Your lights are on
but you’re not home
your will is not your own
Robert Palmer’s original Addicted To Love was a smirking, grinding celebration of shameless desire that —in retrospect— seems like an absurdly calculated, on-the-nose bookend to his 1979 cover of Moon Martin’s Bad Case of Loving You. When coupled with its iconic, misogyny-chic video —powered by a quintet of swaying, empty-eyed, interchangeable sex-mimes— it was right up there with the Flock of Seagulls haircut, Don Johnson’s Miami Vice wardrobe, and Robert Downey Jr.’s painfully prescient performance in Less Than Zero as an evocative artifact of pop culture in the ’80s.
But when Florence Welch got her claws into the song, she rifled through its guts and found the affliction hiding within Palmer’s addiction. She took his taunting of a pathetic, cock-drunk lover, and without changing a word, made it a resigned recitation of weaknesses chanted into a judgemental mirror.