Palmer wanted this 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.
This was Palmer's only #1 hit on the US pop singles charts.
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.
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.
The girls in the video were not Palmer's idea. They were filmed separately and edited behind clips of Palmer singing.
Palmer wrote this about what it's like having an addictive personality.
Palmer died of a heart attack in 2003. He was 54.
Weird Al Yankovic recorded a parody of this called "Addicted to Spuds" on his album Polka Party!.
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 "keyboardist" in the video was Susie Verrico, who later appeared in the in the 2006 series of the UK reality TV show Big Brother.
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