(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Stills)
Tue 27 January 2026 15:00, UK
MTV officially launched in America in 1981, but it took a few years to really establish itself as a cultural institution.
As a growing number of households started paying for cable television, more and more people were drawn in by the tractor beam of 24/7 music videos starring the biggest pop stars on the planet: Madonna, Michael Jackson, Prince, Bowie, and…Robert Palmer?
Yes, he didn’t quite look the part: a 36-year-old, straight-faced bloke from Scarborough, dressed and coiffed like a Wall Street stockbroker, but Palmer had been paying his dues and selling increasing numbers of records for a decade, eventually bringing him into the inner circle of arguably MTV’s biggest pop band of the moment, Duran Duran.
In 1985, Palmer formed a new side project with several members of Duran Duran, called the Power Station, and it was soon clear that this was gonna be old Bob’s big year. With a pair of Power Station hits rising up the charts in both the UK and US, Palmer quickly went to work on his next solo album, which came out in November to even greater success. Titled Riptide, the record reached the top ten on both sides of the Atlantic, and included the biggest hit of Palmer’s career up to that point and one of the defining tunes of its era, ‘Addicted to Love’.
This being the MTV age, though, it wasn’t merely a banger of a soul-pop melody that made a hit. Palmer needed a memorable music video to pair with ‘Addicted to Love’, and he enlisted the help of the famed British fashion photographer Terence Donovan to hatch an idea. The result was one of the most talked about, oft-imitated, occasionally maligned, and instantly memorable visuals of the 1980s: ‘the Palmer Girls’.
Still from Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love’ music video. (Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
You might recognise the imagery without even having seen the original music video: Palmer in full Miami Vice mode in the foreground with his microphone stand, while a band of identically dressed supermodels in heavy make-up and slicked down hair pretend to play instruments behind him: a weird, lifeless, mannequin-esque pantomime that was both hailed by the fashion community and attacked by feminist groups.
“It has captured the public’s attention amazingly,” Palmer said in 1989, after the Palmer Girls had made repeat appearances in his videos for three other songs: ‘I Didn’t Mean to Turn You On’, ‘Simply Irresistible’, and ‘Change His Ways.’ “After two and a half years of maintaining that look, I guess it must be fairly intriguing. When all these videos are seen five years from now, though, I think people will say, ‘Oh, yes, that must have been an ‘80s thing’. It has that quality to it,” he remarked.
Palmer, who died in 2003, was spot on with his prediction, and ‘the Palmer Girls’, who were played by models Julie Pankhurst, Patty Kell, Mak Gilchrist, Julia Bolino, and Kathy Davies, were never going to fit the evolving tastes of the 1990s. But, despite criticisms of the videos and their depiction of women as silent sex props, Palmer felt like most viewers understood the tongue-in-cheek nature of the imagery.
“It has seemed to take a long time for the sense of humour to come through,” he said, “but I think people are finally getting it. It’s really meant to be a campy kind of nonsense”.
He gave all credit for the video idea to Terence Donovan, who spent the last few years of his life (he died in 1996) having to repeatedly discuss ‘the Palmer Girls’, to his increasing annoyance. Fortunately, Donovan’s original 1985 pitch for the idea was preserved and posted to a French fan blog in 2024.
“This film should have a throbbing satanic quality, raw but saturated in the unyielding quality that really sensational women possess,” Donovan wrote, “…I would simply dress a group of international models in Azzedine Alaïa dresses. This designer at the moment produces clothes that make men become quite irrational, and women seem to admire him… I will organise an absolutely glamorous make-up artiste. The hair should be slicked flat and shiny… The camera will be close and will sidle over these repositories of sensuality (to paraphrase Churchill)… I think it would be very dynamic to assemble the band briefly, then evaporate. It would generate a great deal of visual internal energy.”
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