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Palmer wanted this song to be a duet with Chaka Khan and recorded it with her. His label, Warner Brothers Records, would not allow her voice to be used on the record, so he had to erase her part and re-record her high notes before releasing it. Chaka Khan did appear on Steve Winwood's "
Higher Love," which beat out this song for the 1987 Record Of The Year Grammy.
The video featured Palmer singing in front of a "band" of beautiful women who looked exactly alike. They wore lots of make-up and identical clothing as they pretended to play the instruments. The video became an icon of the '80s, and is constantly parodied, including in a Pepsi commercial with Britney Spears.
Elton John's lyricist Bernie Taupin makes a pretty good case that the models in the video were influenced by the song "
Bennie And The Jets," where he wrote about a futuristic Rock band of androgynous beauties. Said Taupin: "I can't help but believe that that Robert Palmer video with all the identical models somehow paid a little lip service to The Jets."
The funny thing about the video was that the models posing as a band were selected precisely because they did NOT know how to play the instruments. As a result, each girl was keeping her own time and moving to a different beat.
One of the girls in the video was "bassist" Mak Gilchrist. She recalled to Q magazine June 2009: "I was 21 and got the part on the strength of my modeling book. We were meant to look and 'act' like showroom mannequins. Director Terence Donovan got us tipsy on a bottle of wine but as were having our make-up retouched, I lost balance on my heels and knocked the top of my guitar into the back of Robert's head, and his face then hit the microphone." Gilchrist added: "I remember feeling an acute sense of embarrassment when I first saw how sexy the video was. The most unusual place I saw it was on a huge screen on the side of a Tokyo building."
The girls in the video were not Palmer's idea. They were filmed separately and edited behind clips of Palmer singing.
The "love is an addiction" theme is a common lyrical trope, also successfully used the 1983 Huey Lewis & the News hit "
I Want A New Drug." Palmer, who died of a heart attack in 2003 at age 54, said that he wrote the song about what it's like having an addictive personality.
The "keyboardist" in the video was Susie Verrico, who later appeared in the in the 2006 series of the UK reality TV show Big Brother.
Weird Al Yankovic recorded a parody of this called "Addicted to Spuds" on his album Polka Party!. (thanks, Steph - SoCal, CA)
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it was Lisa E. Brown originally from Kacksonville, Fl.
and I can prove it.
she also did other videos with Robert Palmer songs
remember the shower scene with the water goggles??
that was Lisa also.
By the way, has anyone else noticed that Palmer sounds so much like Springsteen the Boss when in his tenor voice? Compare this one, for instance, to the Boss's "Glory Days". The 2 tenor voices sound the same, do they not? Palmer & the Boss would sound awesome in a trio w/ Bob Seger!
"Simply Irresistable" is the other song/video Palmer made with the girl "band."
If you replace "love" with "drugs" in this song, I think this song still makes sense, and maybe even a little more sense. :) Other lines would change subtly, too (i.e., "One more kiss is all you need" -> "One more hit is all you need").
- PHIL, San Jose, CA
Agree 100%. He left us way too soon. This was back when MTV was actually fun to watch.
Hell, you could do that with any song. I could turn rage against the machine into country if I took out the guitar, "sung it twangy" and added fiddles.