Robert Palmer

Air takes five of his ten planets, earth four, a single one fire and not one water. The element that would register what a thing cost is missing from the chart entirely, which in the record of a soul catalogue is an absence worth naming. The record gives Palmer Addicted to Love, and a soul and rock catalogue behind the video everybody remembers.

The Sun sits on the final degree of Capricorn with Jupiter at fifteen and Venus at eight, three planets in the sign built on competence and on having actually done the thing. Mercury and Mars sit together in Aquarius, which stands outside the arrangement it finds. His Moon sits on the second degree of Libra at noon and may have been in Virgo, so the private half could be either keeping the peace or correcting what it finds. For a musician the record remembers for a video rather than for the catalogue behind it, a Capricorn Sun at the very end of its sign is a pointed placement.

Jupiter sits square Neptune at just over half a degree, faith without evidence, which reads as promises that felt entirely real when they were made. Mars sits in hard contact with Uranus at just under three quarters, action arriving with no build up. Jupiter also stands at an awkward angle to Pluto at just over a degree, ambition and force colliding. Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were all retrograde at his birth, so the entire slow half of the chart faced backwards. In a musician, scale squared by the planet of image is the contact a promise gets made under and not always kept.

He died in Paris on 26 September 2003, at fifty four. Saturn rules his Capricorn Sun, and that day Jupiter stood conjunct that natal Saturn at just over a degree. Pluto sat sixty degrees from his natal Mercury at under three tenths of a degree, the closest contact in that sky, and Neptune stood conjunct his natal Mars at just over one. The Moon was new and entirely unlit, the phase that starts things without waiting to see the whole of them. Five planets in air and none in water, in a catalogue built on soul music, is the fact to keep and not to explain away.