A Lad In Slane

IN A little over a week s time, Robbie Williams will headline a sold-out show at Slane Castle, Co. Meath, a scenario that, as recently as three years ago, would ve been laughed out of court by even the most clairvoyant of pop psychologists.
Slane: a vast natural amphitheatre where even the most seasoned of performers from Bruce to Bob to The Stones to Guns N Roses have had to call on every bar band tactic, crowd-baiting trick and stadium strategy in their armoury in order to triumph over the many elements that inevitably prevail at outdoor shows.
Slane: where Springsteen for many the greatest live performer of them all confronted with a frisky Irish audience crushing against the barriers, lost his nerve and shortened his set.
Slane: where REM and Neil Young had to pull out all the stops in order not to be usurped by their support acts (Oasis and Pearl Jam respectively); where Bowie delivered a stinker of a Glass Spider set; where Queen got rained out, where The Verve made their last stand.
And this Robbie Williams guy, a 25-year-old rehab veteran who as recently as the summer of 1997 was declared musically bankrupt, this wet-behind-the-years ex-Take That brat with a paltry two solo albums under his belt, thinks he can ride into the Boyne valley and feed the 80,000, live on Sky TV?
You better believe it buddy. See, Robbie might be one jammy dodger, but he s an artful one as well, a mannish boy who has stage-managed one of the most dramatic career-salvaging operations in recent pop history. Were we scripting a biopic here, we might consider his forthcoming Slane set the final scene in a yarn entitled The Great Gatsby s Escape, or The Revenge Of The Joker, or the Return Of Ol Red-Eye.

If the chances of becoming a British boy-band teen-idol are
one in a million, then the odds against casting aside that suit of lights and forging a successful solo career must be a thousand times greater. Only George Michael and Michael Jackson have successfully circumnavigated the Debbie Gibson-Jason Donovan-Bros TV/panto/light entertainment traps and even they moved onto sophisticated soul and r&b pastures, rather than guitar-based pop.
However, Robbie Williams was always too much of a cut-up to tolerate life in the Take That boot camp. I left school and I was put into this cocoon, and major conditioning went on, he reflected a year after leaving the group. You are told, These are the rules, this is what happens when you become a celebrity , and you believe that, because you know nothing else. You ll do anything for your 15 minutes of fame. I d have signed any contract, I d have climbed the Eiffel Tower in my Y-fronts with Shit on me, seagulls! written on my back.
Eternally at odds with his bandmates, and stifled by the draconian directives imposed by his management (no snorting, screwing, slurping or even unsanctioned ligging), Bob sought his escape in the summer of 1995. In a gesture of outright insolence, the singer breached protocol in the most high-profile way possible when he absconded to the Glastonbury Festival to hang out with his new buddies Oasis, and quaff the 15 bottles of champagne he had liberated from an awards ceremony that weekend. Take That s handlers had expressly forbid any of the group attending, let alone giving unauthorised TV interviews and photo-ops, and when Robbie showed up for rehearsals the following Monday, he was handed his coat. And his P45.
Williams wasted no time in celebrating his emancipation with a year-long cocaine and champagne supernova, a series of dysfunctional (and in the case of Anna Friel, fictional) romances and, in the words of Ronnie Hawkins, more pussy than Frank Sinatra . He even won the dubious NME Ligger Of The Year accolade for 1995.
However, the sense of freedom was short-lived a series of protracted contractual wrangles prevented him from embarking on a solo career for over a year. What followed was an unseemly succession of rehab exposis, tell-all confessions, public apologies and rallying-round sessions from celebrity pals like Vic Reeves, Elton John and Noel Gallagher. Williams came out of it all looking like a kid left too long in a candy shop freed from the punishing physical work-outs that characterised Take That s rehearsal and touring regime, he d gotten porky.
Indeed, Robbie always had a problem with puppy fat at the age of 17, TT manager Nigel Martin-Smith sent the singer a letter telling him to lose a stone and a half or be thrown out of the group. Williams attitude to his fluctuating weight has always been to get the last laugh in first as recently as 1998 he was flinging pies at his audience and encouraging them to chant, You fat bastard!
Williams self destructive appetites are never far from the surface. Just last year, during his support slot to The Verve at Slane, the singer professed to be celebrating a year out of rehab, a mere 24 hours earlier, he had told Hot Press Olaf Tyaransen that he d scared himself with his capacity for drink two weeks previously.
Either ways, by mid-1996, Williams found himself reduced to an all-too familiar showbiz clichi; a fallen idler, a Jack-the-lad from Stoke-on-Trent who d prematurely gone to seed. For a young man with a pathological craving for the respect and adulation of his public, becoming the butt of Fleet Street jokes smarted badly. But, ever the survivor, he bided his time until the legalities were sorted out, removed his nose from his own waste, showered himself off, then began plotting a comeback.
Robbie s annunciation of his solo career with a cover of George Michael s Freedom needed no explanation: the former Wham! man s lyric articulated everything Williams felt about his own recent past. Mind you, Bob s version was less an interpretation of the song than an outright xerox, an open fax to the fans. The single was a huge hit, shifting 250,000 copies, and served as a pretty impressive opening gambit, but gave no real clues as to where he was headed.
Freedom 96 for all its lyrical barbs, was still pure pop, a far cry from the kind of classic guitar jangle or indie-dance music being purveyed by Robbie s peer group of the time, namely Primal Scream, Oasis and Black Grape (much to the singer s disbelief, Happy Mondays are supporting him at next week s Slane concert).
Williams had a lot to say he claimed his debut album would rival the Primals Screamadelica for imagination and innovation but he wasn t sure how to go about saying it. At this point he was still famous for being famous: one wrong move and he was Kylie a bona fide celebrity with no distinct identity, no musical direction and no audience.

Enter Guy Chambers, a producer, arranger, songwriter and guitarist who had already acquired a pretty impressive pedigree with ex-Waterboy Karl Wallinger s World Party, a group that prefigured the Gallagher brothers Beatles obsession as far back as their 1988 debut Private Revolution. The first fruits of the Williams/Chambers collaboration were a series of singles, Old Before I Die , Lazy Days and South Of The Border (reaching numbers two, eight and 14 respectively) that established the boy wonder as a cheery but pedestrian peddler of retro-Rickenbacker workouts.
Similarly, Williams debut album Life Thru A Lens was a well-crafted but hardly staggering piece of work, and although Bob s gob was writing cheques his repertoire clearly couldn t cash, the record did contain some acidic comments on the nature of privilege and stardom, most notably in the title tune ( She s looking real drab/Just out of rehab/I m talking football/She s talking ab fab ), Ego A Go-Go ( Ego a go go/Now you ve gone solo/Living on a memory ) and Clean ( Friends with Charlie Sheen! ). In retrospect though, one gets the sense of a larger-than-life persona being suffocated by a frustratingly unambitious musical agenda.
Let Me Entertain You was the record s one audacious moment a platform-booted hybrid of the Queen song of the same name and the Stones Sympathy For The Devil , in which Williams asserted, I m a burning effigy of everything I used to be . That aside, Robbie s most remarkable statement was the closing, untitled poem directed at a former teacher (he d failed all of his GCSEs in 1990), culminating in the lines, Here I sit in first class/Bollocks, sir. Kiss my ass.
Released in October of 1997, Life Thru A Lens sold modestly, but hardly established the former knicker-rocker-glory as a force to be reckoned with. For a while there, it looked like Bob s old mucker Mark Owen, with his weedy voice, fey demeanour and John Leckie-produced Green Man album, might overtake both himself and Gary Barlow in the race for post-Take That supremacy. Barlow meanwhile, was hell-bent on becoming the new George Michael, but with his Clive Davis sponsored, over-produced Open Road album failing to do the business across the Atlantic, there was no end of hand-wringing and tears before brunchtime in the BMG boardroom.
At this stage, Robbie must ve been praying for a miracle. He got one, in the form of the aptly-titled Angels . In the winter of 1997, probably as a last ditch attempt to recoup campaign costs and give the album a final boost, Chrysalis released this pleasant but quite ordinary Let It Be style ballad as a single. Somehow, the song s lighter-waving chorus captured the public s imagination and crept into the upper regions of the charts, eventually peaking at number two. Within a month, sales of its parent album, all but dead in the water by now, rocketed from 33,000 to 300,000, eventually reaching the number one slot a full six months after its release.
Bob was back on the case, and he wasted no time in taking full advantage of this second wind. As soon as Angels finished its prolonged run, Chrysalis released Let Me Entertain You , accompanied by a video depicting the singer as a garish Kiss clone, replete with prodigious chest-hair and God-complex (a turn he would later commemorate with the lines Early morning when I wake up/I look like Kiss but without the make up from Strong ). In two shrewd moves, Williams had transformed himself from an also-ran into a major contender, parading around the winner s enclosure of London nightclubs giving the V sign to all and sundry.
So, by Spring of 1998, the ego had well and truly landed. Symptomatic of this was how tabloid shutterbugs shifted from documenting his grisly states of disrepair to seeking the dirt on his on/off relationship with All Saint, Nicole Appleton. Within weeks, the Williams somehow faded away, and he joined the elite club of one-name celebrities, equally at home in the Groucho Club as the gutter.
To understand how Britain and Ireland took to Robbie after three years of false starts, it might do to take a look at what the competition was up to around that time. Despite or perhaps because of his band s rebirth as US-influenced noiseniks on the 1997 Blur album, Damon Albarn was perceived as too haughty, too condescending, to really have the ear of the people. The Verve s Richard Ashcroft, while beloved of the indie inkies, was the latest in a long line of rock n roll visionaries too space-cadet-esoteric to connect with the proles.
Liam Gallagher could boast the adoration of the Loaded lads and the odd society girl looking for a bit of rough, but was ultimately too egg-and-chips to charm the Sunday supplementers. Thom Yorke was viewed as weird and miserable, Brett Anderson was too cool for his own good, Jarvis had alienated all and sundry with This Is Hardcore and Shaun Ryder was out to lunch. The playing field was wide open.
Robbie Williams was well aware of this. Come the 1998 summer festival season, he set about stealing the show on every bill he could, planning his assault on the nation s consciousness with all the gung-ho spirit of a general who can see his enemy s defenses cracking at a crucial point in the war. Glastonbury, V98, T In The Park, Slane Castle . . . he stole the headliners thunder at almost every turn.
Indeed, watching Robbie take to the stage at Slane last year, one could only feel for the acts on either side of his mid-bill slot. The guy was a pitbull. He wanted it so bad, you could see it aching behind that mile-wide grin bisecting the massive video screens. Certainly, he was the only act of the day to grasp the theatrics of the Grand Entrance, announcing himself in a Bond-style tuxedo to the strains of the Star Wars theme (a major pop-cultural touchstone for an audience born in 1977), before grandstanding his way through Let Me Entertain You .
Not even The Verve and The Manic Street Preachers seemed to comprehend the scale of that day, but faced with 80,000 people, a substantial proportion of whom were there just to see him, Robbie, simultaneously wired to the moon and shitting himself, utilised every trick in the song n dance handbook, even covering the La s There She Goes . And when he ripped the piss out of Gary Barlow s beloved Back For Good by rendering it as a Ramones thrash while his bollocks were hanging out of a rip in his pants, the crowd understood that the joke was on everybody. After all, many of them had bought the record three years previously, and this was a ritual act of desecration on a par with burning embarrassing Debs ball photos.

By the end of the festival season, Robbie s second album was written, recorded and ready to go, and a new single was already in the charts. Millennium an attempt to tap into Y2K tension and articulate not dread, but a pugilistic optimism was the singer s best tune to date and his first number one as a solo artist. Come and have a go/If you think you are hard enough, Bob sang at one point, as if inviting the next 1000 years outside for a battering. Later in the tune, the line Get up and see the sarcasm in my eyes hinted at some of the bitterness that would characterise the forthcoming long player. Ultimately though, Millennium was the Williams/Chambers partnership s lushest production to date, hitching a lolloping hip-hop beat to swoonsome John Barry string samples.
The Bond theme would be continued in the promo campaign for the new album, tartly titled I ve Been Expecting You, a Connery-esque quip directed towards his expanded audience. It had been well-established that Williams was a natural live performer, but at last he d begun to take full advantage of his natural show-offery and maggot-acting in the medium of video. After all, here was a guy who d guested on Brookside by the age of 16. The clip for Millennium mined not only 007 kitsch, but managed to tap into a Frank & Deano-style debauched suaveness in vogue with Arena readers who fancied themselves as post-rock swingers.
I ve Been Expecting You immediately hit the number one slot, eventually going six times platinum, bringing his worldwide sales up to four million. The record also reflected Robbie s musical dilettante-ism, flitting from country-rock ( Jesus In A Camper Van ) to dated Britpop ( Man Machine ) to Don t Look Back In Anger classicism ( Strong ) to Scott Walker-goes-disco ( No Regrets ) to piano-sodden sentimentality ( She s The One ).
It was also pretty vindictive in parts. Addressing Nigel Martin-Smith on the sleevenotes of the debut album, Robbie had written, I think of you a lot and my past is something I find difficult to accept, especially the part with you in it. You re a very talented man with so much to offer. Go easy on yourself and the people around you. Perhaps upset by his embroilment in a lawsuit with another ex-manager, Tim Abbott (settled out of court last November), Williams adopted a rather harsher tone on new tunes like Karma Killer , invoking Lennon s poison letter to McCartney How Do You Sleep? and voicing sentiments like I hope you choke/On your Bacardi and Coke .
Some people found such sour barbs hard to accept. As a result, all was not sweetnes and light. Robbie, fearing he was about to be stitched up, bunked out of an NME interview last November. In response, the paper s editor, Steve Sutherland, wrote: It s as if he s determined to make everyone pay for having his youth taken away from him, for having traded it in a Faustian pact just for our entertainment. It s as if he now realises that he can never get his youth back and he s never gonna forgive us for it. Like it was our fault in the first place!
Similarly grim was the video for No Regrets , his finest single to date, a great 60s-style torch ballad born out of his stormy relationship with Appleton ( I don t want to hate/But that s all you ve left me with ), offset by a melodramatic dance pulse and sober backing vocals from the Divine Comedy s Neil Hannon and Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant. It reached number four in December of 1998.
Perhaps he couldn t be blamed. He had been through the mincer, and the attentions of the UK press were hardly designed to act as a healing balm to his battered and bruised psyche.
Countering these bad vibes, meanwhile, was Robbie s growing reputation as one of the soundest blokes in the business, a view backed up by many of the drivers and crew who worked with him at last year s Slane bash. It was as if he felt more comfortable in Ireland and genuinely gratified, what s more, at the extraordinary extent to which his album and ticket sales here have outstripped those achieved by his record company and promoters alike, around Europe.
In the wider world, meanwhile, his star has shown no sign of waning: Strong became his ninth solo hit single (also peaking at number four), he scooped the Best Male, Best Single and Best Video awards at this year s BRITs, began making respectable inroads into the Billboard Top 100 with The Ego Has Landed, and rumours abounded of professional dalliances with Kylie Minogue and personal ones with Andrea Corr.
Nevertheless, it appears that Bob still has some anger to work out of his system: while being interviewed by German magazine Stern last week, the singer took another pop at his former Take That bandmates and manager. I hated our lead singer and I hated our music, he said. The band had the creativity of mentally unstable morons. Robbie also referred to Nigel Martin-Smith as Satan and characterised their relationship as a devil s pact. He gave you fame, you gave him your soul .
Ouch!

One of the more interesting aspects of Robbie Williams cult is the effect it seems to have had on record industry marketing techniques. For sure, one couldn t view the recent docu-dramas marking the launch of both Martine McCutcheon s and Geri Halliwell s solo careers without thinking Williams had helped establish some precedent for the artist-as-soap-star. Boyzone members are likely to use Rob as a working model for life after teen-madness. And then there s Gary Barlow, who, in a disastrous PR move, recently tried to cop some of Robbie s street cred by lamely admitting to his sex, drugs and rock n roll exploits.
But still, Robbie s music remains every bit as pre-meditated as it was in Take That. Which is no indictment in itself some of the greatest soda-pop in history has been (un)scrupulously manufactured to fit the market. But with Williams, the fame came first, and the need for expression later. The guy spent most of his formative years pursuing stardom, and all of his adult ones trying to come to terms with it.
Perhaps as a result, his work is still struggling to create the emotional electricity that transforms plain pop songs into high art. Bob s an old-school entertainer at heart, not an auteur, and seems prepared to be all things to all people in order to retain the affections of his vast and inevitably amorphous constituency. At least for now . . .
Speaking to the English press last year, Guy Chambers reflected on his approach to the art of making Robbie records.
One of the few conscious things that we thought of on this record was to make it more hi-fi than the last one, he said. The first album was quite . . . brash. That was deliberate. I mean, when we did Old Before I Die that was deliberately brash because the Oasis thing was quite current then. One of the first things that I noticed when we toured the first album is that the crowd had trouble moving to some of the songs. They were quite punky and fast or too slow or whatever. And Rob and I were keen that it would be a bit more groovy and beats-orientated.
These are hardly the words of a Van Dyke Parks or a Phil Spector. That said, Williams is, aside from hardened veterans like Madonna or Michael Jackson, perhaps the only current popster capable of tackling Slane on his own terms.
Why? Let s break it down into hard figures: over the course of a 100-minute show, nine hit singles plus a cover averages at a direct crowd-hit approximately every third song.
But in the end, Robbie s real X-factor is his own hunger, the need to feed the ego, to break the back of the slavering beastie that is a Slane crowd. If we ve learned anything about the guy over the past four years particularly his trouncing of the competition at the same venue last year it s that he won t give up until he has covered himself in glory. n
Robbie Wililams tops the bill at Slane Castle in Slane, Co. Meath, on Saturday August 28th.