Besides hitting the high hat, there was a time when Carl Palmer hit high marginal tax rates.

Carl Palmer didn't need much of a financial planner. Unlike most musicians, he knew the deleterious effects of high marginal tax rates.

Bankrate: What were some of the things you invested in?

Carl Palmer: I invested in what I considered to be very easy investment --
government bonds, unit trusts, played the stock market to a certain extent,
AT&T, Exxon, those types of things. My main interests were rental properties, beachfront properties and buying offshore properties when the legal side in Europe allowed you to do that. Laws changed, so to have anything that was in an offshore company would make you automatically subject to X amount of tax. I also recorded in places like Switzerland, Germany, Montreal and even America, because then the tax wouldn't have been as high. If you consider that to be an investment, then long term it turns into a very good investment, because it was taxed at a much lower rate.

Bankrate: What was the tax situation in the UK?

Carl Palmer: During the early '70s, the tax here was 98 percent. During that time, you could work and record outside of the country, because the product was recorded where it wasn't subject to full-on UK tax. This is a very old law, since changed a thousand times.

Bankrate: So which albums did you record outside the UK to avoid that excessive rate of tax?

Carl Palmer: The biggest one would have been "Works," which was a double album and which we toured with an orchestra. We recorded an orchestra in Montreux,
Switzerland, and then we went to America and toured for three weeks with a 64-piece orchestra. The only way to do that was to use the tax savings we had to reinvest back into our business.

Bankrate: Have the laws changed to the point where it now makes financial sense to do projects like that in England?

Carl Palmer: Yes. If you record outside of England now, the savings are very
little.