The Power Station – Some Like It Hot

It began as a throwaway favor — two bored members of the biggest band in the world agreeing to cut a glam-rock cover for a bassist’s girlfriend — and turned into a supergroup whose biggest hit was built, on purpose, to show off a drummer.

One of the definitive supergroup hits of the 1980s exists almost entirely by accident. Some Like It Hot was the song that announced The Power Station — the union of two restless members of Duran Duran, one of the great soul-rock voices of the era, and a drummer who would quietly turn out to be one of the most important players in the room. None of it was planned. The whole project started as a one-off favor and snowballed, through a single magical day in the studio, into a band that scored a Top 10 smash and then vanished almost as fast as it appeared.

Keep watching: Duran Duran – Come Undone · explore more 80s →

By late 1984, Duran Duran had conquered the world and burned themselves out doing it. After the grueling run behind Seven and the Ragged Tiger, the band scattered into side projects for what was meant to be a year-long break. Bassist John Taylor and guitarist Andy Taylor — not related, despite the shared name — had energy to spare. The spark came from an unlikely place: John was dating the model Bebe Buell and offered to put together a funky version of T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong (Get It On)” for her to sing. He pulled in Andy and the drummer Tony Thompson, the powerhouse behind Chic’s run of disco classics. Then Taylor and Buell broke up before the session happened — but the three musicians liked what they had, and pressed on with a different idea: a revolving project where a different famous singer would front each track. They considered Mick Jagger and Billy Idol, among others.

The singer they actually landed was Robert Palmer, the immaculately tailored British soul stylist the Duran members had befriended at a 1983 charity show. They invited him to try a vocal on a track called “Communication.” When Palmer heard they’d also demoed “Bang a Gong,” he asked to sing that too — and by the end of that single day, the chemistry was so obvious that the revolving-singer concept was scrapped on the spot. They would make the whole album with Palmer. The group named itself after the New York studio where it all came together, the Power Station on West 53rd Street, and brought in Chic co-founder Bernard Edwards to produce.

A song built to showcase a drummer

From the start, Some Like It Hot had a specific mission. “What we really wanted to do,” John Taylor later explained, “was put this drummer out there in a way that we felt he deserved” — the whole track was designed to showcase Tony Thompson. And it does: that enormous, cracking, funk-rock backbeat is the engine of the song, the thing that hits you before Palmer ever opens his mouth. The Taylors wrote the music and arrived with the title, lifted from Billy Wilder’s 1959 Marilyn Monroe comedy Some Like It Hot. The lyric’s most famous line was pure improvisation. John Taylor flew to Nassau, where Palmer was living, played him the demo and announced the title; Palmer looked at him and instantly fired back, “And some sweat when the heat is on.” That ad-libbed response became the hook of the chorus.

The record itself is a study in contrasts — Andy Taylor’s sharp, metallic guitar against John Taylor’s elastic bassline, Thompson’s muscular groove underneath, and Palmer riding the top with a vocal that’s equal parts smooth and scorching. Recorded across a famously fast and famously hedonistic twenty-seven days at the Power Station, the sessions were, by the band’s own accounts, a non-stop party; Palmer, in his liner notes years later, credited that loose, joyful atmosphere with the song’s almost-salsa swing, and said being brought in “as a singer only” gave him a confidence that fed directly into his work.

A brief blaze, and a long afterlife

Released in March 1985 as the band’s first single, Some Like It Hot climbed to No.6 on the Billboard Hot 100 by May, becoming The Power Station’s biggest hit and a fixture of MTV. The bright, cartoonish music video — directed by Peter Heath, all flaming cacti and neon, with Palmer costumed at one point as a priest and featuring the model Caroline Cossey — matched the song’s overheated energy. The group debuted the song on Saturday Night Live in February 1985, which turned out to be Palmer’s only live television appearance with the band before everything changed.

The union didn’t hold. By the time The Power Station readied a tour, Palmer had departed to make his own solo album, Riptide — which, thanks to the involvement of Edwards, Thompson, and Andy Taylor, ended up sounding a great deal like The Power Station, and produced Palmer’s own signature No.1, “Addicted to Love.” Singer Michael Des Barres replaced him for the road. The original lineup reunited only briefly in the 1990s. Time has since taken two of its four members: both Robert Palmer and Tony Thompson died in 2003, leaving Andy and John Taylor to carry the story forward. They’ve done exactly that — in early 2026, the band marked the 40th anniversary of their debut with an expanded four-CD reissue, including their 1985 Live Aid performance, and John Taylor used the occasion to make a case that’s hard to argue with: that Tony Thompson was one of the greatest rock drummers who ever lived, and that Robert Palmer belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Four decades on, Some Like It Hot still makes the argument for him, one enormous drumbeat at a time. John Taylor, the bassist who half-accidentally started it all, was born on June 20, 1960.