‘Looking for Clues’: The song that Robert Palmer can’t remember writing
Suave, 1970s soul rock singer Robert Palmer’s jump into new wave’s synth-soaked sheen could tempt an eye roll, cynically viewed as the desperate signs of an artist’s frantic grab for relevance. For every perfect new wave swan-dive from the likes of David Bowie, there’s Alice Cooper‘s inauthentic tinny electro on ‘Clones (We’re All)’, or even Village People donning new romantic chic for 1981’s confused Renaissance.
While it’s not Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), Palmer’s sixth album, Clues, is no midlife crisis. Released in 1980 following a string of blue-eyed funk records, Palmer approached the synth-driven pop that dominated the charts with intrepid curiosity, a musical antenna alert to what was exciting about the new wave. Byoued by fandom as much as an artistic endeavour, Clues is a record carried along a considerable distance by its infectious enthusiasm and convincing embrace of electronic instruments.
Featuring Talking Heads’ Chris Frantz and even Gary Numan—whose ‘I Dream of Wires’ was audaciously covered—Palmer eagerly embraced collaborations that aligned his songs and production with the contemporary trends of the time.
Following ‘Johnny and Mary’, Clues‘ second single, ‘Looking For Clues’, staked new sonic territory in the most confidence. A sharp, fizzy burst of slithering rhythms, chirpy sequencers, and disjointed breaks illustrates the song’s themes of paranoid scrutiny over a love interest.
Soaking up The Tom Tom Club’s skewed funk who was simultaneously recording in The Bahamas’ Compass Point Studios and the synths demand for engineering discipline, Palmer explained to Q in 1988: “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. In America, that record was regarded as inaccessible and avant-garde when it came out.”
One of his surprising biggest hits was also the haziest. Again, he’s no Bowie, who barely remembered recording the entire Station to Station due to his cocaine blitz, but Palmer was frank about his bewilderment at the cut’s genesis and how well it came out, revealing in the liner notes of his 1989 compilation Addictions: Volume 1: “I can never remember exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote ‘Clues,’ but I’m still like the character in the song – frightened by the sound of the telephone, which is a strange basis for a lyric,… I must have found it pretty easy to write though because there are an awful lot of verses.”
‘Looking For Clues’ was helped by its MTV-ready music video. Aired on the first day of its broadcast and played 23rd after Phil Collins’ ‘In the Air Tonight’, its innovative clip featuring Palmer imposed to appear lost in a giant world of everyday objects introduced a new generation to the R&B Yorkshireman who knew nothing of his blue-eyed soft rock of the already by then distant 1970s.
Going on to achieve greater success with 1985’s Riptide and its monster single ‘Addicted to Love’, ‘Looking For Clues’ still stands as Palmer’s most vital cut, a single from an album that documents an established artist wandering into new sonic turf enthused with unreined possibilities and an honest embrace of ‘the shock of the new’.
