Boy, didn't Robert Palmer go to shit in the nineties? I mean, really go to shit. That cover he did with UB40 was the last straw, I think. Just as well he had a handful of runs on the board before then. This compilation is remarkable for actually having a few good songs, as well as some quite forgettable crap. Which is more than can be said of "Addictions Volume 2". (Yes, there was one. Scary, no?)

You would not have been able to escape "Simply Irresistable" during the latter half of 1988, and for that time it almost made sense. The nutzoidly over-the-top guitar solo, the almost ironic delivery of the vocals, the katana sound effect, and of course the video with all those women in tight dresses doing the shimmy and all that. Of course it was an steroid-enhanced update on "Addicted To Love", which had that mid-80s big production by Bernard Edwards (who was actually quite funky at one point), with that synth pulse underneath and a video, also adorned with women in tight dresses, which was almost as ludicrous.

Ahh, synth pulses. He had a couple of interesting songs which made extensive use of a sequencer, I'm guessing a Synclavier, though it may have well been something cheap. The most engaging of these is "Looking For Clues" with an interchanging array of inane lines, another, "Johnny And Mary", being quite morose in its mundanity.

Undoubtedly the best song on the compile is the opener, that three-minute dose of white boogie, "Bad Case Of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor)" which is great for bringing out the inner fratboy in you. The other bookend is "Style Kills", a loud noisy atonal thing for which we can hold Gary Numan partially responsible for. As for the other songs, well, most of them are half-baked hybrids of unremarkable AOR and cod-reggae without the interesting bits, or Power Station songs, with all that entails.