:cheer: :cheer: :cheer:

I forgot it was November :kink:

Robbie Williams isn't done yet with being a pop star

http://images.smh.com.au/ftsmh/ffximage/2009/11/06/470_robbie1.jpg

Sunday Morning Herald

http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/m...ge#contentSwap1

 

Robbie Williams has always been more than 'that fat dancer from Take That'.

 

Pop stars – real pop stars, not makeweights elevated by 15 minutes of fame in television karaoke – are not meant to be like the rest of us.

 

I don't mean they are made smarter or sexier or funnier, though they may well end up believing the inevitable sycophants around them who tell them this is true.

 

What I mean is that we don't want them to be like the rest of us; the quotidian just doesn't work here, otherwise we may as well do it ourselves, failing inevitably from lack of imagination, wit or recklessness.

 

We expect pop stars – no, we need pop stars – to be more bold, more extravagant, more outrageous, more ridiculous. More.

 

Robbie Williams is a proper pop star. He's shagged more women, sold more records, snorted more coke, filled more stadiums, feuded with more members of Oasis, squired more members of All Saints and the Spice Girls, swallowed more prescription drugs, seen more UFOs and been slagged off by more media and bloggers than you and me and everyone we know or will ever know put together.

 

He has done it in full view of a rabid media high on its own supply of ogling and outrage. Then, in his lyrics, he has glorified and agonised over it, paraded his ego and his insecurities and often enough skewered himself before any of us writing or reading about him could. We can be jealous of him and glad we're not him at the same time.

 

Now that's a proper pop star.

 

Robert Peter Williams was a late winter baby, born in February of 1974. He sang and danced and watched Top of the Pops at home in Stoke-on-Trent, a once-vital town outside Manchester, through the 1980s pop boom years of Madonna, Michael Jackson and Prince.

 

When at 16 he saw an ad looking for singers and dancers to make a British version of New Kids On The Block, placed by aspiring Manchester impresario Nigel Martin-Smith, Williams got to do it seriously. Albeit on other people's terms.

 

Take That, marketed as a slightly edgier version of New Kids, tightly controlled and overworked by Martin-Smith and dominated by the songwriting of its most experienced member, Gary Barlow, became one of Britain's biggest-selling bands in the first half of the 1990s, with sales of 9 million albums and 10 million singles.

 

But, almost from the start, Williams, the youngest, frankest and ultimately most dangerous member, was frustrated, bored and insecure. He drank heavily, coked heavily and in 1995, as a final straw, took off to the Glastonbury music festival to party with Oasis instead of preparing for a tour. He was asked to leave. Or, as he put it in his 2006 song, The 90s, “I can't be bothered cause I'm lazy … So f--- the band/Give me sambuca and gack.”

 

A solo career began shakily, not least because Williams was in his first visit to rehab. The first few singles (one a generic piece of rock-pop co-written by corporate songwriting giant Desmond Child) wallowed in the charts and his now ex-friends in Oasis derisively described him as "that fat dancer from Take That”. He looked most likely to end up a joke footnote in a future pub quiz.

 

However, his meeting in 1996 with songwriter Guy Chambers was to change that. As Chambers noted much later, they had little in common, eventually lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic and had a partnership that ended after eight years with sharp words followed by a long, bitter silence. But they gelled and it was their song Angels, a soaring ballad of classic pop form, that became Williams's career-saving first hit across Britain and Europe.

 

From then, Chambers and Williams tapped into a great British tradition of blending pop and theatre, cockiness and camp, flamboyant upbeat tunes and genuinely moving ballads. There was No Regrets, halfway between Pet Shop Boys and Dusty Springfield; Millennium, which took film-score maven John Barry and grafted him onto the Human League; Better Man, a '70s pub rock-style tear-jerker done with strings and choir; and Kids, a tongue-firmly-in-cheek parody of rock lyric cliches done up as a sexy duet with Kylie Minogue.

 

And among them all, Williams wrote lyrics that toyed with facetiousness and teased with openness.

 

"Everything I touched was golden/everything I loved got broken/on the road to Mandalay/every mistake I've ever made/has been rehashed and then replayed/as I got lost along the way.”

 

He was selling millions, playing to stadium crowds – including eventually a massive outdoor show at Knebworth, which had also hosted his bete noire, Oasis and, two decades earlier, Led Zeppelin – and having whom he wanted when he wanted them. He jokingly told a TV interviewer he was “rich beyond my wildest dreams” and awards were falling out of his back pocket.

 

He even pulled off a credible attempt at recapturing the swing and cool of the Sinatra Rat Pack with an album of Vegas/Atlantic City favourites. The man could sing and dance, had charisma and wit and was the biggest thing around. And he was hating it. And himself. “So unimpressed but so in awe/such a saint but such a whore/so self-aware, so full of $h!t”. Robbie Williams was nothing if not contradictory.

 

"[it was] a really sad time, actually, because I was f---ed up. I didn't know how not to do cocaine on Tuesday at five o'clock in the afternoon. I just lost the ability to say no," he told his biographer, Chris Heath. Later he confessed he wasn't satisfied with his work, certain he'd been tossing it off while others crafted. "I used to go around people's houses and see that they've got a fantastic record collection. And I was never in them. That upset me. I'd like to be."

 

What he couldn't or wouldn't see was that, in fact, he was already in those collections. And was getting better.

 

A move to Los Angeles, the split with Chambers and sobriety led to a sympathetic and symbiotic new partnership with cult favourite songwriter Stephen Duffy to produce 2005's very satisfying Intensive Care album.

 

The album began with the cocksure line "Here I stand victorious/the only man who made you come" and ended with a far less assured "a hand through the clouds keeps knocking me down/it's no less than I deserve". Some things hadn't changed.

 

After the mixed reception to the adventurous, entertaining but inconsistent Rudebox in 2006, and a world tour where in Australia he looked bored to tears, Williams retired to his LA home, occasionally being quoted saying he wasn't sure he could be bothered continuing with his career. UFO-spotting excited him more.

 

It may have been the drugs talking. Here's a line from the Rudebox song Good Doctor: “I want Xanax, Vicodin and OxyContin . . . 'Robert Williams take one Adderall with water in the morning'/As if I'm going to take one tablet/I'm Keith Moon, dickhead."

 

Soon he was off to rehab again, recently telling GQ, "If I hadn't gone into rehab I would have died. The left arm was going numb, chest was contracting. That's the sign, isn't it, that you're on your way out?"

 

Instead of going out, he has recorded a new album, his eighth, called Reality Killed the Video Star, in which he asks that we “don't call it a comeback/look what I invented here”.

 

It seems Robbie Williams isn't done yet with being a pop star.

 

Which is good news for those of us who aren't and never will be.

 

Reality Killed the Video Star is out now.

 

 

In the Daily Torygraph tomorrow

 

http://www.robbiewilliams.com/news-blogs/r...egraph-magazine

question: will Jups buy this newspaper for the second time this year :P

It was the Mail on Sunday last time. Not the Daily Torygraph. -_-

ah, so you'll be buying it then :P

Bloomin well won't. I need to draw the line somewhere <_<

:o but it has a set of exclusive photos

http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/view/10715...n-tent-on-love/

 

MARK’S IN-TENT ON LOVE

 

7th November 2009

By David Love

 

 

THE celebrity wedding of the year between Take That star Mark Owen and fiancée Emma Ferguson is to get under way with a pre-marriage booze-up in specially built teepees.

 

Staff at the historic Cawdor Castle, between Inverness and Nairn in the Highlands, were yesterday making final preparations for tomorrow’s nuptials.

 

 

Two giant beige teepees, which can hold up to 60 people, overlook the river.

 

 

Sources say festivities will begin several hours before the ceremony at 4.30pm at nearby Cawdor Parish Church.

 

Industrial heaters were being offloaded at the site, plus a van-load of flowers.

 

 

Mark, 37, and Emma arrived on Thursday for a dress rehearsal.

 

 

Just 50 guests, including the rest of the band, the couple’s kids Elwood, three, and Willow Rose, one – plus old mate Robbie Williams, 35 – are expected to witness the wedding.

 

At least the Telegraph is a proper paper though Jups, not scum tabloid like the Mail :D

 

Dont think ive ever got it over here. It is prob for sale. Ill see in the morning. :smoke:

 

Btw, dont forget the Bodies performance on CH4 at half 9. :D

Well, I tried 3 local shops. Nobody had a Daily Torygraph. The assistants looked at me as if I had horns <_<

Tha article is available online <_<

It is? :mellow:

Robbie Williams rejoins Take That... but just for one night

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER

Last updated at 4:59 PM on 07th November 2009

 

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/11/07/article-1225953-07148AB7000005DC-734_233x423.jpg

 

Robbie Williams performs on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross - but will join his old bandmates on stage next week

 

Robbie Williams will rejoin Take That on stage next week - 14 years after he quit the band.

The singer will perform with his former bandmates for Children in Need at the Royal Albert Hall on Thursday.

 

Take That and Robbie are expected to top the bill for the one-off gig, which will also features perfomance by Snow Patrol, Lily Allen, Dizzee Rascal, Leona Lewis, Muse and Sir Paul McCartney.

 

A source said: 'It's the gig where Robbie finally gets back with Take That. They're mates again and doing it for charity seems like the best way.'

 

But fans will be desperate to blag a ticket for the sold-out show for their first performance together in more than a decade.

 

The 35-year-old walked out of Take That at the height of their fame in 1995 after a rift with lead singer Gary Barlow. The group went on to release another single without him but split the following year.

 

But their comeback as a foursome in 2006 has given the band even greater success.

There have been rumours that Robbie plans to permanently rejoin the band, since ending the feud with Gary in recent years and calling him 'my new best friend'.

 

Also adding fuel to the fire were reports that Mark Owen, 37, Gary Barlow, 38, Howard Donald, 41, and Jason Orange, 39, were spotted entering a New York recording studio at the same time as Robbie.

 

He recently had a Take That symbol tattooed on his right wrist.

 

The source told the Daily Star: 'Everyone fears Rob will change his mind. But he feels it's the right time.'

 

Take That are expected to perform several of their recent hits such as Rule The World and Patience, with Robbie joining them to sing Could It Be Magic, on which he sang lead vocals, and several of their older songs.

 

Last night Robbie, appearing on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, said that performing live had driven him to rehab in the past.

 

'I've always been very nervous [performing for] 80,000 people, it's an unnatural thing to do,' he said. 'You don't know what's going on in my head. It's traumatic, really scary.

 

'I ended up in rehab again. It was, 'What are you doing to yourself?' I thought it was time to break the cycle.

 

'I've taken the pressure off myself, it's a part-time gig these days. The missus keeps me grounded. There's no need to take myself out of my mind any more.'

 

He also talked of plans to have children with girlfriend Ayda Fields.

 

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/11/07/article-1225953-036DD02C0000044D-546_468x434.jpg

source

 

TRWS

 

It is :cheer:

 

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/r...mid-return.html

ROBBIE WILLIAMS LOSES CASH

Contact Music

 

Figures revealed in Robbie Williams' accounts show the singer's earnings have dropped from £32 million in 2006 to just £269,000 last year.

 

Robbie Williams has seen his earnings drop by over £30 million.

 

The 'Rock DJ' singer - who is currently trying to make his way back to the top of the pop charts after a three year break from music - made just £269,000 last year, down from £1 million in 2007 and a massive drop from the staggering £32 million he generated from record sales, concerts and merchandising in 2006.

 

Robbie's spokesperson said they had "no comment to make" on the figures, which are revealed in accounts for his firm The In Good Company Co Ltd.

 

While Robbie's income has fallen, it hasn't curbed the generous streak in the 35-year-old former Take That star.

 

The 'Bodies' singer reportedly put his lavish UK home - which he bought for £8 million earlier this year - up for sale when he and girlfriend Ayda Field moved back to Los Angeles in order to pay off the actress' mother Gwen's debts.

 

A friend previously said: "Debtors are literally on Gwen's doorstep. Her house has been threatened with foreclosure. She doesn't work and has relied on money from her divorce and from family to fund her lifestyle.

 

"But things have been getting tricky recently and she's worried about the future. Robbie has already been extremely generous."

 

 

What a pointless article. He released no music for 3 years, did no tour whatsoever since 2006 -so to compare it to 2006 when he did th huge tour is just ridiculous. :lol:

 

Not many people make a quater of a million pounds from doing absolutelly nothing :lol:

http://www.blockbuster.co.uk/article/84806...-by-success.htm

 

Robbie Williams amazed by success

 

Latest News - 11 November 2009

 

Robbie Williams said he thought his time had "been and gone". :o

 

The 'You Know Me' singer said he has been surprised by the reception to his latest album 'Reality Killed The Video Star' as he thought the last three years out of the spotlight would have been the end of his career.

 

He said: "It's been very, very odd and very, very lovely. The album is number one in 18 countries already. I thought my time had been and gone.

 

"I knew the material was good, but sometimes it doesn't make the sales or people getting it, but what I thought was going on evidently isn't!"

 

In a surprising move, Robbie also said he thought British R'n'B group JLS should beat him to the top spot in the album charts in his home country - where the two acts respective albums were released on Monday (09.11.09). :arrr:

 

He added to BBC Radio 1 DJ Fearne Cotton: "JLS are so close behind me this week I think it's like 3,000 sales or something, it's so close. I really like those guys, they look like nice people, they are at the start of their career and they deserve the number one." :arrr: :arrr: :arrr:

 

Robbie, 35, quickly backtracked however, joking: "They deserve it... but can I just backtrack a little bit? I deserve it more. The time I've put in the back catalogue, the sweat, the stars, the rehab trips... They haven't been to rehab once!"

 

The 'Angels' hitmaker - who has battled addiction to alcohol and drugs - also told of the tremendous nerves he felt ahead of his comeback concert at London's Roundhouse last month.

 

He added: "I didn't know it was going to in 300 cinemas around the world as well, which I am glad I didn't!

 

"About 24 hours before the show I was like, 'You can't think about this', so I attacked it like I wasn't bothered and it was the best way - or I was going to put myself in a mental home again.

 

"I thought, 'I'm just going to stand there and sing the songs and see what everyone says afterward'."

 

The quiff is back :rolleyes: :lol:

 

He had it on This Morning as well, although it seems more put back than a quiff.

 

http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/tvshowbiz/ar...-Need-show.html

 

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/11/12/article-1226958-0730E9B6000005DC-857_468x313.jpg