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I resurrected this article from The Guardian in 2005, I wonder of this is the 'project' that has been taken out of the box after all these years , is this what Robbie blogged about recently



Life after Robbie


Tomorrow he will be feted for writing the best song of the decade. But after their huge success with Angels, Guy Chambers and Robbie Williams famously fell out. He tells Laura Barton how he coped with the split - and about the secret project that may reunite them

The Guardian, Wednesday 25 May 2005


They say the devil has all the best tunes, but today, disconcertingly, Guy Chambers appears a vision of well-scrubbed cherubism. "I think truly ambitious people can be evil," he says sweetly, "but I don't think I've ever been evil with a capital E." Nevertheless, Chambers is behind many of the world's most successful pop records, and tomorrow will collect an Ivor Novello award for having written the "song of the decade" - Angels, recorded by Robbie Williams. Though he has gone on to write for many other artists - Jamie Cullum, Brian McFadden, Charlotte Church and Kylie Minogue among them - it is with Williams, the singer with whom he worked for five and a half years, and from whom he acrimoniously split in 2002, that his name is most stickily entangled.

Despite the low-level fame the association has brought him, his face has remained rather less well known. There is an air of David Cassidy about him, a hint of Daniel Bedingfield, but one would be hard-put to place him. One afternoon not so very long ago, he found himself at Buckingham Palace. "I was speaking to Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt, and then the Queen came up to us. 'You must be the newest member,' she said to me. I think she thought I was in Status Quo."

His most recent work, the Isis Project, is unlikely to bring quite as much attention as some of his previous collaborations. Recorded as a gift for his five-year-old daughter, Isis, all of the songs are in French, the lyrics written by the French artist Keren Ann Zeidel, set to Chambers' music, and sung by British actress Sophie Hunter. "We went," Chambers puts it, "down the Jane Birkin road." Chambers himself does not speak French. "I like the fact it's in French, and the fact that the words are very poetic, sort of metaphors and sort of archaic. And I like the fact that I don't know specifically what the songs are about. The music's very personal, but the message and the words are just part of the sound of it for me. And I love being able to switch that part of my brain off - the critical part. Because I did get a bit tired a year or two ago of listening to English."

It's certainly a long way from the pop fodder of his work with Williams. Angels was a typical Chambers confection, soaring orchestral strings, stirring piano, and a chorus about waterfalls and love and affection and loving angels instead. It lends itself well to karaoke, and throughout the summer of 1999 proved inescapable.

The song's phenomenal success brought a procession of hopeful young artists to his Primrose Hill studio. What, I ask, would he do if I were a young popstrel in search of a song. "Well, I'd ask you what you'd been doing and what's your state of mind, cos it's all about people's energy. You know, are you the sort of person who wants to take a risk with your sound? Or are you very conservative? Or are you very emotional, are you very confrontational? And then you try to bring that out in the music ... so that when they walk out the door with this music they feel it's them - I don't want them to go away thinking, 'That's really Guy Chambers'."

He might start by muddling around with a sample or a guitar. "Or he or she might have a melody that they're walking around with. Or he or she may say something that makes me think 'that's a great title.' I'm always looking for titles. I'm title obsessed." And what's his best title? "Ooh," he says. "I think Millennium was quite clever. Because we didn't have a title for that, and then I said 'Millennium', and he [Robbie] went, 'What's that got to do with anything?' and I said, 'Well, the Millennium's coming up and it's gonna be huge, and the radio's gonna want a tune with Millennium on it."

Songwriting, he says, is easiest when someone has "an emotional block they want to unblock - cos I think music can do that." He says the Isis Project has been an unblocking for him. "It's a way of me moving on from the Robbie legacy." He speaks a lot like this, his sentences laced with the easy, faintly cheesy sentiment of the pop lyric. "I can't repeat that with anybody else, but it's taken a while to realise that - I can't find another Robbie because there isn't another Robbie." He talks of Williams as one might refer to a great lost love, returning to him with a persistent, scab-picking obsessiveness, his voice carrying a mingling of affection and begrudgery and bewilderment.

Pre-Robbie, Chambers, now 41, had a mildly successful, persistently musical existence. He grew up in Surrey, his mother had worked for a record label, his father was a flute player with the London Philharmonic, and the young Chambers would sit in on rehearsals at the Royal Festival Hall. "I had piano lessons from when I was five. And I was in a choir and I picked up the guitar when I was 10. I tried the french horn, I tried the trumpet, I tried the violin. But then I found the piano and the guitar, because I liked to write my own songs. My piano teacher, when I was about six, said to my mum, 'Oh he really likes jazz' because I was trying to change the music - I would get bored of trying to read other people's music."

When Chambers was 13 his father accepted a job with the Liverpool Philharmonic, and the family moved north. He started bunking off to go to a friend's house and listen to records - "in those days it would have been Deaf School and Echo and the Bunnymen and Teardrop Explodes and the Clash."

He went on to study music at Guildhall and stayed to do a postgraduate course in composition, despite not actually enjoying it. "At Guildhall a lot of the kids were from posh homes and they didn't seem to be doing it for the right reasons." Which are? "I suppose I'm a bit romantic about music. I believe that if you're a musician you should want to die for it. It should be the most important thing in your life." And how does his wife feel about that? "One of the reasons I married her is that she's cool with that fact, that I put music first. But having said that, since I had kids it's changed." Chambers has three children - Isis, Mali and Gala. "The sort of love that your children bring out in you is so unique. It's as deep as the love of music, but because it's your own flesh and blood it's ... radical love. There," he grins, "is a good title."

He dabbled in bands himself, of course - a synth-led group named Hambi and the Dance, who were once supported by Frankie Goes to Hollywood; a brief stint playing keyboards for Jimmy Nail ("It was when he did Crocodile bleedin' Shoes. But I needed the roof doing"), the Waterboys, World Party, the Lemon Trees. But it was when he was introduced to Robbie that his fortunes changed. He recalls that the first time they met, "I was intimidated by him. Just like he was intimidated by me. It was a mutual intimidation. I'm still intimidated by him. He's got this persona, you never know what he's going to say or think. He's edgy. But that's quite good for me creatively. It woke me up a bit."

Their working relationship was relentlessly intense. Chambers toured with Williams, and they wrote continually. "We'd write songs on the back of buses, in hotels. He came on holiday with me." Does he miss him? "Sometimes, yeah. But I don't miss the pressure and some of the politics." The pressure was to write huge hits. "And I love that - it's an incredible challenge, but at the same time it grinds you down after a while." And the politics? "That's more of a personal thing." They both lost perspective, he says. "I think I got a bit big for my boots, and I think I did try to work with too many people. But I'm restless. And I think it was just very difficult to communicate with him at that time, that last year - not least cos he'd moved to LA. And I think once we'd lost that connection of seeing one another almost daily, I think things started breaking down."

Anyway, he continues, "we're talking again now". He drops it into the conversation nonchalantly, between mouthfuls of tabbouleh and a shrug. "I went to the Troubador in LA to see Coldplay and he was there at the same gig. It's a small club, so I bumped into him at the bar and we had a hug and afterwards there was an aftershow and we had a little chat together and then we went for dinner the following week and had a really, really good chat."

And would they consider working together again? "Yeah," he says, "we're definitely going to do something. But I can't say what it is, it's top secret. I haven't told anyone - my brother doesn't even know. But it is completely different. It's a project. I'm not saying what it is." His eyes twinkle, and for one fleeting second one glimpses the devilish side of Guy Chambers.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/may/25/popandrock1