Robert Palmer spent his long career perched between rock stardom and cult fame. He became one of the key artists of MTV’s golden age thanks to “Addicted to Love,” a crunching rocker married to a video that mitigated exploitation with irony. The sight of Palmer performing in front of an army of anonymous supermodels became one of the iconic rock images of the 1980s, pushing “Addicted to Love” to the top of the Billboard charts in 1986, 12 years after he launched his solo career with Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley.
Clues, Palmer’s sixth record, appeared in 1980, halfway between that 1974 debut and Riptide, the parent album to “Addicted to Love.” Fittingly, Clues sounds as if it’s caught between two worlds, attempting to shed the skin of the album-oriented 1970s as it evolves into the electro futurism of the 1980s—a metamorphosis vividly captured on the album’s two singles, “Looking for Clues” and “Johnny and Mary.” Palmer wasn’t the only rocker dabbling in new-wave fashion in 1980. The underground started to bubble up into the mainstream that year, with Alice Cooper’s Flush the Fashion, Linda Ronstadt’s Mad Love, and Paul McCartney’s McCartney II all incorporating the sequenced synths of new wave.
When he released Clues in September 1980, Palmer was nowhere close to being in the same league as those rock stars. He was a journeyman, one whose first big break arrived via Vinegar Joe, a hippy hangover he co-fronted alongside Elkie Brooks. Too slick for the underground, too shaggy for the mainstream, Vinegar Joe released three records in the early 1970s that demonstrated Palmer’s gritty rasp and appealing sense of control, not to mention his superior sense of taste, at least compared with the rest of the outfit. These characteristics caught the eye of Chris Blackwell, the head of Island Records, who signed Palmer to a solo contract that allowed the British singer to surround himself with expert American musicians. On Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley, he counted the Meters and Little Feat’s Lowell George among his supporting musicians.
Palmer kept pace with ease; his unflappable delivery suggested he was holding some energy in reserve. He began to thread reggae into funk on Pressure Drop, a record where he shared the album cover with a naked woman, the first in a trilogy depicting Palmer as a mischievous playboy: He’s winning a game of strip poker on Some People Can Do What They Like, grinning over a pair of discarded bikinis on Double Fun. A satiny veneer enveloped his records, yet he kept his arm’s distance from pop; he remained a resolutely album-oriented artist, barely scraping the Billboard charts as he doggedly toured America.
Palmer’s stylized aloofness, combined with his debonair style, earned him a number of detractors. Reviewing Clues for NME, Nick Kent wrote, “Palmer’s whole career has been an exercise in minor-league talent with heart-throb looks.” Dave Marsh was blunter in the New Rolling Stone Record Guide, writing, “Palmer is in fact virtually soulless, the Fraud of Funk”—a sentiment echoed later by Robert Christgau, who asked, “Is this fraud really the Dorian Gray wannabe of jacket photos?”
Behind those rakish record covers, his albums grew increasingly slick. Palmer’s records of the late ’70s were as smooth and soulful as anything by Daryl Hall & John Oates, and he also worked with one of Boz Scaggs’ musicians from Some People Can Do What They Like. Despite these surface similarities, Palmer didn’t demonstrate pop instincts until he covered “Every Kinda People”—a breezy ode to love and understanding written by Andy Fraser, formerly the bassist for hard rockers Free—and its modest success pushed him to expand his palette on Secrets, the 1979 album which gave him his first genuine hit in “Bad Case of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor),” a rampaging cover of a song from the neo-rockabilly raver Moon Martin.
“Having a hit only increases the opportunities to fire your imagination," Palmer told Fricke in the wake of the success of “Bad Case of Loving You.” The singer’s creativity was sparked by his infatuation with Gary Numan, the synth-rock pioneer behind the post-punk staples “Are Friends Electric” and “Cars.” During the supporting tour for Secrets, Palmer found space for covers of “Cars” and “Me! I Disconnect from You” in his setlists. (Not everybody in his band was aboard the shift in style. Palmer told the NME that his guitarist, one of the players from the Meters, thought he was joking when he announced that they’d be adding the new-wave dirges to their setlist.)
Numan, who Palmer had taken to calling a “soul man” in interviews, took his dad to one of those Secrets concerts; afterward, he proposed a collaboration. Numan caught Palmer at a time when he was holed up in Nassau, splitting his time between his seaside town house and Compass Point, the studio that was across the street from his home. This time, Palmer abandoned the studio pros, constructing the foundation of the album himself with synthesizers and drum machines. He recalled, “The technology was so primitive that you spent most of the time behind the machines with a screwdriver. But it did give you a simplicity of form.”
Whether because of those inherent limitations or simply his own inclinations, Palmer didn’t explore the outer limits of synth-rock on Clues. Instead, he developed a hybrid of modern rock, blue-eyed soul, and future pop, honing his hooks so the music feels immediate even when it flirts with the esoteric. Palmer was interested in aesthetics, not the avant-garde; all the electronics give the music shape and texture. The increased aural definition accentuates Palmer’s sharpened melodies while also shrouding the record in a fashionable facade that pushed Clues slightly to the left of the mainstream’s center in 1980.
Considering the intentional chill that Clues exudes, it’s easy to overestimate the influence Numan had on the record, positioning him as the Brian Eno to Palmer’s David Bowie. The synth-rocker only appears on one cut on Clues, a cover of Numan’s dystopian ballad “I Dream of Wires,” and co-wrote one other song, “Found You Now,” an exercise in Moroccan funk. Numan passed through Compass Point on his way to Japan, and his presence on Clues also feels oddly transient; he’s responsible for colorful accents, not the underlying structure.
It’s possible Numan’s synths drove Palmer to create “Johnny & Mary,” the album’s exquisitely eerie first single. The song appears to rise from the electronic ether, a tale of a romance that’s withered into a cycle of codependency, set to a circular minor-key melody. Plenty of the story is left unsaid and, appropriately, parts of the arrangement seem missing, with its nocturnal pulse accentuated by smears of synth and shards of guitar. It’s so spare, it can still seem startling, capturing the feeling when the promise of the future starts to fade.
"Johnny & Mary” finds a companion in “Looking for Clues,” a jittery piece of funk whose modernism is informed by Talking Heads. Indeed, Heads drummer Chris Frantz, a friend and Nassau neighbor of Palmer’s, plays percussion on the track; Palmer returned the favor on Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, released a few months after Clues. Frantz noted in his memoir that “Robert appreciated the value of a good rhythm section,” which is a reflection of Palmer’s unusual compositional process. Palmer told Fricke in 1979, “I put a groove down on the drums and try to think of a melody to sing.” His rendition of “Not a Second Time,” a song plucked from With the Beatles, was also the result of his rhythm-first approach—once he had the beat in place, he realized the Beatles’ deep cut was a good melodic fit—yet “Not a Second Time” is also indicative of the fact that Clues doesn’t strictly adhere to synth rock. When Palmer was covering Numan in concert, he also was performing a version of “Kid” by the Pretenders, a sign that he was tapped into the more tuneful aspect of new wave.
As evidenced by “Looking for Clues,” “Johnny and Mary,” and the frenetic pop of “What Do You Care,” Clues is far sharper and hookier than any previous Palmer album; “Good Care of You,” a B-side included on expanded reissues of the album, could easily be mistaken for the product of a band of skinny-tie-wearing power-poppers. Palmer didn’t abandon his previous obsessions, either. He channeled his love for reggae into “Woke Up Laughing,” whose synthesized spareness subsumes the sunshine lilt of the rhythm, and “Sulky Girl” occupied the same hard rock space of “Bad Case of Loving You."
While it may be possible to source each strand on Clues, that doesn’t mean they meld into a cohesive LP. Listening to the album can seem like flipping through the radio dial in the early ’80s, speeding past Top 40 and making a stop at a local album-rock station before seeking out college radio. This was a deliberate move on Palmer’s part. “You can go for just one good sound but that can also be like a madman with a pepper shaker,” he told Smash Hits in 1983. “He puts a bit of pepper on his food and it makes his food taste good. He then thinks if he puts a lot of pepper on it, it will taste wonderful. But it won’t necessarily. I’m not interested in getting a career and making a sound and building it up and being Pat Benatar.”
As admirable as his artistic ambitions were, Clues does suffer from so much flitting from style to style. Curiously, it bogs down on the Numan numbers: “I Dream of Wires” veers into a dreary drone, while “Found You Now” isn’t as hypnotic as “Woke Up Laughing.” Another downside of eclecticism is that it’s difficult to attract listeners. Clues didn’t find much of an audience upon its initial release, with “Looking for Clues” barely cracking the British Top 40 and garnering no Billboard hits at all.
Despite its lack of commercial success, Clues seeped into the bloodstream of pop. “Looking for Clues” was among the first videos aired on MTV, while “Johnny and Mary” appeared in a commercial campaign for Renault cars that extended into the ’90s and it continued to echo over the decades; in 2014, Todd Terje released a shimmering cover featuring Bryan Ferry on lead vocals. By 1986, Palmer could claim that his album sounded mainstream—but part of the reason is that John Taylor and Andy Taylor hired him to front the Power Station, the group they formed with Chic’s Bernard Edwards and Tony Thompson in 1984 after briefly stepping away from Duran Duran. The Power Station melded many of Palmer’s interests—funk, hard rock, pop, and soul—in a sleekly marketable fashion. “Some Like It Hot” and “Get It On” both went into the Top 10 in 1985, softening the ground for Palmer’s “Addicted to Love."
Palmer’s restlessness resurfaced quickly. He didn’t join the Power Station on the supporting tour for their hit debut—in one interview, he said he wasn’t invited—and instead concentrated on completing his solo effort Riptide. Once that album became a phenomenon, he subjected his audiences to a cover of Hüsker Dü’s “New Day Rising,” telegraphing his move toward heavier styles of rock—a transition that culminated in Heavy Nova, so named for its fusion of metal and bossa nova. Palmer’s wanderlust settled in the ’90s, at least on record. He still showed evidence of curiosity and broad tastes, gifting NME’s Steven Wells a Noam Chomsky book during a 1996 interview where he lamented that his teenage son preferred Pearl Jam to Pantera.
Palmer’s fondness for Pantera never surfaced on record. Toward the end of his life, he returned to his R&B and blues roots on a pair of albums released before his death, at 54, in 2003. “Addicted to Love” remains a cultural touchstone—aided in part by a parody of its video in Richard Curtis’ holiday perennial Love Actually—but Clues is the cornerstone of his legacy. It captures his skills as a singer and smarts as a musician, and its best moments are infused with an elusive elegance that makes the music feel strangely untethered from time.
