Songfacts®:

• In this song, Robert Palmer paranoid and also confounded by a girl. He's looking for clues to find out what's going on, but is coming up empty.
  
  "I can never remember exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote 'Clues,' but I'm still like the character in the song - frightened by the sound of the telephone, which is a strange basis for a lyric," Palmer wrote in his Addictions: Volume 1 collection. "I must have found it pretty easy to write though because there are an awful lot of verses.
• Musically, this song was on vanguard with synthesized beats programmed on a prototype sequencer. Palmer was steeped in blues, rock, and Caribbean sounds but went boldly in an electronic direction in the '80s. He was eventually able to refine that sound into some huge hits, starting with "Addicted To Love" in 1985.
• The music video was way ahead of its time, compositing Palmer into a world where everything around him is huge. It was one of the few high-end videos MTV had available on August 1, 1981, their first day of broadcasting, and they gave it plenty of airplay - it was the 23rd video they played, following Phil Collins' "In The Air Tonight."
• This song contains a rare xylophone solo. In the video, Palmer does a digitally enhanced dance on the instrument - something that would appear in similar form as part of the 1988 Tom Hanks movie Big.
• The song is part of Palmer's sixth album, Clues. Influenced by new wave and synthpop, the album was a success with European audiences, particularly with the younger listeners Palmer was trying to attract, but it didn't fare as well in the US. "The technology was so primitive that you spent most of the time behind the machines with a screwdriver," he told Q magazine in 1988. "But it did give you a simplicity of form. In America, that record was regarded as inaccessible and avant-garde when it came out."
• Chris Frantz of Talking Heads played the bass drum on this song. They both did a lot of recording at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas, where Palmer made the Clues album and Frantz made the first album with his group Tom Tom Club.
• This was probably the only song in UK chart history to spend five consecutive weeks at #33 - it never rose any higher.
• This was used in the 2007 movie Nancy Drew, starring Emma Roberts.