Robbie Williams, 48, storms the stage in a sequinned vest and gold trousers as he kicks off his 25th anniversary XXV tour at London's O2 Arena

 

 

 

 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/artic...Londons-O2.html

Edited October 10, 20222 yr by Sydney11

A flavour of the O2 show from last night

 

 

 

 

Thanks to Marco Giordano for videos on YT

 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC8boa6uGFwznyZu0pdEgSQ

@1579223967830638592

 

 

 

The show was incredible !!

 

I am still buzzing wow! Tempted to go again tonight 😍

The show was incredible !!

 

I am still buzzing wow! Tempted to go again tonight 😍

 

 

 

Robbie Williams at the O2 review: A heavyweight set of classic pop hits

 

****

 

"Though still Oasis-lite, it was life-affirming to hear a document of youthful bravado delivered by an artist we might once have legitimately worried wouldn’t make it to middle age. Thankfully Williams has travelled some distance in the intervening quarter of a century. As he put it himself, pre-Angels, “Turns out there’s a happy ending: life is good.”

 

 

https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/music/ro...s-b1031411.html

Edited October 10, 20222 yr by Sydney11

@1579391881892753408

Went to the 02 show last night - absolutely incredible, a ‘proper’ greatest hits show and celebration of his career from Take That onwards.

 

 

Robbie Williams, The O2, review: Insecurity and ego collide with the pop star – that’s why we love him

 

****

 

Is Robbie Williams the most self-aware pop star of all time? “I’ve only got two types of song,” he tells a heaving O2 Arena on the opening night of a UK tour to celebrate his 25 years as solo artist. “Type A: I’m f***ing amazing and you’re lucky to be in the same room as me. And Type B: I’m lost and scared and lonely and vulnerable”. He then sings peak-Robbie power ballad “Come Undone”, a song very much from the latter category with a cocksure delivery that makes you feel like you’re watching something from the former.

 

And therein lies the essence of Williams. Pop music, and culture in general, has moved on significantly since he left Take That and – as he tells us tonight before an endearingly wonky cover of “Don’t Look Back in Anger” – ran off to Glastonbury to take drugs with Oasis. But all these years later, his brand of witty, self-deprecating pop – where insecurity and ego collide – leaves him in a field of his own.

 

For all his uncertainties can stray into the needy – he mentions one of his kids told him his looks are going, obviously in search of some reassurance – Williams is a natural born entertainer. Tonight, now sober and, as he tells us, “happy as f***”, he is in his element. The 48-year-old’s voice is showing signs of wear, but in reality he doesn’t so much sing songs as front them. Every song – and tonight features a barrage of hits from the moment he’s uncaged and “Let Me Entertain You” strikes up, brass section, dance troupe and all – is imbued with that certain Robbie-ness: the sparkle, the swagger, those knowing facial expressions. Heavily tattooed with a greying quiff and mullet, he’s dressed for the Las Vegas residency that never was in a metallic gold suit and gold sequin vest. He looks ridiculously fabulous. Or maybe that should be fabulously ridiculous. With Williams, the line is always a fine one.

 

Despite its “25 years of hits” billing, at the outset Williams actually promises “a 32-year odyssey” that takes in his days in Take That as well as the “drugs, sex, scandals and meat pies. Therapy for me, entertainment for you”. He talks us through his career during a mid-section that frames the last three decades as one of success, personal struggle and ultimately redemption (coincidentally or not, Gary Barlow does exactly the same in his current one-man show). He says there’s no hard feelings with his old band – although he does rip apart Take That’s first-ever video and then abandon a lacklustre version of “Everything Changes” because “I can’t be arsed”.

 

But the hits pile up in a breathless second hour. There are some stirring moments: a string-laden “Eternity” (dedicated to Spice Girl Geri Horner); “Feel”, arguably his best song, is towering; “No Regrets” is reworked, with blaring horns, into the propulsive Bond theme it always threatened to be. Both “Kids” and “Rock DJ”, from his all-conquering early noughties commercial zenith, show how original he could be.

 

It wouldn’t be Williams if there weren’t a few messy mis-steps. A cover of “Land of a 1000 Dances” falls flat, leaving him out of breath (“it’s long Covid!”); his idea of making a woman in the crowd the focus of “She’s the One”, putting her on the screen and serenading her, is a showbiz move too far.

 

But his excesses are part of the charm. “Turns out there’s a happy ending,” Williams says at the show’s climax. He’s talking about his own life, but as the undying “Angels” rings out, it turns out to be a fitting epitaph to this show by a true British one-off.

 

https://inews.co.uk/culture/robbie-williams...l_itw_theipaper

Edited October 10, 20222 yr by Sydney11

Robbie Williams review – a survivor and national treasure is triumphant

 

 

O2 Arena, London

He might be on the in-roads to 50 and a family man but a glitter-draped Robbie Williams is discovering that he can have it all

 

By the way Robbie Williams opens his show at London’s O2 Arena, you would think he has something to prove. A national treasure and one of the best-selling artists of all time, Williams has been reflecting British culture back at itself in a hurricane of hair gel and bravado since joining Take That in 1990. Equally, he’s had a life of stark ups and downs – adoration and derision, addiction and recovery – that has made him something of an underdog. Tonight, you hear him before you see him. That familiar, eternally boyish voice checking the mic – “two, one two” – giving the occasion a fly-by-the-seat of one’s pants vibe. Next, you see his silhouette. He emerges behind the band frozen in an Elvis pose; crouched over, mic in hand, flared trousers and all. They start Let Me Entertain You and Robbie struts to centre stage, revealing a gold glitter waistcoat, a greying French crop mullet and box-fresh white trainers. “Now SCREAM!” he demands. And they do.

 

Williams is a performer who, much like Liam Gallagher or Alex Turner, is able to tap into a kind of British masculinity that is loud of mouth and soft of eye: ballads for lads who are constantly one gulp of Carling away from bursting into tears over an afternoon with their grandad 24 years ago. As he bowls around the stage singing lyrics like “my bed’s full of takeaways, of fantasies of easy lays” and “I don’t wanna die, but I ain’t keen on living either” to an all-ages audience, you get the sense of these songs being timeless because they were written from a precipice. Whether he’s proclaiming “I’m a star but I’ll fade” or lamenting that “youth is wasted on the young”, the threat of loss hangs over every high.

 

The tour is in support of Williams’s latest album, XXV, which sees 25 years of hits and fan favourites re-recorded and orchestrated with the Metropole Orkest. From Take That’s The Flood to Rock DJ to Kylie Minogue duet Kids, it’s essentially a personalised tour of his career, from boyband heartthrob through the cocaine years to his current station as a family man whose kids think he’s lost his looks. The set is peppered with anecdotes about going on holiday with Geri Horner when he was first getting sober, and doing cocaine with Oasis at Glastonbury before hammering out a cover of Don’t Look Back in Anger so resonant it should legitimately annoy the Gallagher brothers into burying the hatchet.

 

Given the framework of the tour, it’s no surprise that it feels almost like a swan song. He talks about 1990 – the year Thatcher resigned, the Berlin wall fell (November 1989 to be exact), and, more importantly, Take That formed. He does live commentary on the video for Everything Changes: explaining why there is jelly bouncing off his bare body and how Gary Barlow got all the lead parts. He reminisces about reading NME in the 90s and getting “big ideas” about writing his own songs. He makes dedications to his family and says he has found happiness. At one point a camera sweeps past the barrier and lingers on an older male fan holding a handmade sign that says “hardcore since ’74” (the year Robbie was born).

 

To counter, there’s plenty of the man that gave us Rudebox (which he graciously does not play). He points into the crowd and grabs his crotch and he bends over and roars “this is my bum, this is my arse” followed by something about ageing. Within the first five minutes he’s down among the crowd screaming “come on you f***ers”. For a sweeping encore of No Regrets and She’s the One, he dons a customised wrestling robe and holds his arms outstretched while the orchestra blows the songs up to operatic proportions.

 

Like his father Peter, the Sinatra of working men’s clubs, Williams is a showman from start to finish. While waxing lyrical about entertainment, he tells us that the number one rule is “love your audience”, and that love clearly goes both ways. Before finally bringing things to a close with Angels, he nods to Knebworth 2003: “When I asked you to grow old with me at Knebworth you did, didn’t you?”

 

Now approaching 50, Williams doesn’t just write songs about living fast and being young. He performs with the joy of what can come after. His parting message for anyone who’s followed his journey from the start – and, I suspect, himself: “Turns out there is a happy ending.”

 

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/oct/...e-is-triumphant

Edited October 10, 20222 yr by Sydney11

‘I was off my head’: at the O2 Arena, Robbie Williams rampages gloriously down memory lane'

 

4/5

 

 

Understated entrances are not Robbie Williams’s thing. Back in 2011, on Take That’s Progress tour, the arrival of their erstwhile fifth man halfway through the show involved his appearing on a giant television screen in the middle of the stage, before emerging through a doorway at the top of it, and leaping out suspended by wires. This, while Let Me Entertain You played, rather than one of the band’s own songs.

 

The singer’s introduction to his XXV show at London’s O2 Arena last night was just as swaggering. “My name is Robbie f--king Williams,” he bellowed, strutting up the ego ramp in a sparkly gold vest. “You’d better be good, because I am going to be f--king phenomenal.” Twenty-five years and a week since the release of his solo debut, Life Through a Lens, this look back at Williams’s career – a “mystical odyssey”, he called it on stage – showed a man still with an endless appetite for applause, and a particular skill in getting it.

 

Promising “the highest of highs, the lowest of lows, the drugs, the sex, the scandals, the meat pies”, the night delivered a Williams history lesson, both musical and personal, from Take That’s Everything Changes to his new solo single Lost. A cover of Oasis’s Don’t Look Back in Anger was used to recall his infamous weekend at Glastonbury with the Gallaghers, in 1995, just before he quit Take That. “They couldn’t control me anymore,” he explained, before winkingly adding: “Plus, I was off my head.” Later, he dedicated the wounded Eternity – “I only write two types of song, ‘I’m f--king amazing’ or ‘I’m lost and scared’” – to Geri Horner, explaining how important the Spice Girl’s friendship was to his getting sober in the early 2000s.

 

Largely, though, a Robbie Williams live show is about larking about and invoking massive singalongs. Pulling up the video for Take That’s Everything Changes on the giant TV screens, he narrated along, pointing and laughing: “I thought, ‘No one can ever see it, it’s w--k.’” Then he played half the song himself, until calling a halt: “I can’t be arsed.” The banter was funny enough, but it bordered on disrespect for his former band; besides, they’ve probably got some good ones of their own about William’s disastrous hip-hop misstep Rudebox (2006) – conspicuously absent from this show.

 

But then, to behold the run of his own hits that made up the final third of the show – Old Before I Die, Kids, Rock DJ; a massive Feel; an even bigger She’s the One – was to hear some of the most important pop songs of the past quarter of a century. Here, Williams looked at both his most energised and his most content, particularly as the inevitable finale Angels – dedicated to his mother – drew out the loudest chorus of the night. He may be boastful, but it isn’t hollow. “F--king phenomenal” indeed.

 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/concerts/...p-singer-still/

Edited October 10, 20222 yr by Sydney11

Good critics from Guardian and Telegraph and even the Daily Mail was writing nice. It must have been a very good concert.

 

 

Video credit to Filipe Fernandes on YT - Link below

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/user/javarder1

 

Good critics from Guardian and Telegraph and even the Daily Mail was writing nice. It must have been a very good concert.

 

 

It seems so Elisabeth, at least that's the press reviews out of the way now & he can breathe a sigh of relief. I really like LOST , I am dying to hear what Laura thought of it live . Rob always gives 100% & the audience comes away happy.

 

 

Hard to believe that Gary N is with Robbie 27 years :)

 

& Eternity dedicated to Gerry Horner :heart: - what a song to have written for you

 

 

 

Video credit to Marco Giordano on YT

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC8boa6uGFwznyZu0pdEgSQ

Also people say that Guy is not involved in this Tour!!

The Quietus

Three Songs No Flash

I’m Scum And I’m Your Son: Robbie Williams Live In London

Fergal Kinney , October 10th, 2022 11:46

 

At Robbie Williams’ first date of a major new UK tour, Fergal Kinney explores what the entertainer’s Odyssean career to date tells us about the evolution of English masculinity. For a specific type of man, the appeal of packing it all in and heading out on the open road as a Robbie Williams tribute act has always held a certain intractable appeal. Why wouldn’t it? In the imitation entertainment industry, he is widely understood as having one of the lowest barriers to entry in the game. You can write your own cheque as a Queen or Amy Winehouse tribute act, but there’s a complex skillset inherent to those acts. Not quite so Robbie. Turning not very much into success – and, fairly or unfairly, the consensus has always been that he does not have very much – was the Robbie Williams gamble.

 

During his late 90s and early 00s imperial phase, Williams was a definitive icon of English masculinity. He has sold over 75 million albums globally. His chart statistics leave Elvis standing at the gates; only The Beatles have had more Number One albums. In 2022, though, he has not had a serious hit single for a decade. Making peace with his own position in the market, he has just released an orchestrated album of his greatest hits, complete with tasteful nude sleeve. Nearing fifty, he is Mr Saturday Night, Mr Christmas. Why, then, does he seem happier than ever, and what might his success and story tell us about the English masculinity he often represents?

 

Robert Peter Williams was born in 1974 to an upwardly mobile working-class mother and a frequently absent light entertainer father. Aged fifteen, he flunked his audition for the nascent Take That, but was hired after winking at manager Nigel Martin-Smith on his exit from the session. In that wink, Martin-Smith correctly identified that the boy had a certain gawky appeal that transcended traditional notions of talent and competence. Take That were an uneasy coalition built around the haughty child prodigy Gary Barlow, five young men — boys, really — with no idea how to communicate with one another. It was in that group that Williams began to experience the sharp feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, fear, body dysmorphia and depression that would persist throughout his entire life. In 1996, he was sacked from the band owing to his increasingly frequent benders, and was birthed into the showbiz London of the late 90s.

The lad culture of that decade had been partially engineered as a response to the perceived gender play and rising political awareness in a lot of 1980s culture. A now mainstreamed football culture, a growth period for Big Alcohol, an imported and misappropriated postmodernism, a sharp rise in cocaine availability and a nationalistic, back-to-basic moments in guitar rock created a uniquely ugly cultural milieu. Williams arrived at the Britpop party at the exact moment that the bottles were being cleared away and the taxis ordered. With Guy Chambers, a jobbing songwriter who had led the unsuccessful 60s influenced pop band The Lemon Trees, he began his solo career mining key Britpop tropes, revealing his belief in that movement’s superiority to the pop he had produced with Take That. It worked, but Williams’ gamble for solo fame paid off at the exact worst moment for an addict like him, who was at that point only at the beginning of understanding what was leading him to dissolve complex feelings in lager, ecstasy and cocaine. It would make for an unhappy fame, but it did create a back catalogue that’s suffused with Williams’ genius for, in his words, “turning trauma into something showbizzy.”

 

Is it a safe space for me to share?” yells Robbie Williams, wearing a gold lamé vest and joggers, with a part-mullet, part-quiff that only emphasises his resemblance to a benevolent himbo Morrissey, “can I be vulnerable for you?” Tonight is going to be a little different. Tonight, the opening night of his XXV tour, we are going to go on a journey. Picture the finale of the biggest pop show you’ve been to, and a Robbie Williams set begins largely pitched at that level, with the high-octane pop/rock bombast of ‘Let Me Entertain You’, followed by a spirited, holiday camp rendition of Wilson Pickett’s ‘Land Of 1000 Dances’. “Tonight is a 32 year musical odyssey,” he explains, sat on a raised podium that is his base for the set’s moments of reflection and reminiscence, “there’s going to be the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, it will be very bleak for me and very emotional for you.” Tonight’s set, then, serves as a kind of biographical greatest hits delivered in loosely chronological order. We are shown an unreleased, early Take That promo video that involves a dancer eating jelly from the chest of Gary Barlow. The video pauses on a pert naked bum. “I’d like to say that was my arse,” reflects Williams, “but it isn’t, it’s Mark Owen’s,” and he uses the moment to reflect on the body image problems that have been part of his mental health struggles. Noel Gallagher cruelly referred to Williams as “the fat dancer from Take That,” and tonight Williams covers ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’, partly a reflection on the Britpop era (looking wistful as he remembers arriving at the 1995 Glastonbury Festival “with a pocket full of cocaine and a belly full of champagne”) and partly an audacious landgrab of his rivals’ material. Underlining the long 90s theme, tonight's show is at the former Millennium Dome, that visual emblem of Blairism. Blair and Robbie's fortunes were intertwined, Robbie's imperial phase almost exactly matching the Blair premiership. Robbie Williams was the sound blaring from car stereos and workplace radios during those strange boom years.

 

“I only have two kinds of songs,” observes Williams tonight, “I’m f***ing amazing, and you’re lucky to be in the same room as me,” there are cheers, “and type B, which is I’m lost, scared, lonely and vulnerable.” The Robbie Williams imperial phase was strange. For big, million-selling pop songs, their experiences are seldom universal, but often specific to the high drama of his life in the tabloids during those years. The global smash of ‘Feel’ and the early Britpop aping ‘Strong’, both aired tonight, are songs of masculine sadness on a grand scale. “The success broke me,” reflected Williams in a recent BBC special. “You wouldn’t have wanted to spend a second in my head.” That the major English pop star of the early 21st century was a man in mental health crisis is interesting, and perhaps revealing of why the star was able to access parts of the male psyche that other artists couldn’t.

 

Though he spoke to maleness, a huge part of Williams’ active fan base is, of course, female. One of my earliest, most treasured pop memories is my grandmother, mother and younger sister all sat in hushed reverence for a festive Robbie television appearance. Not many artists get all three generations, and the blockbuster success of Williams’ 2001 crooner album Swing When You’re Winning – which included a duet with the dead Frank Sinatra – helped turn pop’s bad boy into an entertainer for all the family. It helped that Williams was closer to a pre-Beatles understanding of a male pop star, where the songs were just one branch of the all-round entertainer. He positioned himself as a kind of self-appointed wayward son to a nation. “I'm scum and I'm your son, I come undone,” he sings in yet another of his huge, sad hits. Tonight, in one of the biggest cheers of the evening, Wiliams asks, “am I still your son?”

 

Of course, Williams’ relationship to his female contemporaries was and remains complex. A centrepiece of live sets in the early 00s that would not fly today involved the singer bringing a fan up to the stage, who he would promptly get off with. Listening to the audience’s screams on the footage, audiences appear to be OK with it. As always with laddism, though, you didn’t have to look far for its obvious and grim flipside ­– see the unpleasant footage of the gurning, worse-for-wear entertainer repeatedly propositioning a patient and visibly uncomfortable Fearne Cotton during Live 8 Tonight, he singles out ‘She’s The One’ to a woman in the audience, and the arena cameras remain fixed on her throughout the duration of the song as an intended respectful tribute to his female fan base. At one point, a woman lifts up her top to expose her breasts for the singer. He is unruffled. “It’s like being a diabetic in a cake shop,” he explains, batting the moment away in words you sense he has had to use before.

 

“I’m not naturally gifted with what would be deemed a proper talent,” explained Williams in a 2021 interview on The Adam Buxton Podcast. “What comes out of me is pure pop, it’s simple, it’s Middle England, that’s where I’m from.” It was the kind of wallpaper ubiquity that made Williams hard to really observe during his peak. “The sickness that afflicts Robbie Williams,” wrote the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher in 2007, “is nothing less than postmodernity itself […] He is the 'as if' Pop Star - he dances as if he is dancing, he emotes as if he is emoting, at all times scrupulously signalling - with perpetually raised eyebrows - that he doesn't mean it, it's just an act.” I’m not one bit sure this was what was going on, however. More so than undercutting his own performances with knowing irony, in his imperial phase there was often a worrying lack of irony or distance in Williams’ performances. He expected too much from the stage, he performed as though it could bring salvation. It was neediness in excelsis.

 

“I can’t stand the way I perform,” mourned an unhappy Robbie in the 2001 tour film Nobody Someday, “I want to be David Bowie or Iggy Pop, but it’s more like Norman Wisdom. It’s like a Tourette Syndrome that I’ve got. A Tourette Syndrome of pantomime movements that I can’t stop myself doing.” Tonight, Williams seems at ease with the strangeness of his movements - and they are strange. Watch a Robbie tribute act, and their wiggles, gurns, squats and shuffles are unseemly. You don’t want to see it. But like all truly great performers, Williams himself always appears galvanised and elevated by some supernatural force.

 

As the pressures of touring increased, Williams was mocked in the press for bringing best friend Jonathan Wilkes on tour. In Chris Heath's Reveal book, the singer speaks of needing his friend to be “my walker, hold my hand, and shoulder some of the glare” on tours that the singer had often stressed to management that he felt mentally unable to do. When Williams developed agoraphobia, he would seek refuge in the online world - chiefly conspiracy theories, UFO research and the paranormal (Robert De Niro in 2008 was surprised to be gifted a DVD copy of Living TV’s Most Haunted series by the singer). Some of his explorations are undoubtedly funny, but it is worth noting that the vulnerability of lonely men to online radicalisation by the far-right remains one of the biggest challenges to modern masculinity, not helped by Covid lockdowns and a coming winter that will see many confined to their homes out of fuel poverty.

 

“A quick update about myself,” smiles Williams as the set nears its close and the narrative reaches its denouement, “it turns out there’s a happy ending.” After a self-described low point in 2006, he began to quietly make changes that persist to this day. He did a lot of therapy, committed to sobriety and embraced fatherhood and marriage. Now sat, for some reason, in a long velvet dressing gown that seems to symbolise his hard-won Zen wisdom, he reels off the names and ages of his kids and pays tribute to his wife, the model and actress Ayda Field. The family redemptive arc is moving, though it’s still something to be denied of women in pop. Singers like Sophie Ellis-Bextor or Jessie Ware may do podcasts based around discussion of family life and motherhood, but what men and women are celebrated for in pop as they grow older remains sharply divided along gender lines.

 

Celebrity self-improvement can be hellishly annoying, but the fun of current-stage Robbie – showcased tonight – is the sense of someone not holding back the extreme parts of their personality whilst still making those necessary changes. He does not always get it right – like the video of him singing ‘Let It Go’ from Frozen as his wife actually gives birth – but the redemptive arc of tonight’s set at no point feels smug or self-congratulatory. On a recent The Graham Norton Show> appearance, the actor David Tennant gently chided Williams about possible use of Photoshop on his recent nude album artwork (some of the worst experiences of my life as a man have involved gentle chiding.) With disarming sincerity, Williams rejects the premise of the joke, before sincerely and disarmingly discussing his own weight fluctuations and the body image anxieties that have existed throughout his adult life. In 2023, we can expect that in a biopic Better Man and a planned retrospective Netflix documentary series may help us closer understand one of our most interesting, hiding in plain sight pop performers. “There is always a dichotomy with my career, what I have to do in public as opposed to who I actually am in my real life,” explains in a recent Vogue video, “at the moment, the two are getting closer together.”

 

There’s a lot of causes for despondency when it comes to being male in 2022, but parts of Williams’ story have had the capacity to give me a strange and perhaps unwarranted sense of hope. Faced with innumerable challenges, it is easy to be pessimistic about the capacity of English masculinity to change. Male suicide remains the biggest single killer of men under the age of 45. There’s a media conversation about male mental health and a changing masculinity that, whilst potentially admirable, feels elitist and distant from those it needs to help. Any solution that foregrounds the relatively easy win of men having conversations with their male friends over, for example, the need for colossal emergency investment in adult and teen mental health services, how the hostile environment created a climate where some BAME people feel afraid of engaging with mental health services, the fact that Black men are ten times more likely to suffer psychosis but half as likely as their white counterparts to get treatment, the role of Big Alcohol in male suffering or the fact that if you’re having a mental health crisis the first professional you are likely to encounter is a police officer, is not even beginning to take seriously the scale of the solutions warranted.

 

On the ground, though, there are green shoots. Putting one’s faith in general change should always be done with extreme caution, but there is enough evidence to suggest that we are witnessing a younger generation that seems to be dismantling gender binaries (and the itinerant vanguard of teenage male bullying, homophobia and masculine policing). This feels like a huge advance for individual human freedom and should be treated as such. The nadir of the 1990s feels a long way away, but rather than be complacent about this, we should be careful to use this moment to midwife and nurture alternate versions of masculinity, of ways of being male.

 

Filing out of the O2 Arena, it’s none of the giant pop smashes that really remain in my head as I exit. Not the blockbuster cameraphone moment of ‘Angels’ - the 1997 single of such broad masculine power that it features in the Desert Island Discs of both Peter Schmeichel and Ed Miliband. We are used to hearing it bellowed out in public, its communality comes as no surprise. No, it’s tonight’s performance of the 2016 track ‘Love My Life’. The second single from Williams’ 2016 album The Heavy Entertainment Show (that album’s primary single, ‘Party Like A Russian’, has been retired for obvious reasons), ‘Love My Life’ taps into something that has always been a Williams trope but now appears to connect this most arcane of performers to the modern pop moment. “I am powerful,” sings Williams, perhaps at his most enthused during the set, “I am beautiful, I am free, I love my life.” Not much about Robbie ever seemed likely to predict the future in pop music, he wasn’t that sort of guy, but the bombastic confessional song he pioneered during his imperial phase quietly became the lingua franca of mainstream UK pop. The dramatic, confrontational self-revelations of Sam Fender and Self Esteem were not really a feature of British pop before Robbie. What really is the Robbie Williams story? Tonight, it’s one of a boy from Stoke-on-Trent not only changing himself, but also changing British pop.

 

Robbie Williams' XXV Tour continues across the UK and Ireland through October

 

 

https://thequietus.com/articles/32185-robbi...iew-masculinity

Edited October 10, 20222 yr by Sydney11

I like the Quietus article .

 

Interesting what the writer says about Love my Life, I feel the writer understands Robbie & what he represents ..

 

 

 

 

Edited October 10, 20222 yr by Sydney11

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It sounds like it was a really great beginning of the Tour!

God bless him an energy through the year!

 

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Articles are interesting and describes him better then recently, it's another good sign.

 

Also I'me very interesting to know why Guy is not a musician on this tour.

 

Laura, did you buy a Tourbook?

If you did, could you make a photo of the Tour credits, please?

 

---

 

As usual I'd like to get more surprises of the set list but having Old Before I Die and The Flood is already not bad!

@1579591952865308672

 

 

I love Rob's wardrobe choices for this tour, really stepped it up

 

 

 

Not sure why Guy is not there, did you say he was working on three musicals Alex, maybe he is just busy or they had another row :lol:

 

Joking aside Guy was on Strictly with Rob last week so I guess he is working on other projects ..

Edited October 10, 20222 yr by Sydney11

It seems so Elisabeth, at least that's the press reviews out of the way now & he can breathe a sigh of relief. I really like LOST , I am dying to hear what Laura thought of it live . Rob always gives 100% & the audience comes away happy.

 

I like Lost too Tess -really like it and he sang it well but inevitably the energy dipped while he was singing it as with any new song.

 

Strong was amazing :cheer:

 

Love My Life less so -but it's just my personal preference.

 

The main thing I take away from the gig other than how much fun it was (I was smiling all night) - was the energy in the room.

I always say I prefer outdoor gigs which I do but the O2 felt intimate last night and it was rocking. So much noise and energy. I loved it. :dance:

 

Laura, did you buy a Tourbook?

If you did, could you make a photo of the Tour credits, please?

 

---

 

No I didn't Alex -sorry. £25 each was just too much.

 

I'm loving all the four star reviews. :cheer: :cheer: :cheer: :cheer:

That quietus one is very thought provoking and interesting.