For Lou, Robert Palmer is “Addicted to Love” and “Simply Irresistible”. This is the Robert Palmer Lou knows and the songs he grew up on. To be more exact, Robert Palmer is the videos to those songs. To put an even finer point on it, Robert Palmer is defined by the stone-faced, body rocking back-up band in the videos. Like Bryan Ferry, models are a major facet of the Robert Palmer aesthetic. Palmer is an Agent 007 of rock. License to dress to kill.
Matt at Vinyl Vouge knows what Lou likes. He recently recommended Palmer’s Pressure Drop album, released in 1975 from Island Records. Lou could care less about the music. It is all about the cover which features the ample assets of nude woman looking over a balcony. The balcony cover has become rightly famous. It is an arresting image. The back cover features Palmer inside a TV screen looking up at a full moon. Sidebar: The wonderful thing about album covers is that they create impressions, thoughts, feelings, and, maybe best of all,memories. The balcony cover reminds Lou of his junior year high school trip to Spain for Spanish class. In Torremolinos, a dump of a coastal town, Lou was on a balcony with the girl of his dreams. She was wearing a silk kimono with nothing underneath. The breezes off the Mediterranean offered seductive glimpses of tan lines. The mist of the blue-green sea glistened her skin. This probably never happened, but the Pressure Drop cover tells Lou that it did. What happened is that Lou guzzled a few bottles of sherry in Jerez and barely made it out alive. Almost getting sent home on the trip. That sherry was Lou’s tequila moment. Sherry is gross. The smell of it makes Lou sick. In fact, the Pressure Drop cover is making Lou queasy. That is the power of album covers.
Who cares about Robert Palmer, it is all about that woman on the balcony. Her ass is not representative of her true talents. Whoever she is. Lou says that because searching online reveals conflicting information on who she actually is. Carinthia West is one candidate. West was a 1970s It girl who was a model, actress, photographer, and journalist. She was a muse to rock stars and associated with Mick Jagger, Ronnie Wood, David Bowie, George Harrison, Neil Young, Paul Simon, and countless others. At sixteen, Beatles photographer Robert Whitaker discovered her at a bus stop on the King’s Road. As a result, she was introduced to the London rock scene. As an actress, she appeared in the Beatles mockumentary The Rutles among other roles. In the 1980s she became a journalist and interviewed Helen Mirren, Dennis Hopper, Donald Sutherland, and a host of rock stars.
West is most well-known as a photographer. She parlayed her friendship with icons into getting causal and intimate photos of them. As Ronnie Wood said, “Carinthia took photos while we were getting on with life.” West has gallery representation for her photography and has had exhibitions at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the San Francisco Art Exchange, Soho Contemporary Art, and other venues across the world. One of her most famous photographs is “Pink Pig Over Battersea.” These black and white photos of “Algy”, the pink pig, documents the making of the album cover for Pink Floyd’s Animals by Hypnosis. Many of her photos of celebrities are remarkably candid and really capture an intimate moment with an icon.
But Lou has also seen mention that Geraldine Edwards was the nude woman on the balcony. Chris Blackwell of Island Records has confirmed this as true. Edwards was eighteen at the time she modeled for the cover. Edwards is a private person and has distanced herself from the cover and has only given two interviews in her life. Edwards was Robert Palmer’s girlfriend at the time of his death. Edwards was born in San Diego, California and became one of the first rock groupies of the early 1970s. Peter Wolf of The J. Geils Band was the first rock star to invite her backstage and thereafter she could be found with Eric Clapton, Roger Daltry, and Rick Springfield. At various times,she has been approached to write her memoirs as a groupie, and she has declined. Rumor has it that she was one of the inspirations for the character Penny Lane in Almost Famous.
So, who is actually on the cover of Pressure Drop? Finding out is not Lou’s job. Lou merely scratches the surface of things. He is lazy. It is up to his resolute readers to follow his footsteps in the margins and dig deeper into the matter.
As for the album itself. It has seen better days. The cover is split, like a well-thumbed porno mag. The LP has light scratches, but it played fine for Lou. What Lou heard was not really a cohesive album. It is kind of a gumbo with New Orleans, funk, and reggae flavors. The members of Little Feat cakewalk all over the album. James Jameson is on it. Looking at the credits on the back cover everybody is fucking on it. So, it makes sense that the woman on the cover might be one of two people. Pressure Drop is an album with multiple personalities.
Addicted to Love: Robert Palmer - Addicted To Love (Official Music Video)
Torremolinos, Not as Lou Remembers It: Torremolinos, Spain 🇪🇸 | The Most Lively Town on Costa del Sol?
Carinthia West in Words and Images: Famous faces through the unique lens of Carinthia West
Think Geraldine Edwards: Almost Famous (3/9) Movie CLIP - Penny Lane & the Band-Aides (2000) HD
— Lou Waxman