Some Guys Have All The Luck

Publié le par olivier

Some Guys Have All The Luck

"When we first moved into Nassau, we had a neighbour who had this daughter and she was like a sylph: she had green hair from the chlorine in the pool because she was a champion swimmer, she was brown from the sun and she was neither a boy nor a girl - she was only eleven.

"Her father had been out there ten or fifteen years and they didn't renew his work-permit. He was from Newcastle and they had to return home - this girl, suddenly uprooted at that age and taken to Newcastle. Next thing we knew, she showed up at our doorstep - fat, pregnant and pale... and with a Geordie accent! She'd run away from home, so we talked to her for a while and it was really rough for her. Eventually her father got a job in Calgary. Lats time I saw her - she's sixteen now - she'd got her figure back and had a broad Canadian accent!

"It's just the kind of period where you have to fit in."

Do you think you can fit in just about anywhere?

"Yeah. Yeah, I do. I'm good at that."

Robert Palmer, golden-throated soul crooner, golden-tanned would-be playboy, is in town to talk. Despite his long and distinguished career, from Vinegar Joe through a succession of white soul classics, on this occasion the massed ranks of the pop press are waiting in line to ask him about his new (gasp!) Duran Duran conection - he's the featured vocalist on a project organised by Duran's John Taylor and called the Power Station.

"John called me up on the phone and said, 'Get out here, I need you on this record,' and I said, 'Well, it's a bit awkward at the moment,' but he sent me a cassette and I loved it. So I got on the plane, wrote the words on the plane, got off the other end and away you go! I think a combination like that is more to do with chemistry and it isn't necessarily anything to do with music... Those kind of things just happen to me."

Some Guys Have All The Luck

They seem to have been happening most of his life. Palmer lived the first ten years of his life on the sunny Mediterranean island of Malta ("It was gorgeous. It was so hot that the summer was like a long holiday, so I was at the beach all the time."), but he was actually born in Batley, Yorkshire.

Did you have a troubled childhood?

"No. I hung around with adults most of the time. I was late fitting in. It's funny, because I'd be shifting schools all the time - three years here and then move. It was only awkward when I got back to England. When I came back from Malta, when I was ten, I'd been in a Naval school and (adopts finely clipped elocution) I spoke like this. I showed up in this school in Scarborough and had the mickey taken out of me, so I quickly developped a Yorkshire accent. My dad was in the navy, so we moved around a lot and I don't really feel I belong anywhere... I've lived longer in Nassau than anywhere, and that's definitely home. You miss people more than places..."

I remark that he doesn't seem to have the usual rock snobbery where curtain musicians avoid each other because of the type of music they play.

Is there anyone you wouldn't talk to or wouldn't consider talking to?

"Oh, that's interesting... I've a list a mile long - Crystal Gayle for a start, she's a snob! But as far as avoiding people, no - there's always something fascinating about people. I mean, I met Billy Squier - and I have a real problem with his music, it's just personal taste, but it was no problem putting that out of my mind and having a conversation with the guy. So what? He might have been a cobbler who makes rotten shoes, but that wouldn't make any difference.

OK, let's say tomorrow Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top phoned you and said he needed you to do a vocal...

"Fine, fine... (starts to sing) 'TV Dinners... running through my head.' I'm so rhythm-oriented in my approach - it's a basic funkiness that attracts me."

As if to prove his inherent funkiness, Mr. Palmer shows me a cassette of mainly black music he's been carrying around - James Brown, Chaka Khan, Ike & Tina Turner... and Prince.

How do you rate someone like Prince?

"Well that song on there is Head off a really early album - it's got a great verse that goes (starts singing again): 'When I first met you baby / You were on your way to be wed / You were such a sexy thing / I had to have you in my bed' and then the girl's voice comes in and she says, 'You're such a hunk, I'll give you head / Until your love is red' - Gross! It's a killer beat and a great bass-line. He had another one called Let's Pretend We're Married. But of late I can't get near him, I don't like Purple Rain at all."

It's interesting that you sing a lyric like that - if ZZ Top did that it would be regarded as outrageous, yet for Prince there's an implied assumption that he's somehow subverting macho sexuality because he's not big and butch. It's regarded as tongue-in-cheek.

"Yeah - I'm very interested in that, actually. I've just recorded a song called I Didn't Mean To Turn You On - do you know it? I heard it and it was sung by a girl: she sings, 'When I took you out / I knew that you were all about / But when I did / I didn't mean to turn you on' - and that just offended me so much! But now when a guy sings it - I love those twists. Like Olivia Newton-John singing 'let's get physical!' I mean, I couldn't believe how anybody was supposed to swallow that - if it was Prince, it would make sense!"

Some Guys Have All The Luck

Which singers do you like?

"Well, this new guy from Go West is really good and Howard Hewlett (from Shalamar) is my favourite of people who are still alive. Who else... oh, Billie Holiday and Marvin Gaye. I'm very into traditional Persian singers, too.

"But a lot of the time I found I was listening to music that I would never attempt to sing. Then it occured to me: why? Why not have a go? So I've been doing a lot of different stuff... it's an indulgence really. On the last album there was a track called The Silver Gun, which was in Urdu. I spent, God, six months going over and over this thing - and I finally nailed it. It was great to put it on tape and listen back to it and go 'yeah yeah!'

"Obviously I've got my limitations, and I try to work within them - but there are certain things that I just didn't think about stretching, and lately I have been doing, and I'm really pleased with the results."

How do you rate yourself as a singer? Do you think you're up there in an elite among your contemporaries?

"No... I think I'm in an unusual position in that I haven't really established anything and yet... I've kept afloat, I live well and I've never had to make any compromises."

Do you crave more commercial success?

"No, I never have - I never listen to the Top Ten. Occasionally something will get in there that I like, but it's really not my fodder, it never was, I never did listen to it, so that's an accident..."

Does that mean you're not competitive?

"No, I'm not competitive in any way. I'm not jealous either (slight laugh). Oh... except when my wife had babies, that made me jealous!"

Robert Palmer at home in the Bahamas with daughter Jane (early 1980s)

Robert Palmer at home in the Bahamas with daughter Jane (early 1980s)

Family life is obviously important to Robert Palmer: but such a relaxed environment - he lives in Nassau after all - seems an unlikely setting to create music with a real cutting edge.

So where does that come from?

"It's because I want something to come out of the speakers that will make me jump! And if I don't do it, nobody's going to do it for me."

I don't see how you can be successful in such a shitty business and still have this laissez-faire attitude. You must have made a conscious decision to break away in the first place and become a solo artist.

"Yeah, yeah - but I was driven, I had to do it. It wasn't conscious will or effort. If I didn't do that, I wasn't doing right. I had no choice. It always seems that things are like that to me - you're faced with a set of circumstances and you can do this or you can do that, so you do this," he laughs. "When it's cold, you wear a hat!"

Yeah, but when it's cold, some people stay at home.

"Well, I dunno - I don't think I have that choice."

So what drives you on to create?

"Again, I have no choice! I get up and it's the best thing I can think of to do and ever since I started to do it, it always has been. But aside from that, it's as much a hobby as it ever was. I get up in the morning, switch my rig on and I'm away! I just do it. And I enjoy it, so once I've done that I switch off again and then I can spend a month just reading books."

How would you like to be remembered?

"I don't need to be, because as soon as I became a father I became redundant! But when you end up committing stuff to record, when I listen back to it, it's like a diary of events: I remember the people, the moods, stuff like that."

Are you happy to be judged simply by the work you leave behind? Presumably not, otherwise you wouldn't do interviews.

"I don't know actually - It's something I've never considered before, so I'm taken by surprise by the question and can't think of a sensible answer. But it's a reasonable question and I don't want to give a silly answer. If I think of something can I let you know?"

Johnny Waller (Blitz - 1985)

Some Guys Have All The Luck
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