ROBERT PALMER : Music & Style

Heart-throb Robert Palmer pinned down in New York.

Three times I got out of my warm bath to answer the telephone. The first call was a few seconds of silence and down. The second call stopped ringing just before I could pick it up. The third caller had awful news.

A deep crack of thunder and it began to pour with rain. Then I knew I was back home again. New York was a flight away, a different world. I could try dolefully to pin it down with words, but the disjunction between memory and articulation already had me depressed numb. You're always some place else.

I started to crack up in the city which always sleeps.

What is the young man doing on the third floor? He is making a telephone call. He is speaking to the New York representative of Island Records. Naturally, the representative in question knows that I am here. She has been expecting my call. She knows where I am staying, she knows the hotel, the district it is sited in and other less concrete details. She knows, for instance, the hotel's reputation and particularly the area concerning how many people who check into the hotel don't check out of it again. She probably knows that Sid Vicious' girlfriend Nancy Spungen was one of them.

I wonder for a moment if she met her unfortunate end in the same room I have been given. A morbid thought - but anyway, photographer Joe Stevens later tells me, it isn't so. Sid and Nancy checked into a room on the second floor. Floors one to three are known as 'transient' floors, it seems.

I'm not sure if I would have prefered the second floor; or, for that matter, the hotel I was originally booked into - the Essex House, overlooking Central Park - which is, I gather from a good number of New Yorkers and fellow writers, a far classier hotel than the one I end up in: the Chelsea.

Joe Stevens' theory is that Island's higher ranks didn't like something Vivien Goldman put in her B-52's piece about how she stayed somewhere flash (the Essex House) whilst the B-52 girls didn't. A victim of perverse corporate logic? Hold on suspicion.

Robert Palmer wasn't my first of foremost reason for a flight to New York - he just tucked neatly into an uncharacteristic case of good timing. I wanted to talk to August Darnell (a modern soul genius) and see the City's lights. My first visit.

I threw Robert Palmer in when I heard two new songs of his: Johnny And Mary (the excellent single with the exorbitant bass boom); and Looking For Clues (his new LP's title track). Neither an informed nor infatuated party, I merely wished to colour him in a bit, flesh out the meagre clues. I was working purely on suspicion.

I liked the two songs in question because they were made of nervous, evil funk and shot full of doubt. The words to both Looking For Clues and Johnny And Mary can mean whatever you want them to (which is good) and what they meant to me was to do with problems close to home (which is where the heart is).

"It's crazy but I'm frightened by the sound of the telephone / I worry that the caller might have awful news" starts Looking For Clues. A great way to start, you have to admit - even if you're not a paranoid fool like me. The nearest it gets to a 'conclusion' goes "I'm convinced that there's a way of getting through to you / Ooh, I'm looking for clues..." - which covers more emotional ground that you might at first think. It fuelled my callow detective instincts.

The rest of the songs on his new LP were a different case entirely: what anyone with a flimsy and unfanclub knowledge of Robert Palmer would probably expect - a messy, privileged and never messed up eclectism. Sandwiched between the shock of the opening Looking For Clues and Johnny And Mary for instance is Sulky Girl - a regrettable scrap of ordinary riffy rock years removed from its present company in structure, style and delivery. Bits of the remainder of the LP are co-written and co-played by Gary Numan.

Now, Robert Palmer lives in the Bahamas and tends to use obscure conga players or celebrity horn sections - a soul snob - so I wondered a little about this latest crush. I'm a lousy mindreader.

I used to have the first LP Robert Palmer made for Island - Sneakin' Sally Through The Alley it  was called. The reason I had it was that it was the mid-'70s and Little Feat and Allen Toussaint and probably The Meters were all on this LP and what that added up to was an easy sell to a young soul rebel. I was poised in the disjunction between DJ and critic, and felt uneasy with the purchase. I couldn't put my finger - let alone my pulse - on it.

Robert Palmer has made loads of albums since then. I lost interest, but the reviews stayed the same. Doubt is always the denominator: he's just a magpie... colours in but won't use his imagination, and so on. Sitting on a fence with all the right people... or singing sweetly swinging on a perch in a gilded cage... but what does it add up to?

The Ritz is a recently opened New York club. Its inner architecture is somewhat akin to a Music Machine or Lyceum, but you get even fewer breaks, because the Ritz serves one kind of beer only, and it is horrendously watery and very expensive.

I knew everything I needed to know about the Ritz after hearing that. You can work out everything proceeding from such a clue. You can sketch the clientele in advance: male patrons will wear shirts open to the hairy chest and medallion, and female patrons will probably go for the latest in designer jeans - whatever they are (I shudder to think and have never bothered to investigate).

When Joe and I arrive early evening at the Ritz as arranged with the New York representative of Island Records, only the road crew are in. Big boxes spilling open, big stomachs, big belts, big pizzas, big cartons of milk. No big star. We locate another small bar.

We go back later much against our now looser instincts. Palmer finally arrives. He is wearing a yeughy smooth creamy white suit and dark tie and yeughy smart shoes. He could get on the cover of Ritz and Rolling Stone. He seems happy and garrulous, if unnaturally preoccupied with his nostrils. He chats with two people - a man from the road crew and a black woman who looks like she just stepped off the cover of one of those mid-'70s p-a-a-a-r-r-t-y people! soul albums.

We seem to get a nod at one point, although he seems to be doing this quite indiscriminately. We eventually introduce ourselves to him, as there is no one from his record company there to do it for us. He says he has been told nothing about any interview. But will he do one, now? Oh, he doesn't know about that - he's feeling rather "hostile" at the moment. He runs away to check with someone about sound checking. Yeah, he'll do a quick interview.

At the door of the Ritz two big blue suited shapes who are either chauffeurs or bodyguards express interest in our expedition: wouldn't you just know it, I'm taking Robert Palmer to a bar! He tells me that he hasn't got any money whatsoever on him so I'll have to stand the drinks. Then he tells us the news he'd heard that afternoon about John Bonham's death - news to us, too. Boy, you should have seen my face when he said I'd have to stand the drinks.

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