ROBERT PALMER : Music & Style

Michael Walker is a journalist in popular culture and the bestselling author of 'Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story Of Rock And Roll's Legendary Neighborhood.' In 1986, his first story for Rolling Stone was an interview with Robert Palmer "on occasion of his surprise #1 hit Addicted To Love." Now, on what would have been the singer's 77th birthday, Walker shares some thoughts on "an artist who went with his gut on material ranging from techno to reggae to blues, often with spectacular results."

Robert Palmer, who died in Paris at the absurd age of 54 in 2003, pursued a career both enabled and constrained by a record industry that didn’t quite know what to make of him. Famously suave, a natty dresser given to Armani suits even while singing raw reggae, he is most remembered for Addicted To Love, a swaggering metal-crunch Number 1 hit in 1985 accompanied by a video of Palmer fronting a miming band of miniskirted models that somehow threaded the needle of Spinal Tap’s sexy/sexist typology and became a benchmark of ‘80s pop culture. But Addicted To Love, while not exactly an anomaly given Palmer’s protean musical tastes, barely hints at the willful diversity with which he populated his career.

His blithely noncommercial 1974 debut, Sneakin' Sally Through The Alley, featured collaborators and sidemen including Little Feat’s Lowell George and funk drummer-legend Bernard Purdie, along with contributions from New Orleans house band the Meters and coverage of Allen Toussaint’s soul chiller From A Whisper To A Scream. The album didn’t sell but created a fan base that Palmer nurtured through constant touring and a continuum of self-assured albums that essayed reggae and Philly soul stylings like Every Kinda People, a 1978 Top 20 single that prefigured his potential to make broadly popular music even as he indulged his idiosyncrasies.

By 1979, Palmer had banked another solid hit with his cover of Moon Martin’s Bad Case Of Loving You, which established his bona fides for unbridled rock and roll. On 1980s’ Clues, he attacked material ranging from an austere cover of Gary Numan’s I Dream Of Wires to the title track, an irresistible confabulation of frantic funk and electronica performed at breakneck tempo. Having taken previous swings through the Caribbean (he’d previously moved from London to Nassau), Palmer essayed one of his most irresistible reggae songs on the title track of 1983’s Pride, steel drums and all, his last album before breaking though with 1985’s Riptide and Addicted To Love, following a detour as lead singer of the ad-hoc supergroup Power Station, with Duran, Duran’s Andy and John Taylor, which yielded two Top 10 singles, Some Like It Hot and a cover the T-Rex classic Bang A Gong.

After Riptide was released in 1985, I met Palmer for an interview in a wood-paneled hotel suite in mid-town Manhattan. It was a time in the record industry when helicoptering managers and publicists had yet to turn interactions with the music press into fencing matches over access; as Palmer talked, the Island Records publicist on hand made no moves to intervene and instead quietly ate her lunch just out of my peripheral vision. Palmer was, by turns, charming, gracious, distracted (he conducted the entire interview with fly of his Armani trousers open) and gently condescending when my callowness required. He confided that, “somehow or other, word got ‘round that I was this gourmet and connoisseur,” a misconception he was in no rush to correct. “There have been some unbelievable meals, believe me…” He didn’t blanch when I raised the matter of his refusal to tour with Power Station the previous year, on the undeniable justification that it could have permanently derailed his own career, or that he had also claimed that the he hadn’t yet been paid for his services for the project. “I was a bit indiscreet in that interview,” he admitted, before lighting another in a chain of Dunhills he smoked throughout.

What I mostly remember about the encounter was Palmer’s sense of humor, as dry and bracing as a Beefeater martini; he clearly didn’t suffer fools and loved upending convention, seeding his music with coded ironies that he dared his audience and especially his detractors, which in the music press manifested as geeky editors who branded him at every opportunity a pretty boy lightweight and pretentious poseur, to apprehend. Riptide's second big hit, I Didn't Mean To Turn You On, his cover of the Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis dance smash, originally recorded by Cherrelle, saw Palmer delivering, with unflinching earnestness, lyrics that describe him fending off unwanted advances after a first date.

In Jam-Lewis’s original, the protagonist is a young woman calling bullshit on a would-be paramour’s guilt trip over mixed romantic signals. Palmer flipped the script in his version, making the young woman the aggressor; he told me he loved the absurdity of “some middle-aged guy” - himself - singing a song with lyrics of near teenage pique. In the end, the song was so well played that the joke went over nearly everyone’s heads.

Palmer never returned to the multi-platinum mainstream he occupied in the mid-80s, partly because his interests were too catholic to sustain him there and also because Riptide may have disproportionately benefitted from a contemporaneous scandal in the record industry that caused the major U.S. labels to boycott the hiring of so-called independent promoters after reports connected their activities to the use of cash, cocaine, prostitutes and other illegal incentives to get records radio airplay, at the time the main driver of album sales. According to Frederic Dannen’s Hit Men, a forensic accounting of the pre-millennium record industry’s sketchy methods, when work for the “indie” promoters from the major American labels suddenly dried up around the time of Riptide's release, they pivoted to British labels that weren’t participating in the boycott. Island, Palmer’s label at the time, was one of them. “[Indie promoters] worked heavily on Addicted To Love, a record by Island artist Robert Palmer, after the boycott took effect,” Dannen reported.

In the aftermath, Palmer - like David Bowie, another idiosyncratic who in the ‘80s blew up to stadium-filling superstardom before parachuting back to earth and later, some of his best work - continued trusting his gut, following up Riptide with Heavy Nova, which somehow accommodated heavy metal, South African pop, and bossa nova and yielded Simply Irresistible, another Top 5 smash, the last big hit of his career. By the time of Palmer’s death in 2003, of a heart attack while in Paris, he had just released his fourteenth studio album, Drive, an album of left-field interpretations of blues from Big Mama Thorton’s original version of Hound Dog to ZZ Top’s TV Dinners. As AllMusic noted approvingly: "This is the blues filtered through a highly sophisticated sensibility, and thus rendered as an artifact…But then, that filter is what [Palmer has] been applying to indigenous musical genres for his entire career."

A career built on never breaking character and driven, always, by instinct.

Michael Walker (Letter From Laurel Canyon - Jan. 2026)

michaelwalker404649.substack.com

Voir aussi :

• Power Play par Michael Walker (Rolling Stone - 1986)