The charm of Robbie Williams
What could it possibly feel like to be a sportsperson who gets the yips? To wake up one morning and be unable to replicate the technical skills that define you. To suddenly find the thing you do well absolutely impossible. Golfers who lose their swing, cricketers whose bowling deserts them, snooker players who can't sink a pot.
Stage fright – something both Robbie Williams and Cat Power have suffered from – is much the same. Williams took seven years off touring last decade because of it, which must have been devastating for someone whose need for validation is so intense that he has made it his brand. Chan Marshall, the American singer who performs as Cat Power, toured through hers, resulting in shows performed on stages in near-darkness, or that ended early or were undermined by alcohol and the other things that terror forced on her.
Both are now in their fifties, both still performing, both very consciously revisiting the past in their own ways, and you couldn't have got two more different performances. Williams, early in proceedings, announced his intention to be recognised globally as the King of Entertainment – Michael Jackson having already taken the title of King of Pop ('And you don't even have to come for a sleepover at my house!'). And truly, we were entertained.
Even the boring bits – and there were boring bits, usually played out on the video screens – were entertaining by the standard of the boring video bits at stadium shows. The only part that was truly misjudged was a singalong medley of covers – he'd just done 'Let Me Entertain You' and been joined on the chorus by 60,000 people, so he didn't need to get the crowd loose.
Better Man, the ape-as-Robbie biopic, has plainly resurrected him as an item of public interest after a period in which his appeal was becoming, Spinal Tap-style, a little more selective. 'Robbie fucking Williams. Back in stadiums,' he noted, and one wouldn't have predicted it even a couple of years ago. At heart it was a variety show: rock songs, singalong ballads, a load of jokes, a couple of set pieces and a pair of standards. Performing 'My Way' and '(Theme From) New York, New York' absolutely straight and with complete sincerity, gave away the lineage in which he places himself – and it's not next to Oasis. Obviously, he sees himself as an old-fashioned song-and-dance man, and he's a very, very good one – whether in end-of-the-pier or big-stadium mode.
At a press conference in San Francisco in December 1965, Bob Dylan was asked whether he thought of himself as a singer or a poet: 'Oh, I think of myself more as a song-and-dance man, y'know.' That is the sole point of connection between Williams and Cat Power; for while he ran into the spotlight, she stayed in the shadows: her songs at the Barbican had no hint of dance about them.
Her set, based on Dylan's 1966 tour with the Band (with an acoustic first half, then an electric second), has had writers asking why? Let's assume she just likes the songs, and if Bob Dylan is going to play them like this, why shouldn't she? But watching her expert band recreate what Dylan called 'that thin, wild, mercury sound' was a reminder that she could never hope to recreate the cultural force of Dylan going electric; that music loses its power shorn of context.
The trio of records that unveiled Dylan's sound – Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde – are one of the rare points in pop history where you can hear a style of music being invented as it is recorded: if it were made now, you'd call it Americana, a thrilling amalgam of country, folk and R&B played by kids who'd grown up on rock'n'roll. It is thrilling because you can still hear history being made. But repeating it 59 years later? This was the rock equivalent of watching a BBC2 documentary where Lucy Worsley stands in front of someone pretending to be Richard III and enquiring about a horse.
The songs with Robbie Williams's name attached to them are not as profound as those with Dylan's name attached to them. 'You think that I'm strong/ You're wrong/ You're wrong/ I sing my song/ My song/ My song,' will never win the nobel prize for literature. But the nakedness of Williams's neediness, and his complete awareness of his own limitations, is winning. Where Power has all but removed herself from her own performance, Williams's show is about one thing: him and only him. Not even the music. Just him.
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