Robert Palmer is dead

It's coke.

I had just never heard about him dying in the first place. RIP big guy. ;_;

i just got a bunch of old terrible vinyl, which happens to me every so often as 'the guy with turntables'. a my fair lady cast recording, greek opera singers, french orchestral renditions of western scores... just all basically unredeemable. and wedged in there.. 'Clues' by Robert Palmer. sah-mokin!! i swear to god i thought i'd put it on at the wrong speed though, at first. no way those songs are that fast. but, well, no, they're that fast.

That's the one where he teamed up with Gary Numan on a couple of tracks. "Looking for Clues" has one of those pre-MTV videos with a off-white backdrop and cardboard props, along the same lines as Sparks' "Beat the Clock" and "Number One Song in Heaven":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92wCPfqyVbg

I don't know what kind of image he was going for. He looked slightly too old and slightly too well-fed to be a New Wave star. You had to be really thin to be a New Wave star. That's one of the reasons Talking Heads never invited Jocky Wilson into the band. He would have looked strange in that context.

The ancient Egyptian pharaohs were entombed along with their servants, so I like to imagine that somewhere in Switzerland there's a mausoleum with a skeleton dressed in a really sharp suit and some other skeletons - taller, thinner skeletons - dressed in 1980s minidresses, with fingernail scratchmarks on the door etc. It's a compelling mental image.

Palmer was the best fellow traveler.

XP - That song is remarkably like McCartney's 'Coming Up'

“Woke Up Laughing” is such a perfect little tune.

so this green gartside interview has some juicy robert palmer stories:

https://www.mixcloud.com/NTSRadio/trevor-jackson-green-gartside-29th-october-2019/