In We’re No. 1, The A.V. Club examines an album or single that went to
No. 1 on the charts to get to the heart of what it means to be popular in
pop music, and how that has changed over the years. In this installment, we
cover Robert Palmer’s “Addicted To Love,” which hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot
100 on May 3, 1986.
Robert Palmer’s iconic video for
his biggest single, “Addicted To Love,” celebrates its 30th anniversary this
coming January. Paying homage to American art deco legend Patrick Nagel, for
the video the singer substituted the seasoned session men who helped him record
his breakthrough 1985 LP Riptide and replaced them with
quintet of high fashion models.
“I remember feeling an acute sense
of embarrassment when I first saw how sexy the video was,” “bassist” Mak
Gilchrist said to Q Magazine in 2009. With Palmer out front
dressed to the nines in a white shirt and tie, the video created an imagery
that has come to define MTV during its ’80s heyday as prominently as any other
single of its time. Nobody in the Top 40 carried themselves like Palmer back
then: Standing in a crowd among his peers, he looked like Don Draper on the set
of The Goldbergs.
“People talk about the way he
dressed in the videos, but that was the way he dressed all the time,” renowned
studio guitarist Eddie Martinez tells The A.V. Club.Martinez, along
with Duran Duran guitarist Andy Taylor—Palmer’s associate in the short-lived
supergroup The Power Station in ’85—gave the song its feral hard-rock edge.
“And there was no pretense; he was very comfortable in his own skin. He’d come
to the studio dialed in his double-breasted suit and proper tie, and he wore it
well. I always respected that.”
However, it was the strength of the
song itself that propelled “Addicted To Love” to number one on the Billboard
Hot 100 the week of May 3 in 1986. The success of that single and the Riptide album
served as a serious turning point in Palmer’s established career, which dated
all the way back to his work in the early ’70s English R&B group Vinegar
Joe. That effort led to a long relationship with Island Records, yielding such
choice solo work as 1974’s Sneaking Sally Through The Alley,
1975’s Pressure Drop, and 1980’s Clues. With Riptide,
however, the singer updated his approach, coupling the white-hot mid-’80s
R&B climate with the equally in vogue hard-rock scene to create a sound
entirely his own. Palmer was helped by Chic bassist Bernard Edwards behind the
production desk and a crew of great musicians that included Taylor, Martinez
(the man behind the guitar riffs on the Run DMC hits “Rock Box” and “King Of
Rock”), drummer Tony Thompson, keyboardists Wally Badarou and Jeff Bova, and
bassist Guy Pratt, among others.
“Robert had this plan for a while,”
Pratt explains to The A.V. Club. “He wanted to do a
rock album, with Jeff Beck originally, using disco technology. No one had
really done that yet, and Riptide was a very influential album
in terms of the shaping of that ’80s sound. You know, that big guitar and
really bright techno stuff, all of which had nothing to do with the vast
amounts of cocaine being used by people at the time [Laughs.] Originally when
Robert wrote ‘Addicted,’ it was basically a ZZ Top song. It was Bernard who
came up with that bass line, which takes the song to a whole other place because
it came from the man who created ‘Good Times.’”
“For the ’80s, the song had
something very modern to it,” adds Martinez. “When I listen to Riptide now,
and particularly that track, there’s something to it that still holds up to
this day in a really good way. There are other albums I was on during that time
that didn’t hold up as well. But I think the way it was recorded and the way it
was performed really still rings true. The whole thing was done digitally,
too.”
“Addicted” was originally intended
to be a duet with Chaka Khan, but her then-manager refused to sign off on its
release in fear of her overexposure, as she was enjoying her own success with
her 1984 LP I Feel For You. A demo version of the song with Khan,
however, is said to be in existence. Palmer gave her credit for vocal
arrangements. Khan posted a picture of
her and Palmer performing “Addicted” at Wembley Stadium on her website, shortly
before Palmer died of a heart attack in September 2003. She wrote, “I arranged
the vocals for his #1 hit ‘Addicted To Love’ but unfortunately, the vocals I
recorded didn’t make the final version. I was still pretty stoked to have been
involved in this project!”
for the rest go here:
http://www.avclub.com/article/robert-palmers-addicted-love-helped-define-mtv-era-228936
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