I was looking at the credits on Tears for Fears’ The Hurting when a name I didn’t recognize jumped out: Phil Palmer, credited for “Guitar [Palmer Picking].” Session guitarists don’t usually get a named style in the liner notes. So I looked him up, and the connection ladder went somewhere I didn’t expect.
Phil Palmer is the nephew of Ray and Dave Davies — the Davies brothers, the ones who started The Kinks. Dave Davies gave him his first guitar. That’s not a footnote in a session musician’s bio; that’s the origin story.
Palmer didn’t stay in the family band. He became one of those session guitarists who turns up on records you’d never expect to share a musician. On The Hurting he’s playing alongside Tears for Fears’ synthesizer-heavy early sound — Roland synthesizers, drum machines, and a guitar style so distinctive the band credited it by name.
Then there’s David Sylvian. On Brilliant Trees (1984), Palmer plays guitar on “The Ink In The Well” and “Red Guitar” — the latter being the song that gave the album’s sound its name. He also plays acoustic guitar on “Taking The Veil” from Gone to Earth (1986). If you know those records, you know how far they sit from early synth-pop: Sylvian’s art-rock is all space, texture, and silence.
Same fingers on both. A Kinks nephew who helped make two records that sound like they were made on different planets.
The same thread pulls in more of the collection. Mel Collins — the saxophonist — played on both The Hurting and Sylvian’s Gone to Earth. And the drummer on Sylvian’s records, Steve Jansen, is Sylvian’s brother — which means the Palmer connection sits inside a family story too.
I own all of these records. The Hurting lives next to Brilliant Trees on the shelf, and until I read the credits I never noticed the same guitar player was on both. That’s the thing about session musicians: they’re the invisible glue of a record collection, and you only see them when you look at the small print.