ROBERT PALMER : Music & Style

What Phil Spector did for sound Robert Palmer did for babes, for it is he who immortalised the Wall of Bimbos technique in his mid-80s videos Addicted To Love and Simply Irresistible. You remember the models playing air guitar in spray-on dresses, slicked back hair and whipped lips. Women as ice-cream, women as deaf mutes in bathing suits who gyrate soundlessly through the video fantasies of a million men. Thanks Bob.

But what is this? The man on the other end of the line with the faint Midlands accent and oh-so-serious manner feigns incomprehension when I coyly ask if he is still afflicted with an insatiable appetite for women.

Judging by the lyrics in his new songs on his new album Don't Explain, the happily married crooner now resident in Italy still gets thunderstruck by the chance arrangement of skin and bone in a young woman's face. At forty-something, doesn't singing about naked lust for a nubile seem a teensey bit, how shall you put it, deja-vu?

"I'm sorry, I don't know what you're getting at, I don't understand the question."

Hmmm. What I mean is, you're forever identified with those sensational mid-80s videos. Do you have another visual trick up your sleeve that will redefine your image for the '90s?

"Well, let's hope somebody does because I have no imput at all into the videos that I do and the phenomenon those videos created was, in retrospect, fine with me but it was nothing to do with me neither. So what's a little strange about it is that I ended up representing this look and this mood that bewilders me as much as it does the public. I really don't know anything about it. Essentially, when I did those things the guy put the whole thing together and I showed up and there was an X taped on the floor and I sang into the camera, close up, long shot, took about twenty minutes and I left. Next thing I know it's like a big thing. So I don't know, how do we get around that?"

One way is by talking humbly to female journalists at the other end of the world about the songs on the new album, all eighteen of them.

From the testosterone laden vocals and groin guitar breaks of the originals on Side One to the cover versions on Side Two, a tribute to the music he loved when he was growing up, like Billie Holiday's Dont Explain and Roger and Hammerstein's People Will Say We're In Love.

Explains Robert: "The last seven songs are a giveaway because I didn't want to impose that kind of music on an unsuspecting public so I figured if I just gave them away, if people didn't like them they could turn it off. It's kind of unfashionable, and yet it's music that I grew up with so I just hope that some people will like it and I won't be charging them extra for it."

This is Robert Palmer gentleman smoothie talking, a genuine sort of guy, confused and bemused by the woman eating image thrust upon him by his own notorious videos. Is he, in fact, blissing out, indulging in his own upmarket brasserie version of the current love and peace fixation of the younger generation? Could we hurl that dirtiest of all rock insults at him... is Robert Palmer getting mellow?

"You could hardly say that if you're listening to the first five songs," the singer retorts, "I've never recorded songs as shriekingly aggressive as those five tunes. Gosh, I don't know how to put it exactly, it's a matter of wanting to create a broader perspective. During a show, since I'm not theatrical in my presentation, I'm always looking for how to achieve a broad and distinct set of musical moods so that I can change the atmosphere radically with music rather than setting off fireworks or doing vulgar things ot whatever. So that's another reason I presented the record that way. For me they're distinct musical moods, different moods for different occasions."

Robert Palmer finished mastering Don't Explain just five weeks ago. He's also just finished filming an hour long made-for-television movie, an extended video clip designed to showcase those elusive moods in a romantic setting rather than the psychedelic meat market of a night club.

"I just think if the music's seen to be in an environment and performed and a have a package it might be better accepted rather than being viewed as me being on a nostalgia trip or anything like that."

Sorry guys, but it sounds like Robert Palmer's Wall of Babes technique has bitten the dust along with all the German bricks.

Donna Yuzwalk (Rip It Up - Dec. 1990)