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Spectator
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
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.
The Independent
03-03-2025
- Sport
- The Independent
Jos Buttler counts the cost of muddled methods as England hit the reset button again
And so ends as battering and bruising a two months as any that English cricket has experienced. Many similarly scarring winters of discontent have come before but since the start of 2025, the senior men's and women's sides have played 18 times and won just once. Credit, therefore, must go to Abi Norgrove's U19s restoring a semblance of respectability with a semi-final finish at the World Cup in Malaysia. Tournaments of torment are far from new but there was a singular sadness to the final outing of Jos Buttler 's tenure as white-ball captain on Saturday. The damage already done, both on the day and beforehand, the captain poked and prodded at the debris of his sinking ship on his way to a boundary-less 21, part of a final English omnishambles to conclude their Champions Trophy. It was meant to be the tournament that got the England skipper smiling again; a grimace was about as close as Buttler came to a grin. Bowed and beaten by a post that has proved thankless for too much of his tenure, a relinquishing of duties after this tournament had come to feel likely in the India series that preceded it – England ill-prepared, ill-equipped and ill-disciplined, careering into precisely the sort of miserable tournament that followed. 'It's the right decision for me and it's the right decision for the team," Buttler conceded on Friday with doleful eyes. 'It was quite clear this tournament was going to be important results-wise for my captaincy and going out with a bit of a hangover from the tournaments before, I've just reached the end of the road. "My over-riding emotions are sadness and disappointment but I'm sure in time that will pass and I'll get back to really enjoying my cricket.' Time may allow more fond reflections of a stint that sadly swung sharply into the negative. Having led England to a trophy at his first major event, Buttler has since overseen three consecutive tournament failures. With a coaching change already performed, a switch of skipper had felt to have been coming. A drop-off in personal performances has been symptomatic of the collective's malaise; how to get the best out of Buttler the batter will be a key question for his successor. Brendon McCullum himself admitted, though, that the 34-year-old has not been set up to succeed. Where predecessor Eoin Morgan received, and demanded, his nation's best and brightest each time England took the field en route to 2019 World Cup triumph, Buttler has too often been the fall guy of the saturated schedule, the Test team understandably prioritised as McCullum and Ben Stokes began their revolution. The fortunes of the white-ball sides have naturally taken a dip with several senior figures featuring sparingly. Attempts to get the band back together for the World Cup in 2023 showed the perils of a lack of practice, an unrehearsed collective playing all the wrong notes on a Spinal Tap-style tour from hell across India. Before this tournament, Joe Root had not made an ODI century in more than five years; the glimpses that he and Ben Duckett – increasingly important but only just emerging as a consistent pick in the 50-over format – show what might have been with a stable batting line-up. Even the seam bowling attack, exciting on paper but inflexible in practice, for the Champions Trophy seemed partly picked with upcoming red-ball assignments in mind. There has been misfortune along the way. Ben Stokes would have better balanced the XI but for an all-action cricketer, something has to give – one hopes that his hamstring issues do not become any more regular a concern. Injury to Jacob Bethell was untimely, removing one of few in the squad with more than one specialist string to their bow. Yet the importance of a 21-year-old in his first months in international cricket show the skew of a strange selection. Pakistan can sometimes be a pace paradise but travelling to the subcontinent with one specialist spinner always felt destined for disaster. After Bethell's injury opened an opportunity to call up another all-round option, England's brains trust instead opted for a fifth wicketkeeper-batter. Compare and contrast England to their opponents on Saturday and the difference is stark. South Africa had already lost pacemen Anrich Nortje and Gerald Coetzee before the tournament began before two of their top three fell ill on matchday - yet the Proteas had an adaptability and attitude that their opponents lacked. Likewise, Australia's raft of retirements and injury issues appear to have done them little harm. It has been a very good tournament for Sam Curran, Liam Dawson and a number of other county cause celebres. One can overplay the lack of variety within England's attack – Morgan's men won a World Cup with five right-arm seamers – but McCullum's lack of love for genuine all-rounders is a touch perplexing. Liam Livingstone was the closest they had in Pakistan: a batting all-rounder who averages 15 at ICC events in his career. Livingstone 's hopeless hack at Keshav Maharaj meant that he, Phil Salt, Jamie Smith and Harry Brook compiled 134 Champions Trophy runs between them – the depth England claim to have built in white-ball cricket is not yet delivering when it matters. Salt and Livingstone, having led in Buttler's stead in the West Indies in the autumn, shape as among the possible contenders to succeed the skipper; neither should be at all secure of their spot in the side. Vice-captain Brook is the presumed favourite but England ought to be cautious not to overburden a player reflective of their muddled methods – the Yorkshireman is yet to find the right tempo or technique in ODI cricket, particularly against high-quality spin. Like many, Brook is still learning the balance between risk and reward in a format that the nation's most promising young cricketers no longer really get to play. While the erosion of domestic List A cricket is not unique to England, India, for example, have done a fine job supplementing the surfeit of T20 options with regular 50-over cricket, creating a pool of players who understand the different rhythms required. Instilling that same understanding in his side is now a key task for McCullum. If his great strength with the Test team was casting off the shackles of self-doubt and burden of a fear of failure, this is perhaps a tougher coaching task. Having originally turned down the white-ball role in favour of the Test team, fearing it too easy, it is a challenge that should excite him. It was McCullum's New Zealand that inspired the Morgan-led transformation that culminated in World Cup triumph; after their latest low, England are pressing the reset button again
