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in Robbie Williams and Take That

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For those who do not know who Tommy Ball is ....

 

Thomas Derbyshire (born 27 June 1938), known professionally as Tommy Cannon, is an English comic, actor and singer. He is best known as the straight man of the comic double act Cannon and Ball, until Bobby Ball's death in 2020, in TV programmes such as The Cannon and Ball Show.

Edited by Sydney11

 

the local pundit - EP #4 (PART 3) FEATURING MAX BEESLEY

 

 

In our final episode, Max discusses moving to Los Angeles, playing at Knebworth with Robbie Williams in front of 150K people, and Manchester United... Legend. Thank you, Max!

 

  • 2 weeks later...

Robbie Williams would have appeared in ‘FIFA’ “for free”

"Robbie didn’t care about the [money] at all"

 

Members of the FIFA 2000 team have reflected on working with Robbie Williams, including the singer’s love for the series that led to his appearance in the game.

FIFA 2000 featured Williams’ ‘It’s Only Us’ as its opening song, but this only happened thanks to a throwaway answer from the singer when leaving the Brit Awards in 1999.

 

At the awards, Williams won British Single Of The Year, British Male Solo Artist and British Video Of The Year.

 

“He comes out of the Brit Awards and the interviewer says, ‘What are you going to do now Robbie?’ And he said, ‘I’m going to go home and play my copy of FIFA 99,’” recalled Tom Stone, former vice president of Electronic Arts‘ European marketing division, in an interview with Time Extension.

“So we heard this, we called his management, and said, ‘Was Robbie serious? Was he really playing?’ And they go, ‘He loves FIFA,’” he continued. Fortunately, FIFA’s audio director was already in touch with Williams’ record label and so securing the singer and his team’s involvement in the newest FIFA entry was a walk in the park.

Yet, the team experienced some resistance to the idea. “There were a lot of people who thought he was wrong for the game because they still saw him as Take That and his bad thing with the press,” explained Marc Aubanel, senior producer of FIFA 2000.

 

But Williams and his manager wanted that “heartthrob” image to be left in the past, and featuring in FIFA which had a predominantly male audience was a “branding opportunity”.

 

The singer’s additional terms for the inclusion of ‘It’s Only Us’ were that he would be a player in the game and that his favourite club Port Vale would be added to FIFA 2000.

Electronic Arts obliged – he was mocapped and turned into a “Cyber Rob” 3D model that appeared in the game, the ‘It’s Only Us’ music video and on his official website.

 

“Robbie didn’t care about the [money] at all. He’s like, ‘If you get me in a mocap suit and I can be mo-capped and put into the game, I’ll do it for free,’” said Aubanel.

 

In other gaming news, Adidas and Marvel have revealed Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 Symbiote-themed shoes as part of a larger collection to celebrate the game’s launch.

 

https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/robbie...or-free-3508308

Edited by Sydney11

  • 2 weeks later...
Interesting piece from Gary ..

Gary Barlow On Robbie Williams Quitting Take That

https://www.facebook.com/highperformancepod...298983962903568

 

That is interesting.

 

Gary's son must be older now than Rob was in TT - I'm sure that gives it a different perspective. Plus 30 years of hindsight.

Edited by Laura130262

Reminder of fairly decent lookback by Alex Petridis ( The Guardian } August 22'

 

Some good analysis of the individual songs ..

 

As Williams releases XXV, an orchestral reworking of his greatest hits, we revisit the original songs in the versions you actually want to hear

 

 

20. Sensational (2016)

Williams is a far better lyricist than he has been given credit for. Tucked away on The Heavy Entertainment Show, Sensational is a witty, incisive skewering of the occasionally fraught relationship between artist and audience: “I love you ’cause you love me, and I wish that you could always stay. Now go away.”

 

19. Candy (2012)

Most of Williams’s oeuvre has improved with age – the quality of his big hits is easier to appreciate now that they are not omnipresent – but Candy, co-written with Gary Barlow, remains a guilty pleasure: it is almost wilfully cheesy and maddeningly catchy. As a piece of unrepentant bubblegum pop, it ticks every box.

 

18. Tripping (2005)

Tripping looks awful on paper: the lyrics include a quote commonly misattributed to Mahatma Gandhi, the sound is reggae-influenced – or at least reggae by way of the early 80s Clash. It is melodically subtle and downbeat – at least by Williams single standards – but curiously it works.

 

17. Motherf***er (2016)

Long before mental health became a hot topic in pop music, Williams was laying bare his struggles in song. Motherf***er is the most startling of the lot: addressed to his children, it details generations of illness they might inherit: “I’d like to sing a song that says that you’ll be fine, but … I’d be lying.”

 

16. Morning Sun (2009)

Williams subsequently took to deriding the Trevor Horn-produced Reality Killed the Video Star as “half-arsed” and dubbing it Let Me Underwhelm You, but its opening track is great. Lovely melody, grandiose orchestration, lyrics that – typically – fret about reviews and star ratings and Williams’ own ambition: “All I wanted was the world.”

 

15. Let Love Be Your Energy (2000)

An infinitely more convincing take on Beatle-influenced alt-rock than the pallid Oasis-isms of 1997’s Old Before I Die and Lazy Days, Let Love Be Your Energy barrels confidently out of the speakers, a killer song atop wall of distorted guitars, its arrangement decorated with nods to I Am the Walrus and Penny Lane.

 

14. She’s Madonna (2006)

It would be lovely to retrospectively claim that Rudebox – the album that ended Williams’ imperial phase at a stroke – is a lost left-field pop masterpiece, but it still sounds confused and patchy: the product of an artist who wants to do something different but hasn’t worked out what. Still, the good bits are great, not least this witty, Kraftwerk-y Pet Shop Boys collaboration.

 

13. Go Gentle (2013)

Amid the camp jokes and Great American Songbook standards on Swings Both Ways lurked Go Gentle, a beautifully understated paean to his daughter, audibly influenced not by the swing era, but the sound of grownup, late-60s LA pop – Harry Nilsson, Jimmy Webb-era Glen Campbell.

 

12. Rock DJ (2000)

You got the feeling that Williams, a fan of Ian Dury, saw Rock DJ as his tribute to the Blockheads’ disco-influenced hits: here, the backing comes from Barry White’s mid-tempo It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me, while the rhythm of lyrics is audibly inspired by the Blockheads’ Reasons to Be Cheerful (Part 3).

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11. Feel (2002)

 

The sound of a man on top of the world – the accompanying Escapology album went platinum in more than 14 countries – protesting “I’m not sure I understand the role that I’ve been given”, the resolutely downcast lyrics rubbing against the tune’s soaring, orchestra-assisted uplift.

 

10. She’s the One (1998)

“He nicked my pig and killed it, but he gave me enough bacon to live off for four years,” said World Party’s Karl Wallinger after Williams covered his 1997 album track. It’s a great song, but Williams’s less fragile, less Beatles-y take turned it into the kind of single that goes platinum.

 

9. Let Me Entertain You (1997)

Long established as Williams’s set-opening theme song, it is easy to overlook the fact that Let Me Entertain You’s lyrics aren’t about the singer’s needy desire for an audience: they are a genuinely witty drawing of a man desperately trying to talk someone into bed. Bizarre but true fact: it began life as, of all things, a drum’n’bass track.

 

8. No Regrets (1998)

Williams spent his early solo career spitting bile at his former Take That bandmates in interviews, but while his musical summation of their split has the odd barbed line, its overall tone is not bitter so much as crestfallen and, well, regretful: it sounds like a sigh, haunted by what might have been.

 

7. Lovelight (2006)

A highlight amid the mess of Rudebox, the Mark Ronson-produced Lovelight is not just a fantastic song, but a weirdly prescient one. Sixteen years on, its falsetto-vocal and blend of Daft Punk electronics with super-smooth yacht-rock-y disco sounds very now: frankly, if Harry Styles released it tomorrow, we would never hear the end of it.

 

6. Supreme (2000)

 

Prime evidence for how good the Robbie Williams/Guy Chambers songwriting team was at its best, Supreme has a gorgeous chanson-inspired melody; the way it teases its passing similarity to Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive in the lyrics before finally letting rip with a string sample from the 1979 hit is inspired.

 

5. Angels (1997)

Angels was so ubiquitous for so long that it is almost impossible for anyone of a certain age to listen to it objectively: throughout the late 90s and 00s, it wasn’t so much a song as an unavoidable fact of daily life. Most pop songwriters would kill to come up with something with such impact and longevity.

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4. Advertising Space (2005)

Intensive Care, Williams’s first album without Chambers, is sorely underrated. Co-written by 80s pop star turned cult folk-rocker Stephen Duffy, Advertising Space is a ballad as good as anything the singer ever recorded: an emotive, epic meditation on the death of Elvis and the strained relationship between art and commerce.

 

3. Kids (2000)

If Williams had a penchant for complex, racked examinations of his career and his psyche, he was also more than capable of coming up with utterly uncomplicated balls-out pop: the entirely fantastic Kids packs a monster chorus, a guest appearance from Kylie and lyrics that cheerfully played on the media obsession with Williams’s sexuality.

 

2. Strong (1998)

In his heyday, Williams was frequently mocked as an eager-to-please light entertainer, which now seems unfair: here was a huge British star who was charismatic, outspoken, conflicted, his oeuvre packed with curiously meta hits. “This is real because I feel fake,” offers Strong, a song about weakness and self-doubt that sounds ready to take on the world.

 

1. Come Undone (2002)

“My main talent is turning trauma into something that looks showbizzy,” Williams told the Guardian in 2016: a perfect summation of Come Undone. Musically, it is a beautifully turned example of a 00s power ballad, gentle piano and acoustic guitar verses surging into immense, air-punch-inducing chorus. Lyrically, it is something else. Come Undone thrashes about, exploring Williams’s success in terms that are alternately defiant – “f*** you all” – and so self-loathing they could have come from the pen of Kurt Cobain: he variously describes himself as “full of shit”, a “corporate suit”, “a whore” and “scum” and informs his audience that “if I stop lying I’d just disappoint you”. A depiction of fame unravelling that is specifically designed to be a hit – it made the Top 5 – it’s an extraordinary song.

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/aug/...st-songs-ranked

Edited by Sydney11

:o I wonder if Robbie remembers this moment in time :lol:

 

2 Unlimited: “We jammed in a band with Prince and Robbie Williams”

In Does Rock ‘N’ Roll Kill Braincells?!, we quiz an artist on their own career to see how much they can remember – and find out if the booze, loud music and/or tour sweeties has knocked the knowledge out of them. This week: Ray Slijngaard of Eurodance duo 2 Unlimited takes on the ultimate test!

 

 

What’s the most bizarre Ab Fab-style night out you’ve had with a fellow pop star !

 

“It was probably with Robbie Williams. We were at the MTV Awards in Berlin [in 1994] and there was an afterparty, and Prince was there. We were in a small club and Robbie was singing, I was rapping, and Prince was playing guitar, and we were all freestyling songs together. It was like a hip-hop thing. Man, it was crazy!”

 

 

https://www.nme.com/features/music-intervie...illiams-3517996

Edited by Sydney11

Really sad to read about the death of Matthew Perry, may he rest in peace .
Really sad to read about the death of Matthew Perry, may he rest in peace .

 

So very, very sad. :(

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