ROBERT PALMER : Music & Style

British soul stylist rocks out

Everybody should have Robert Palmer's problems. British, blond and baby-blue-eyed, the thirty-year-old singer is also the reluctant owner of an enviably handsome face that looks like God's gift to the society pages.

Settling into a cushy Manhattan hotel sofa, Palmer may look like the world-weary man of leisure in his gray pullover, tailored jeans and deep Bahamian tan. But he would have you believe he wears his good looks like an albatross.

"I'm quite embarrassed by my appearance most of the time," he insists with as much conviction as his usually subdued voice can muster. "It's consistently forced upon me, because it's show business, that my appearance creates an effect."

Rolling his eyes in mock exasperation, Palmer adds with only half a laugh, "I make an attempt not to deal with it."

He is currently doing his best to avoid dealing with the fact that the success of his no-frills, guitar-driven version of Moon Martin's Bad Case Of Loving You has made Secrets (his fifth Island LP) his first Top Twenty album in five years.

"Having a hit only increases the opportunities to fire your imagination. And I guess that's why you have a hit - you're hungry."

For all his protests, Palmer takes an almost vindictive pleasure in his hard-rock hit. Although he has also dabbled in New Orleans funk, reggae and disco-inflected pop on previous LPs like Sneakin' Sally Through The Alley, Pressure Drop and last year's Double Fun, Palmer has been consistently cast as a lesser white soul brother to Boz Scaggs and Hall And Oates - slick urban R&B in more three-piece suit.

A gracious conversationalist, Palmer momentarily steps out of character, bristling at the blue-eyed-soul tag, and maintains vehemently that "I was put into this competition." But he claims that the gutsy rocking edge of Secrets - recorded without the usual horns, strings and chorus - was not a conscious reaction to such flak.

Secrets was actually written and arranged by Palmer in the "practical" isolation of his seaside home in Nassau. A former graphic designer and son of a Royal Navy career man from the northern England county of Yorkshire, Palmer received his only formal musical training on guitar "from a little old lady who burned a paraffin stove."

He still writes songs and works out cover arrangements on little more than a drum kit. "I put a groove down on the drums," he says in all seriousness, "and try to think of a melody to sing."

Palmer contends that, as a rock & roll singer, his problem is not one of chops - starting at age nineteen, he served lengthy apprenticeships with obscure English bands like the Alan Bown, Dada and Vinegar Joe - but one of what he calls "attitude."

"I've never gone and done anything really extreme, "he says, citing the Rolling Stones and reggae's Burning Spear as "heavy attitude behind the music."

"But I'm not concerned that my stuff isn't extreme - lately. I don't want to be heavy. I can't think of another attitude to have toward an audience than a hopeful and positive one. And if that includes such unfashionable things as sentimentality, well, I can afford it."

"I think things are all right. I'm not complacent about it," he says with some annoyance, "but I'm not spending my day worrying about a third World War or being angry. Being encouraging and hopeful is more constructive. You can accomplish more that way than by making a loud noise."

David Fricke (Rolling Stone - 1979)