choice particularly but it turned out to be great because of that, just being totally ready and knowing where to go with it. I cut twice as much stuff as anything, I cut it twenty tracks and I spent a lot of time on the vocals. Since I was producing myself I didn't think I was going to be boring anybody (laughs).

What would you consider a high point in your career?

RP: Obviously 'Sneakin' Sally' was a high point in that it was like jumping in to the deep end. I walked into the studio in New York and the guys in there weren't particularly friendly. I'd been on the road singing for ten years and the previous five years more or less non stop, so I wasn't too concerned. Anyway, we're 16 bars into the first song when the drummer goes, 'Wait a minute, wait a minute. What did you say your name was?' From then on, it was just a lot of fun. One of the reasons it worked so well was both of the rhythm sections concerned were used to some guy rushing around with a big stick saying, 'We need to do this. We need to change the style. We need to be this or that.' I just dug them for what I'd heard on their records, and it was like, 'What do you want?' and I'd say 'It's in E, let's go!'

When were you first influenced by reggae music?

RP: Well, I was 16, playing in clubs in the north of England, where there's a heavy West Indian population, so in between the sets there'd be a lot of ska music and Motown, so that was what I heard a lot. I remember playing reggae in Phoenix, it didn't go down well, at all. Then I came back there a year later and I saw a full page advert in the paper saying "New Wave Night", and it was just a bar playing imported records and reggae was the theme, and over the years I would incorporate that more and more and followed it through.

You sing a lot of standards.

RP: I moved to Malta in the Mediterranean when I was three months old and lived there until I was 10 or 11 and it was a lot of English families who tended to emulate a South Pacific groovy lifestyle and the music was Fifties music! Lena Horne, Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole. There was no peer pressure to say that the music that was happening in England at that time was hip. So when I got back there, everybody's going, 'Oh, you like that stuff. What 'bout this?' I couldn't understand. I thought the stuff that I was brought up on was hip until I heard Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye. I thought, 'Oh, there's my rock 'n' roll. There's my rebel music.' And it was only about five years ago that I attempted to sing all these tunes that I knew from when I was a toddler that I had sung in the bath all my life (...)

Juke Magazine - Australia's Music Weekly (Jan. 1989)