(#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)
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