ROBERT PALMER
SIMPLY IRREFUTABLE
FAR FROM THE DILETTANTE PLAYBOY HIS IMAGE SUGGESTED, COULD THE SHAPESHIFTING ROBERT PALMER BE ONE OF THE MOST UNDERRATED SINGERSONGWRITERS OF HIS ERA? AS A NEW BOXSET COMPILES HIS RECORDINGS FOR THE ISLAND LABEL, WE REASSESS HIS CHAMELEON-LIKE SOLO CAREER AND COLLABORATIONS WITH SUPERGROUP THE POWER STATION.
STEVE O’BRIEN
Smooth operator: Robert Palmer in May 1986
© Getty
Ihardly ever get asked about music,” Robert Palmer told The Guardian in 2002. “I do, however, get asked about the Addicted To Love video and my suits on a daily basis.” When he died just a year later, of a heart attack at the age of just 54, sadly that’s what most of the obituaries focused on – the rock-pop playboy who seemingly prized style over substance, hedonism over musical integrity. But while other sharp-suited lotharios such as Bryan Ferry are celebrated as rakish geniuses, somehow Palmer’s considerable contribution to music seems to have been cold-shouldered.
The image of Robert Palmer that’s seared into our collective memory is of him performing amidst a bevy of identical-clad supermodels, a perfectly coiffed sophisticate luxuriating in the pages of a Vogue photoshoot. The Addicted To Love video was one of the defining promos of the 80s, and proved so insanely popular that Palmer reheated the idea for follow-up singles I Didn’t Mean To Turn You On and Simply Irresistible. Those visuals, however, have overshadowed pretty much everything else Palmer ever did, and caricatured him as someone for whom music was somehow secondary to looking good. That he was once honoured as Rolling Stone’s Best Dressed Male Rock Artist and told interviewers “I guess I always treated music as a hobby” only added to the sense that he was not somebody to be taken seriously.
Yet a closer look at his music suggests a more compelling and intriguing figure than the obits painted. This was an artist who, over a career spanning 30 years, proved as restless and daredevil a spirit as David Bowie taking in such genres as funk, synth-pop, soul, reggae, jazz, arena rock, bossa nova and blues. You see, there was always more to Robert Palmer than met the eye. Even his beginnings belied his image as a designersuited Romeo.
Not many pop stars – especially ones that hang out with supermodels – have Batley in West Yorkshire on their birth certificate. Yet this is where Robert Allen Palmer came into the world on 19 January 1949. That said, his family upped sticks to Malta when he was just a few months old, returning to Yorkshire 11 years later, this time to Scarborough where his mother ran a guest house and where his father was now stationed in the Royal Navy. Robert’s years abroad meant that, by the time he was at his new school, he was “the only one who spoke Oxford English.” At school, as in music decades later, Robert Palmer never quite fitted in.