Songfacts®:

• Before he was addicted to love, Robert Palmer played a smooth talker in "Some Guys Have All The Luck."
  
  It's a cover - a reimagining really - of a song from 1973 originally recorded by the American soul group The Persuaders. Palmer stripped the verses from the original and replaced them with various grunts and ramblings that would scare any woman away. But he did keep the chorus from the original and even started the song with it - The Persuaders' version begins by telling a story:
  
  Alone in a crowd on a bus after work
  I'm daydreaming
  
  When Rod Stewart covered the song in 1984, he brought back the verses but kept the chorus up top.
• When Palmer put the song together, he thought it was a completely original creation. It was Moon Martin, who wrote the song "Bad Case of Loving You," that told Palmer he had inadvertently filched someone else's title and chorus.
  
  "I played it to him an then a few days later he came in and said he'd just heard someone singing it in the studio across the road, which seemed impossible since I hadn't finished it yet myself," Palmer explained in his Addictions: Volume 1 collection. "I must have heard it subliminally."
  
  "In the end the only thing I remembered was the title line," he added. "The rest is very different from the many versions that were subsequently recorded."
• Palmer was making music electronically at this point using sequencers, drum machines and synthesizers. It was somewhat experimental but on the cutting edge of the new wave sound that was emerging in the early '80s. This style gave his take on the song a completely different sound than the original.
• Palmer's "Some Guys Have All The Luck" was the first to chart in the UK, where it went to #16. It didn't make an impact in America, so when Rod Stewart released his cover there two years later, many thought it was an original song (The Persuaders' version stalled at #39 in the US). Stewart took the song to #10 in the US and #15 in the UK. It charted for a third time in Britain when Maxi Priest took it to #12 in 1987.
• Various reggae acts, including Inner Circle, Junior Tucker, The Shakers and Judge Dread, recorded "Some Guys Have All The Luck." Palmer was signed to Island Records and often recorded at Compass Point studios in Nassau, where the song would have been well known through these reggae renditions.
• This was Palmer's biggest hit in his native UK to this point. He released his first album in 1974 and made waves with songs like "Every Kinda People" and "Bad Case of Loving You." He leveled up in 1985 with "Addicted To Love," which went to #1 in America and reached #5 in the UK. Palmer died unexpectedly at 54 when he suffered a heart attack in 2003.
• Palmer made a music video for this song that's so strange, even MTV wouldn't play it. It takes place at an Eyes Wide Shut-style gathering where guests are surrounded by living statues they can slice open for fun. It was directed by Jean-Pierre Berckmans, who also did Taco's "Puttin' On the Ritz."
  
  Palmer had been making high-end videos for a while, and when MTV went on the air in 1981, they put his video for "Looking For Clues" into rotation. His video for "Addicted To Love" became iconic.
• The song was written by Jeff Fortgang, wrote it for his Connecticut-based band The News after graduating from Yale. The News recorded it as a demo; it didn't earn them a record deal but the song landed at Don Kirshner Publishing, where it was placed with The Persuaders. Fortgang never sold another song but earned a Ph.D. from Adelphi University in Clinical Psychology, playing dive bars on weekends to help pay tuition. He later became an instructor at Harvard Medical School.
  
  What does Fortgang think of Robert Palmer's version of his song? "Other than the hook, it is barely recognizable," he told Songfacts. "I've read that he thought he had written it until someone else recognized it and he realized he'd heard it somewhere. I was a big fan of his work, but not so much this recording."
• Palmer released this as one of four new songs on his album Maybe It's Live. Those four are all studio recordings, but the other six songs on the album are live.