Robert Palmer: S&D

just listened to the yet-to-be-mentioned-on-this-thread "best of both worlds" for the first time in years and, damn, those are some weird chord changes. he briefly changes keys in the middle of each verse, from B to D, in a way that's unexpected, awkward and pretty damn cool.

as for his interest in african, caribbean, brazilian, etc. music, here's a pretty good interview where he delves into it with some musical depth.

really enjoying Clues and Pride

somehow I never knew about Clues. What a great album.

https://open.spotify.com/track/5bg0lxba4KQmBhWe3nKHUB

Link to Alfred's recent writeup since he hasn't gotten around to it yet:
https://humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/he-needs-all-the-world-to-confirm-best-of-robert-palmer/

i somehow managed not to hear "every kinda people" until like two or three years ago. what a great song! i love the steel drums. definitely the sort of soft rock i go for.

Yet he wrote a few terrible tunes.

Hearing this for the first time and digging it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdWTy9TwvZ8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7tMoOJbc-A

I never knew he used to cover "New Day Rising" live

Another one for the "I can't believe this exists" file: Palmer covering Motörhead's "Eat the Rich" live in 1988.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEaCwaYyt_E

Well, the embed didn't work, but here's the link...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEaCwaYyt_E

Totally believe it. This man loved performing his record collection

The crazy/awesome part to me is that "Eat the Rich" is a song from 1987, which means Robert Palmer was an active Motörhead listener.

His fake Lemmy is hilarious.

He covered The System's "You Are in My System" a year after its release too.

His live "New Day Rising" was late-'80s too, no?

yep

Was near his Comsat Angels period iirc.

This man loved performing his record collection

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, April 19, 2022 4:01 PM

Well put.

I have a soft spot for his cover of “pressure drop”

Happy birthday. He was capable of dubbed-out shit like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xccGP7IfgjI

I feel he is on the cusp of a new hipster crush.

Wow this is fantastic…a stripped down version of a track that would appear on the Power Station’ album…and bonus Adrian Belew mention/solo…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3uUkZKXzcM

Somehow in his wiki bio:

A quiet man in his personal life, Palmer was uninterested in most of the excesses of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle, although he was a very heavy tobacco user who smoked as many as 60 cigarettes a day

Here is Palmer in the opening seconds, showing uninterest in most excesses of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1UBS5ZL7Hs

From the Phill Brown book:

As we finished the album the whole subject of the budget became a bit of a sore point. Despite the early attempts to keep costs under control, Some People Can Do What They Like turned out to be the most expensive album so far for Robert, at about $75,000. We had used 28 days of studio time for tracking, overdubbing and mixing, 22 reels of 2-inch multitrack tape, 10 reels of 1/4-inch mixing tape, and an unknown number of boxes of cassettes and razor blades. Twenty-three musicians, two engineers, three assistants, one producer and one model had been employed, not to mention Robert himself. Then there were fees for house rental, cars, hotel accommodation, flights, meals, hire equipment and per diems. Oh... and a cocaine bill for Robert of $10,000.

Green Gartside has an anecdote from his long 2019 radio interview where he praises Palmer as an R&B obsessive and, contrary to stories, an exceptionally courteous man. Palmer called him sometime in the early '00s to rave about another obscurity. Green was like, "Robert, where are you?" Palmer was standing in the ocean with a cell phone, like Al Pacino in The Insider.

There's a lot about Palmer in Guy Pratt's memoir too, all of it very fond.

Pratt on Palmer:

These were fabulously debauched times, although they were never keen on you leaving the house, figuring they had all the gourmet food, cocktail ingredients, narcotics, firearms, films and musical equipment anyone could ever wish for.