Robert Palmer – Addicted To Love

“Addicted to Love” is the Robert Palmer second single from his Riptide album, (1985). The single charted #1 in US and #5 in UK.

The song was originally conceived as a duet with Chaka Kahn until her label, Warner Bros., refused to let her sing on the track, forcing Palmer to re-record the high notes himself. A few more guys round out the instrumentation, including Palmer’s Power Station bandmate Andy Taylor, of Duran Duran, on guitar. But the song is not without female influence.

In the music video, Palmer is backed by a “band” of lookalike models who are little more than fashionable accessories for the suave singer. Indeed, looks trumped musical ability when director Terence Donovan auditioned girls for the clip. “I was 21 and got the part on the strength of my modeling book,” Mak Gilchrist, the “bassist,” tells Q magazine. “We were meant to look and ‘act’ like showroom mannequins.”

The girls in the video are:

Julia Bolino (guitar)
Patty Elias (guitar)
Kathy Davies (drums)
Julie Pankhurst (keyboard)
Mak Gilchrist (bass)

The quartet does strike a dramatic image in their little black dresses. Donovan, a British fashion photographer known for capturing the mod fashion of the Swinging ’60s, shifts his lens to the ’80s. He completes the Palmer Girl look with slicked-back hair, rouged cheekbones, and red-glossed lips. The result is an iconic slice of ’80s fashion that makes the “Addicted To Love” video unforgettable and proves the increasingly popular music video medium can have a powerful effect on a song’s success, as the single rockets to #1. The clip wins Best Male Video at the MTV Video Music Awards, and Palmer takes home a Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance.

Here is the original, memorable video from 1986:

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Robert Palmer - Addicted To Love

Robert Palmer - Addicted To Love 03:44

Video on the top of the page has been recorded live at a danish TV gameshow in 1995. The band is “The Rootcanals”: Søren Reiff (gui), Emil de Waal (dr), Assi Roar (ba), Jesper Mejlvang (key), Bob Rickets (sax), Jan Glæsel (tr).

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