MASSIVE ATTACK: Mezzanine

 

(#587: 2 May 1998, 2 weeks)

 

Track listing: Angel/Risingson/Teardrop/Inertia Creeps/Exchange/Dissolved Girl/Man Next Door/Black Milk/Mezzanine/Group Four/(Exchange)

 

Another Major Statement. Another sixty-nine minutes of my life – or more precisely, what remains of my life - that I won’t get back, and I think this tale has reached its natural ending. Another Damoclean sword suspended over my partially willing 1998 head, indicating, just as surely and sinisterly as Ultrasound’s “Best Wishes” or Geoff Ryman’s 253 that an end was approaching and encroaching.

 

So imagine this as the last Then Play Long article if the internet had existed twenty years earlier and I’d begun the blog when I still had sufficient energy to maintain it. This is how far I would have got in real time, in actual 1998. The third Massive Attack album, or a petrified Goth meditation that imagined it was the third Massive Attack album.

 

There is a lot to be said about the background to and making of Mezzanine but that has been more than adequately documented elsewhere and it didn’t help David Cavanagh either, did it? I could trawl sample sources exhaustively but that would, er, exhaust me and it’s already been done anyway. I don’t think any reader wants to be bogged down by the same facts mechanically reiterated and I certainly don’t have the heart or inclination to reiterate.

 

In précis: 3D was tired of the band’s music having been traduced to “coffee table soul” (a.k.a. “trip hop”) and wanted to inject elements of what he (and very likely not just he) regarded as the “soul” music of his own youth. Daddy G agreed that they had to do something different, but Mushroom was pretty happy with how things had been going and didn’t want to trip up their cart. There were arguments (“ARE WE A FUCKING PUNK BAND NOW?” But hadn’t they always been?). Each member recorded their own contributions separately. Elements of members’ songs got reworked by other members.

 

As with The Beatles, the resulting music probably benefited from the tension. Well, most of it did. When Mezzanine works it is a powerful beast indeed. When it doesn’t, it is slightly less powerful. But as a record it isn’t going to argue with you. It exists, it looms like the oppressive high-rises of Victoria Street, bearing down on me as I headed towards the Oxford Tube coach stop. Living a “life” that was only ever going to kill me. Turn around and it’s still there. Lamenting, consoling, suffocating.

 

At its best, Mezzanine is awesome, overwhelming. Take its first three tracks. “Angel” has a ghost of Horace Andy solemnly intoning a prayer as the track builds up and up with guitars, beats and purpose. It transforms into a monument as you listen. In his “love ya, love ya, love ya”s Andy appears to be summoning up what was not yet the ghost of Barry Ryan (other Discman long-distance commuting obsessions; stumbling off the Oxford Tube coach into early morning Park Lane with “Kitsch” climaxing in boogie woogie piano and prawn cocktail screams, off a budget-priced Dutch compilation which was the only way you could get Barry Ryan on CD in those days).

 

The video, if you haven’t seen it, is nearly as fantastic; Daddy G pursued from the car park by what turn out to be editions of him and turning on them (i.e. his worse self). It would have been even more convincing if they hadn’t killed any tension by having Andy intone “You are my angel” as a plot spoiler, because Circa Records A&R thought you were stupid. But “Angel” consumes like a raven before settling down and creeping away like the Natural History Museum beetle specimen on the cover (the BEETLES! How could I have not seen, etc…). Astonishing.

 

I had known “Risingson” already because it had been a single the previous year. I’m not even going to pretend to guess what the song’s about because nobody gives a fuck about lyrics – it’s the overall SOUND that impels you to remain in its orbit – but can confidently attest that it summed up EXACTLY what I felt about myself, Laura and the world at the time. “Toylike people make me boylike” – wasn’t that ALWAYS the truth? And there’s what wasn’t yet the ghost of Lou Reed in the background! The great turnaround in the song’s middle – oh, they know their Labi Siffre! – when it stops, not quite sure where or how to turn, before this enormous, swallowing escalator of a bassline, like a crocodile supping on Jacob’s Cream Crackers, ascends your spine. Hospital nightmares of voices, honing in on you from all directions, telling you that yes, there’s a THREAT, but you don’t know what it looks like yet, do you? And, at its root, the Fun Boy Three – “dream ON.”

 

Did you know Madonna almost sang “Teardrop,” or at least Mushroom Vowles’ original harpsichord demo of it? Somehow that demo found its way to Madonna’s people and to everyone’s surprise the answer was yes; she’d loved working with them on “I Want You” and was eager to repeat the experience. Record company problems notwithstanding, 3D and Daddy G were distraught, as they had already earmarked Elizabeth Fraser to sing over the (reworked, without Vowles’ knowledge) backing track.

 

Listening to the song, now as then, you really couldn’t imagine Fraser not singing it. I don’t know what Madonna could have brought to it other than Kabbalah reflected brightness or a Streisand variant on melancholia. Whereas Fraser recorded the song on the day she learned about the death of Jeff Buckley, with whom she had had a brief relationship – her words were inspired by Bachelard, but in performance they drip with very profound lamentation. The song, in her hands, turned into a requiem for Buckley, and she sounded more committed, emotional and open than she had done for some time (the Cocteau Twins, following a disastrous and ill-advised spell on a major record label that neither knew nor cared about them, had slid into disuse).

 

I take “Teardrop” as a requiem for more than simply Jeff Buckley. Its contours clearly cry out to – or, possibly, for - the days of Treasure and Tiny Dynamine, music I thought so transcendent and filled with personal emotional import, music that meant more to me in 1984-5 than you could possibly imagine. It serves, this song, as an elegy for a world expired, as though to remind its listener “remember how it was, how I once made you feel?” – see also the late Angelo Bruschini (formerly of the Blue Aeroplanes – the Bristol thing never dips out of view or conscience)’s modest guitar recollection of the Cocteau age.

 

Perhaps the song was telling me – a lesson that I should long since have learned – you can never get away from yourself.

 

So much closing, of doors. Everything, closing down.

 

* * * * * *

 

Mezzanine doesn’t really escape the shadow imposed on it by its first three songs, songs so powerful that they made much other music of the time sound inconsequential. As an E.P., nobody could have argued that it wasn’t a classic, just as the twenty-nine or so minutes of Lido Pimienta’s La Belleza or the twenty-and-a-half minutes or so of PinkPantheress’ Fancy That (can) stand to be heard.

 

(you see, I don’t have enough time or patience left in my life to devote to, or waste on, listening to and writing about chart-topping albums by dull boy bands, landfill indie rockers, sentimental tosh, unsentimental corporates…I need to keep discovering and travelling down unexpected new avenues because there’s only so much walking I’m able to accomplish these days…)

 

But there are still eight very long tracks to go on Mezzanine. “Inertia Creeps” is cumulatively quite tense and compelling in its quietly relentless build-up (although it lacks real release, presumably on purpose) and its sampled duality of John Foxx’ Ultravox! (the nervy synth lines of “Rockwrok”) and the half-speed fragment from “İstanbul” by Balik Ayhan (Interesting fellow, Ayhan, who passed away two-and-a-half weeks ago; he went into Turkish politics and became a prominent yes man to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, even composing and performing a sycophantic tribute whose title translates into English as “You are the king of men, you are from Kasımpaşa”) but it lacks the blatant humanity that Horace Andy lends to “Angel”; 3D just sounds cumulatively cheesed off.

 

Whereas “Dissolved Girl” – a song Madonna could have sung, but was in the end given to Skegness session singer Sarah-Jay Hawley (who was brought in by the band’s manager) to co-author and sing – simply sounds like a suboptimal pastiche of Massive Attack. I don’t intend to impugn the integrity of Ms Jay-Hawley, but this is akin to getting your free ticket to Top Of The Pops and you are faced with a studio much smaller and stuffier than it looks on television, while the superstars on tiny stages include David Dundas, Berni Flint and Lynsey de Paul featuring Mike Moran. And to think they could have had Madonna (although Lena thinks Sarah Cracknell could have taken a decent, er, crack at it). Though excellent musically - particularly the midsong switch from moody middleground shimmer to harsh guitar thrashing - “Dissolved Girl” stylistically rifles through every dreary cliché you’d associate with the B-roads of trip hop – Sneaker Pimps, Morcheeba, Lamb, Mono and other such Music and Video Exchange regulars. It perhaps isn’t surprising that some people wanted out.

 

Things improve dramatically with “Man Next Door,” possibly pop’s most ominous ode to noisy neighbours – in great part because we never see or connect with that man, merely hear him – which I suspect 3D knew from the Slits’ 1980 version rather than the Paragons’ original (or indeed “A Quiet Place” by Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters, which inspired John Holt to write the song in the first place) – which Horace Andy sings quite brilliantly, supported and echoed by Bruschini’s imposing guitar (and even a tick-tick Cure sample, from “10:15 Saturday Night”). It is almost a sequel, or even precursor, to “Throw Down A Line” – and I wonder what Cliff and Hank themselves might have brought to the track. This is tremendous paranoid pop.

 

Elizabeth Fraser returns for “Black Milk.” There is a sadness so ineffable – yet tactile – about her contributions to Mezzanine, and this song is, lyrically, her ode to a world that in 1998 was already vanishing and dying (hence it sounds uncomfortably up-to-date in 2025). She wanders through a twinkling cave of lullaby refrains – or are they really concealed stalactites – as though giving the world a final dusting before closing it down. Those twinkles stem from “Tribute,” an instrumental that closes side one of the eponymously-titled first album by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band (although somebody neglected to send Manfred the letter requesting permission to sample, meaning that the great man sued Massive Attack for copyright infringement. There were no hard feelings, however; the two parties settled amicably out of court). A dazzle and a shimmer in the impending winter sun (but it’s only springtime!).

 

The title song, featuring Daddy G and 3D lobbing verbal grenades at each other with vague innuendo ("Tastes better on the way back down"), doesn’t particularly go anywhere - much like the protagonist of the Nicholson Baker novel, I'd say; speaking of idle, semi-random thoughts that arise over the course of a lunch hour (see also "Mezzanine" the song and novel's eventual obverse, Geordie Greep's "Walk Up" - the carnal desire rendered explicit) other than a slightly surprising magnification (rather than a turnaround as such) two-thirds of the way through which suggests that they might actually be marooned on one of the outer moons of Saturn, or possibly stuck in the same police car as Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton in "The Stakeout" from Inside No 9 - this is certainly a nocturnal record, offering serenades to trainee vampires, and it still radiates "terminal."

 

Speaking of the music of the night: “Group Four” sounds, in the context of Then Play Long, like accumulating and cumulative music. Its title stems from the fact that the song is being rapped (by 3D, a.k.a. Robert Del Naja, whose album Mezzanine basically is) from the perspective of a security guard. The banal minutiae of overnight semi-alert existence – flasks of “sober tea,” “relay cameras,” “dummy screens and magazines”; this too is like living on another planet, or in a separate, enclosed parallel world (think airports, or long-term inpatients on hospital wards – if you’re inside either, you’re never really sure if it’s day or night. You could be anything, anywhere).

 

Elizabeth Fraser, making her third appearance on Mezzanine, counteracts this crushing mundanity with what I can only describe as distended electro-Tropicalia, singing sweetly over funereal sunsets of synthesisers about what the security guard imagines is the outside world, or his residual memories of it – escape in the starry sky, a need to flee from this “life” into the airy eternal. It is perhaps the saddest moment on what really is a deeply sad record – as though saying goodbye to humanity. The guard thinks of all the things he saw and was promised in childhood; a future of travelling with jet-packs that would never be permitted to happen, replaced by fitting more bolts to locks, or even cleaning toilets – the great lie of capitalism; this is what had been expected of you all along.

 

But, pace Manfred Mann's Earth Band, "Group Four" proves to be a definitive summation of and tribute to everything that has preceded it in this long-running tale. Drums - or the sample of Nick Mason's energetic pattern on Pink Floyd's "Up The Khyber," a brief, semi-improvised percussion and keyboard workout used in the band's soundtrack to Barbet Schroeder's very much of its time 1969 ironic ode to drugs, sex and alleged freedom More - enter the landscape, pursued by loud, droning guitars, over which Fraser's vocal resumes.

 

The structuring and evolution of this song appear to represent reality swallowing "the dream" - any dream - forever; abstract idolatry reduced to rough and tedious sex (“unlimited girl, unlimited sky”; exactly what sort of magazine is this fellow reading?).

 

But the manner in which "Group Four" patiently and relentlessly works its way up and forward into a climax is significant in the Then Play Long setting as it appears to represent the entire history of popular music, and rock music in particular, coming to a boil. Why is Mezzanine such a fitting record to conclude this tale, and "Group Four" perhaps its aptest closing song?

 

For one thing, as Lena pointed out, Mezzanine affords so many people into this story who had hitherto found their way barred - not only the Cocteau Twins and the Blue Aeroplanes (and, given that the latter's frontman Gerard Langley was his key mentor, its existence even paves the road leading to George Ezra) but also, by virtue of being sampled, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Manfred Mann, Isaac Hayes, Ultravox, Iron Butterfly, Quincy Jones as an artist...

 

...and (for another thing) the man whose ghost was as ubiquitous as Ian Curtis' had been in the preceding decade. For "Group Four" is nothing less than an excoriating and exquisitely painful and poignant requiem for Jeff Buckley. I did write about Grace but few of you noticed it because you thought I was writing about something else. Stylistically and emotionally, however, Buckley's spirit flows through "Group Four"'s spine like lettering through a stick of rock, and if you can detect certain architectural similarities, I suspect Fraser is mourning another needless 1997 death - that of Billy MacKenzie (see also the latter's final recording, done with Apollo 440 about a year before commencement of the Mezzanine sessions).

 

Yet there are airs of unreality and urgency permeating "Group Four" that combine as though to prevent a particularly lucid dream from crawling out of control. Listening to the piece is akin to having the whole of Then Play Long flash between one's ears...it has all been building up to this. Even the name of the piece - "Group Four." Doesn't that make you think of...the Beatles? Led Zeppelin? The Four Tops? The Four Seasons? The Sex Pistols? The Clash? Pink Floyd? Blur? Overwhelmingly, the Gang Of Four (this album could have fittingly been titled Damaged Goods)? And, of course, Jeff Buckley (and the three other musicians in his working band), to whom "Group Four" ends up as an ultimately exhilirating tribute. As though revealing an escape route, towards the sky, the sun, and the light. And look how long a journey it took to arrive here.

 

Which leaves only “(Exchange).” That has already appeared, as an instrumental backing track and sans parenthesis, midway through the album, and that appearance was somewhat odd, since it sounded like the closing credits to a film. Yes, there’s the Isaac Hayes sample – whatever Tricky or Portishead do, so can we (one very strong motivating force behind this album was to come up with songs that would work on stage) – but where’s the purpose (other than its paradoxical sense of unsettlingly reassuring spaciousness, which directly inspired Groove Armada, Bonobo et al)? That makes itself apparent in Mezzanine’s closing moments, as Horace Andy returns for a final bow. His verdict? “You see a man’s face? You will never see his heart…But you will never know his thoughts.” Mezzanine as an extended internal monologue. Much as most of Then Play Long has been. The elastic bass, springing up like a safety net. The warm pacific (state?) chords of Fairlight, re-emerging behind the clouds, reluctant to leave. Daring you to get up before it's finished. A crackle of needle against polyvinyl chloride. Those days of records before any record of them was needed.

 

* * * * * *

 

I told you everything in this tale, or made an art of telling you practically nothing because it looked like the same thing. I feel that the story has run its course and that the bye-bye/be-seeing-you end titles of “(Exchange)” allow a nice, nifty exit back out into the world.

 

There are, as things stand at the time of writing, still over eight hundred number one albums to write about (not including the two we wrote about in advance). You see, all this time and we aren’t even halfway through yet. And if the miracle of immortality occurs and I get up to date, there are in all probability going to be at least a few hundred more albums that will have accumulated by that point – and I very much doubt that I’ll live to write about them.

 

Nor do I believe there is any real purpose in writing about them – not even the good ones. What could I tell you that you didn’t already know or couldn’t guess? How much energy and focus do I still have in reserve to spend time reassessing what I know are deeply average or mediocre records, purely because of the fleeting whims of certain sections of the record-buying public or astute record company marketing strategies? Either way, impulsive novelties always win out over lasting art – because the latter is rarely immediate, and immediacy is what any market, by definition, craves.

 

Or crass sensation; do I really wish to waste my declining years examining a ninety-minute album recorded by a MAGA cheerleader which, at the time of writing, has already been criminally misread and purposely whitewashed by people who are supposed to make their living as music critics? I agree with the commentator on I Love Music who noted that we seem to have lost the ability to differentiate between right and wrong. Always making pallid, wishy-washy excuses for performers (Kanye West, Arcade Fire) who are really beyond the pale, have transgressed the basics of human behaviour. Pretending that we can be “objective” about rats whose disease flows right (you can capitalise that “r” if you like) through the arteries of their work. Acting like Joel Grey in the Kit Kat Club – life in here is beautiful, etc., as if music were an abstract entity divorced from anything else in the world. In 1982 I was infuriated at what I regarded as sourpusses having a go at New Pop, but now I see how it helped lay the foundations of today’s hellhole. The gleeful embrace of capitalism for the presumed benefit of consumers who took not a jot of notice about what these songs were saying BECAUSE NOBODY LISTENS TO LYRICS except anxious English Literature graduates at a loss about what to do with their lives so turn to music criticism.

 

Hence I have decided that I would infinitely prefer to spend whatever amount of life I still possess in reserve – simply listening to, and enjoying, music that I actually like, or know I would like, or (a greater aesthetic miracle than either) didn’t know I might like? I have no urge to hunker back down to things I already know. We almost never listen to anything in our CD library these days; it is so much easier for us, at our age and stage in life, simply to listen to something on the computer than to spend half a back-breaking hour climbing stepladders and digging through CDs in an attempt to find that piece of music. That in turn escorts us back to the golden days where Steve McQueen, Julie Christie and John Lennon would just scatter records randomly across the floor and listen to them. Before the fences were erected, before there were “canons.” Random ecstasy. Nothing in music ever came along to replace that feeling. Making up your own pop story was always going to be far more fun than adhering to somebody else’s.

 

And there is also the overpowering feeling that with the long-term Then Play Long regulars in later years – the likes of Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar and even Eminem – it’s going to need to be someone else’s job to write about them. In other words, if you want this tale to continue, I’m afraid you’ll need to start relaying it yourself.

 

Then Play Long, however. Imagine that I’d started writing it twenty years before I did. As I’ve already said, I had more time, energy and enthusiasm to do this sort of thing back then and had the appropriate technology existed at the time I would have used it (I didn’t have the wherewithal to put a fanzine together – and who would have read it if I had?). That’ll teach me to be born twenty years too early.

 

Equally imagine, however, Mezzanine as Then Play Long’s natural endpoint. That it was the last piece of writing I managed to complete before I boarded the train to Paddington on the morning of Saturday 24 October 1998. That the writing stands as proof that, once upon a time, I was here.

 

* * * * * *

 

(In memory of Frank Sinatra, who died on 14 May 1998)

 

 

 

 

Robbie WILLIAMS: Life Thru A Lens

 

(#586: 18 April 1998, 2 weeks)

 

Track listing: Lazy Days/Life Thru A Lens/Ego A Go Go/Angels/South Of The Border/Old Before I Die/One Of God’s Better People/Let Me Entertain You/Killing Me/Clean/Baby Girl Window/Hello Sir

 

People depend on stories, so here’s a story. It was the early spring of 1999, I think. Laura and I were browsing in (the long-gone) Books Etc. on Charing Cross Road. Both Elizabeth, the movie starring Cate Blanchett, and Shakespeare In Love had opened at the cinema, hence Laura was naturally eager to find out more about that period in history. We were in the British History section, looking for something relevant to read and study. We finally settled on Christopher Hibbert’s The Virgin Queen: The Personal History Of Elizabeth I, Genius Of The Golden Age, which is about as definitive and comprehensive as such studies can get.

 

A nervous young man made his way over to us. He’d heard how good this book was – did we have any other recommendations for reading on Tudor England? We assumed he was a student, coming down the road from UCL, but he sounded and looked really keen and genuinely interested. We showed him some other books along the shelves and he picked them up and bought them. As we went our separate ways, he gave us what were clearly heartfelt thanks.

 

What a nice fellow, we thought. It only occurred to us a couple of hours later that we had been talking to Robbie Williams.

 

I am consequently hesitant to criticise the work of a man who was, and perhaps still is, simply attempting to work life out. This is the first of many Then Play Long entries concerning Britain’s strangest pop star – strangest because there is almost nothing strange about him, or so you might prefer to think. He became Britain’s biggest pop star, while remaining practically unknown outside Britain. That might be a pre-emptive nod of acknowledgement towards the shrunken state of his nation towards the end of the twentieth century.

 

Why did he become so hugely and unavoidably big in the UK? What did he have to offer to us? Tom Ewing has written interestingly about the factors in late nineties Britain which enabled and facilitated his rise, including the sore need of its people to come to terms with a country altered by two dramatic events in 1997. With Diana gone and Blair now seen as suspect, it’s fair to suggest that this was a nation that no longer knew what to do with, or to, itself.

 

It also wasn’t helpful that hitherto easy signifiers such as Britpop and Girl Power were becoming complicated and arcane. Britpop appeared to have been engulfed by a gluey wave of melodramatic Major Statements – as fine as some of the resultant music was, it now seemed at one remove from “the people.” Meanwhile the Spice Girls were hustled into making a movie and second album far, far too soon, compelled to interact with old-fashioned people (Michael Barrymore indulging in 1974-style bits of profoundly unfunny slapstick business!) and concepts that were supposed to be alien to the central premise of Girl Power (if there ever had been one). All Saints, in the outer lane, bided their time before signalling (or possibly shuffling) to overtake.

 

What a relief it must therefore have been to come across Robbie (steady on there), to all superficial intents and purposes an old-school light entertainer who would have had his own Thames Television show at 6:45 p.m. on a Monday in the seventies. A “cheeky chappie” who refused to take anything seriously, with the exception of himself.

 

As with the Beatles in early 1964 America, it may well be that the simple reason for Robbie’s locally gigantic success – “this is a local pop star for local people” – is that people were fed up with being miserable and wanted to bloody well cheer up again. What better than daft old he’s-one-of-us Robbie, goofing around on the telly with his cheeky post-David Essex grin?

 

(actually, having thought about it, THAT’s who Robbie reminds me of most strongly as far as British pop stars are concerned – David Essex, pub R&B singer and drummer turned actor turned pop star, whose every single was, in some way or other, WEIRD, NOT LIKE THE REST, with Jeff Wayne as his very own Guy Chambers; and the albums were even WEIRDER…)

 

Or so our selective amnesia persuades us to recall, because it initially wasn’t that simple. When released in early October 1997, Life Thru A Lens had been preceded by three singles. The first of these, “Old Before I Die,” did very well – as with Supergrass’ “Richard III” and Blur’s “Song 2,” it was kept at number two by a now unplayable record by a cancelled performer. The second, “Lazy Days,” was barely promoted and was fortunate to nudge into the top ten. The third, “South Of The Border,” was scarcely a single at all and declined to bother the top ten.

 

I think the idea at the time - for what was, initially, one of the most ineptly-promoted albums in the history of British pop - was to push the Britpop/indie side of Robbie, to promote him as “cool,” someone who’d happily work the pub quiz machine in The Good Mixer, as opposed to a Former Boy Band Member. Back then, Gary Barlow was far out in front in the Post-Take That Stakes, although nobody got very excited about that, while Mark Owen was some way behind (though was the second ex-Take That member to release a solo album, Green Man, perpetually available at a charity shop near you).

 

It didn’t work. Despite respectful (not rave) reviews in the music press, Life Thru A Lens entered the album chart at a mere number eleven, and a month later was out of the Top 100 altogether. Copies were already flooding selected branches of MVE. In fairness, it came out in a week flooded with new releases by big names – Urban Hymns, the eponymous second Portishead album, Elton John’s The Big Picture, Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind.

 

Nevertheless a crisis meeting with the record company took place, and it was decided that the only way to save the album, and possibly also Williams’ career, was to release “Angels” – the non-indie one, the “mainstream ballad that will appeal to Gary Barlow fans” one – as its fourth single. Williams reluctantly agreed, and the song, released as a single for the Christmas market, went on to sell well over a million copies in Britain, win an Ivor Novello Award, resuscitate its parent album dramatically, save Robbie’s bacon and – as with “My Heart Will Go On,” the principal song that helped stop “Angels” from getting to number one – become an actual folk song, one that transcended its origins and is used to stir and confirm a common faith.

 

“Angels” isn’t really like anything else on Life Thru A Lens – not even its other ballads. It is a very ingeniously-engineered pop record which seeks to bless its cake on both sides and consume it; romantic enough for the mums, a touch of spiritualism for the grannies and a hint of blokey roughness for the hand-round-the-shoulder-at-closing-time/you’re-my-besht-mate Oasis fans. Vaughan Arnell’s video for the song seems to contrast romantic illusions of Robbie – there he is, living and loving it cool on the unspoilt Devon beach and sand dunes, although the overhanging shadow of a helicopter might suggest an outtake from The Prisoner (or Maxinquaye; the video for “Overcome” was filmed just up the coast at Camber Sands). Perhaps he should simply have walked down Hoxton Street and been nice to everybody he met, saying good morning, getting out of people's way etc.

 

Meanwhile, an alternate “real life” Robbie strolls around a suspiciously familiar-looking high-rise estate somewhere in London, wandering past an isolated Burger King, playing around with a football – OH GOD I KNOW WHERE HE IS I’VE BEEN THERE I’VE CLIMBED THOSE STEPS BUT WHERE IS IT AGAIN AARGH THIS IS GOING TO BOTHER ME ALL DAY WHERE EXACTLY IS HE? I guess the central message of the video is that, if you can imagine yourself convincingly and persistently enough out of the rut of everyday life, you’ll transcend those limitations and encounter your true self. Maaaan. Although I would just have had Robbie wandering and racing around the whole video through and only have him turn to close-up camera at the end to mime the song’s final line – that would have been a masterstroke.

 

The song itself means nothing and everything; it’s one of those catchall odes. It was once voted the most requested song to be played at funerals – “I’m loving angels instead,” you see. But instead of what, or whom? Actually the song makes it fairly clear that this “angel” is the succour protecting Robbie from the banality and frustration inherent in aforementioned everyday life (“and through it all, she offers me protection”). As I understand things, it’s the first of two songs on the album that are about his mother.

 

“Angels” is tailored so expertly – which is not to mistake the song for being exciting or thrilling - that I expect many of the people who helped Life Thru A Lens go eight times platinum might have bought the record for that song alone, or possibly that song and “Let Me Entertain You.” I wonder how many consumers even ventured to any of the album’s other songs. For them, it was enough to know that, with “Angels” – and Guy Chambers – Robbie had beaten Gary Barlow at his own game. Checkmate, mate.

 

I ask this question aloud because I’m not really sure what to make of the record. In preparation for this piece, I have now listened to it five times – sometimes an album requires that many listens, so that songs can sink thoroughly into my mind. The first couple of times, I thought: hey, this is actually a really good and agreeably insolent pop record! The next couple of times, I began to see the joins, the glue. The fifth time, I was picking faults.

 

What can reasonably be said about Life Thru A Lens is that it’s very much a debut solo album that is furiously hedging its bets. Bits of Britpop, more mainstream nineties pop-rock, nods to psychedelia-lite; it is designed to appeal as meticulously and scientifically as Open Road was, except, in contrast to Barlow’s benign but fundamentally blank and beige mind, we are invited to analyse what exactly is going on in Robbie’s head, without ever really encountering an answer. “Old Before I Die” ostensibly sounds like a spirited Oasis tribute, complete with patented Liam Gallagher tr0pes, until you look at the credits and see that Williams co-wrote the song with Desmond Child.

 

Elsewhere, it’s not quite Britpop but not quite not Britpop. “Lazy Days” is a bright, worried opener subverted in an ungainly fashion by Williams’ repeated leitmotif of “a jolly good time”; the Boo Radleys would have roughed this up a tad (see “Heaven’s At The Bottom Of This Glass” from Kingsize) and one gets the first of many impressions that Williams is trying just a little too hard to convince us that we can now permit him to be hip. There is, for instance, his cumulatively annoying tendency to screech his high notes throatily, as though James Hetfield had just accidentally squatted on a hornets’ nest, rather than sing them. Perhaps this lends his work the rough edge that he craves, but at other times – for example, “Lazy Days”’ climactic procession of “YEAH YEAH!”s – his boy band vibrato suddenly comes out of its cocoon to less than convincing effect.

 

The title track is good but bottomless power pop which ends up going nowhere particularly interesting and lyrically seems to be a more jocular take on the “Common People” premise, although who gives a toss what they’re wearing at Quo bastard Vadis (booked a table there which turned out to be the evening after Diana’s funeral; skunk eyes from the few others in attendance throughout, and another eighty quid I’ll never see again)? “Ego A Go Go” incorporates some luminous bitching about Gary Barlow (“Now you’ve gone solo/Living on a memory”) but musically resembles Dave Stewart’s idea of late nineties MTV rawk with an over-fussy horn section and a crashing climax that seems out of place with the architecture of the rest of the song. Intriguing, however, that a song having an extended crack at Barlow is immediately followed by Robbie doing Barlow better than Barlow ("Angels").

 

It’s bewildering that “South Of The Border,” an album track that does its best to scream I’M AN ALBUM TRACK, was ever considered for single release. Here’s Robbie, fleeing down to That London, and who should turn up but “Cocaine Katie,” by whom he presumably means Kate Moss. I mean, who fucking cares? Meanwhile the music is horrible early seventies midtempo pub rock pseudo-sleaze masquerading as New Thing, including a fucking “funky” electric piano. The whistling interlude is good, though – see also “TV Movie” by Pulp – and I note the first appearance of a concept – or a town, anyway - entitled “No Regrets.”

 

“One Of God’s Better People” is a nice acoustic ballad about Robbie’s mother and it actually touches the heartstrings in ways that “Angels” doesn’t (not mine, in any case – that’s another example of trying a little too hard to please). It gets right to the emotional nub of things and nestles there. Out of that emerges “Let Me Entertain You,” which in another life might have been called “Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding,” is a rousing number which perhaps should have been placed at the album’s beginning (and remarkably had not, at that point, been tried out as a single. In favour of “South Of The Clucking Border”? No wonder Chrysalis were exasperated). Burning effigy, mon cher, mum and dad, all the other signifiers; this sets out Robbie’s stall, tells you exactly what you’re going to get – and of course he’s placed it as the introductory song in his live act.

 

“Let Me Entertain You” would have made an electrifying introduction to Life Thru A Lens, as well as rivalling Primal Scream’s “Loaded” as the best “Sympathy For The Devil” cop. Well, an entertaining one, anyway. In the song’s video, general commentary has placed Robbie’s facial make-up as a Kiss tribute, although he looks far more Jobriath than Gene Simmons to me and is in an eerie way prophetic of Joaquin Phoenix’ Joker. But Freddie Mercury would have understood and adored the showmanship, the great Derek Watkins delivers an incendiary trumpet solo, and in any case the song isn’t what you think it’s about; it’s actually about Robbie trying to persuade somebody else’s girlfriend to cheat with him (for “entertain” read “f*ck”).

 

The next two songs remind us that, at the time, Williams was in the throe of multiple drug addictions – cocaine, prescription and non-prescription drugs, morphine; you name them – and had only just come out of rehab. The downbeat ballad “Killing Me” refers to his cocaine habit. But its successor, and possible sequel, “Clean” might be my favourite song on the album; a “With A Little Help From My Friends”/”Penny Lane”-style staccato 1967 romp in which the singer declares that he is off those damn drugs, though struggles to convince himself, let alone the listener. Well, cleaner than he was. Um, clean at times. Clean-ish. Not too clean. Actually not clean at all, as evinced by the “Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite” dislocated fairground waltz which brings the song to a close.

 

And this, said the author about to reveal a dramatic twist, is where Life Thru A Lens collides with This Is Hardcore. “Clean” was co-written by Richard Hawley and Antony Genn. Who be the latter? Briefly a guitarist with Pulp in the late eighties, later keyboardist for Elastica and later still one of Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, he co-wrote “Glory Days” on the album immediately preceding this one. Yet I think Robbie proved, for many, a far more digestible Jarvis Cocker. There are no grandstanding Shakespearean soliloquies delivered from atop castle turrets here. Robbie is not Making A Point or issuing a Major Statement. He has many of the same problems and foibles as Cocker – but he is able to make light of them. Most importantly, he can laugh at them (Cocker’s habitually-concealed gallows humour notwithstanding) and make us laugh with, rather than at, him.

 

The album semi-concludes with another wistful acoustic ballad, this time addressed to, of all people, Richard Beckinsale, who died when Robbie was five. The singer had been seeing his elder daughter Samantha at the time and, in this song, expresses his sorrow that her father couldn’t have lived to see what she had become – the comedy actor (The Lovers, Porridge, Rising Damp) was only thirty-one when he died in his sleep of a massive heart attack secondary to undiagnosed coronary artery disease and hypercholesterolaemia (the general consensus at the time was that he had been working far too hard). There eventually follows the “hidden” track, “Hello Sir,” in which, over a vaguely doomy piano, Williams calmly tells his old school headmaster in rhyming couplets to go fuck himself.

 

There remains a lot of dissatisfaction beneath Life Thru A Lens’ cheery, laddish surface. The singer knows what he wants out of life, and it’s not what he got from Take That or what he seemed, in 1997, to be getting as a soloist. He never truly sounds happy anywhere on the record, and in many places seems positively resentful. His eyes on the album’s cover are staring through us, as though we don’t exist. He appears to be plotting some kind of revenge, possibly on the world. For most people, however, it was enough that he wasn’t “deep” or “meaningful.” He was just there to give us all a laugh – but is that what he really resented? I don’t know that late nineties Britain could have dealt with depth or meaning in any helpful way. The nation seemed, if anything, to want to get as far away from those two things as possible and keep its most popular entertainer as close to its chest as to render him invisible to the remainder of the planet. We know where we are, and therefore where he is.

 

“I think she must have a thousand devils in her body…”

(Alvaro de la Quadra, Bishop of Avila, regarding Queen Elizabeth I, as quoted in the abovementioned Christopher Hibbert book)