This week’s singer has to be one of the most underrated of the 70s, 80s and 90s. A talented song writer, producer and singer in many different genres, yet UK radio, typically, only seem to play one song, Addicted To Love. Robert Palmer began playing blues and over the next 25 years had included rock, disco, electro, pop, soul and even a bit of crooning. It’s a good way not to pigeon-holed, but he should have been more appreciated than he was. Today’s choice is one of his disco/electro track, Johnny and Mary, but who were they?
Palmer was born in Batley in the West Riding of Yorkshire in January 1949 and because his father worked for the British naval intelligence, the family moved to Malta where he spent the first 12 years of his life and grew up listening to jazz and soul music which he heard on American Forces Radio. After moving back to the UK, the family settled in Scarborough and when he was 15, he joined his first band called the Mandrakes. His first real break came in 1969 when he was invited to join the Alan Bown Set as a replacement singer for Jess Roden. His tenure there was short-lived and he left to join a band called Dada which featured Elkie Brooks and her then-husband Pete Gage but after a year they evolved into Vinegar Joe where Palmer played guitar and shared lead vocals with Brooks.
Palmer used his time in Vinegar Joe to hone his song writing skills, “I was getting more confident about the songs I was writing but with the supposed democracy of a band they were like pieces you’d handed in. By the time the group finished with it, it was turned upside down, lost the mood and everything.” he explained to Robert Sandall in 1988. After the group split in 1973, Palmer went off to the States to learn from the American players he admired. He watched them and copied them and learned some of the songs on Motown and Stax before they were heard over here.
In 1974, he signed a record deal with Island records and with the full support of the label and its owner, Chris Blackwell, he recorded his debut album Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley, with all the top musicians including Lowell George and Michael Jackson’s guitarist David Williams and it was all headed by Aretha Franklin’s musical director and drummer Bernard Purdie.
In 1978, hit fourth album Double Fun which contained his first UK hit single, Every Kinda People which was written by Free’s bass player Andy Fraser, which Fraser had recorded but never released, so when Palmer heard it he decided to cover it. It was a minor hit but has since been covered by numerous people including Mint Juleps, Randy Crawford, Chaka Demus & Pliers, Kym Marsh, Joe Cocker and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. It was also used as the theme tune to the Michael Barrymore TV series My Kind Of People. The following year he released the more rock-orientated album Secrets which contained his second UK hit, a cover of Moon Martin’s rock classic Bad Case of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor)
Come the 1980s and the electro era, Palmer had recently produced some songs for one of his teenage hero’s, Desmond Dekker and it led him to start using prototype sequencers and, “inadvertently”, he said, made a name for himself as a “techno-brat” much showcased on Secrets and the follow-up, Clues. He said of it, “The technology was so primitive that you spent most of the time behind the machine with a screwdriver.”
Clues’ first single was Johnny and Mary which peaked at number 44 but, was none the less, his biggest hit to date at the time. He told Daryl Easlea, “I’d bought a Spider which was another prototype sequencer which plugged into a wasp. It was black and yellow and battery powered. I was fooling around and that was it, it was just me and my drummer Dony Wynn.” Palmer had moved to the Bahamas and was living in its capital Nassau when he wrote the song. The song is generally about a fictitious couple going through the motions with ‘Johnny’ living in a bit of a make-believe world and ‘Mary’ just going along with his ideas. There were a lot of British ex-pats living in the Caribbean at the time and Palmer said, “Lyrically I was dealing with my exposure to ex-patriots adding, I’d never seen such contrived formality before but Johnny and Mary obviously had. These are people who have fallen into life like a habit, there’s no struggle or romance in what they do.”
The song performed much better around the world than it did in the UK reaching number 21 in the Netherlands, one place higher in Australia, 12 in New Zealand, 11 in Sweden, 10 in Austria, eight in Belgium, seven in Germany, five in both Switzerland and South Africa and topped the chart in Spain.
The Clues album almost made the UK top 30 and spent a couple of months on the chart. Among the personnel, it featured the aforementioned Andy Fraser on bass, Talking Heads’ Chris Franz on bass drum and Gary Numan on keyboards. The car company Renault liked the sound and used Palmer’s version in their early TV adverts. In the 90s, they used other specially recorded versions of the same song and so, in 2002, Palmer said, “I play that song today and I can see people nudging themselves saying, ‘why is he playing the car commercial.'”