Robbie Williams' Heavy Entertainment Show aims for love, lands with interest

Bernard Zuel
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Robbie Williams
HEAVY ENTERTAINMENT SHOW
(Sony)
★★★

This is not going to be news to anyone, even if you don't see the handwritten, heavily perfumed note to his audience that is Heavy Entertainment Show, but Robbie Williams wants to be loved.

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That's hardly surprising in any performer of course: stick a pin in 90 per cent of them and, almost as much as any former politician craving the limelight, neediness is not just their middle name but their raison d'etre.

However, at this point in his life, Robert Peter Williams, once of Stoke-on-Trent, now of Los Angeles, isn't just after regular affection; he wants to be loved like he used to be loved.

And since few have been loved quite as much as Williams was in his pomp, between 1997 and 2007 when he outsold everyone, outraged many, slept with plenty and made some of the best pop music of his time, this is not any ordinary need we're talking about.

This need has been at the core of his decisions since returning from a few years recovering from an E overdose - ennui, exhaustion, entropy – that crashed him after the ambivalence of 2009's Reality Killed The Video Star. That ambivalence by the way, being both his and ours.

As with the pre-release talk around this new record, his 2012 album, Take The Crown, was declared his bid to reclaim pop grandee status with big, boldly coloured musical choices. It didn't quite work but didn't crash, so count that as a start.

His second swing album a year later, Swing Both Ways, cashed in on his highly successful original turn in tuxedo and Rat Pack swagger, 2001's Swing When You're Winning, and saw him stage elaborate BBC Light Entertainment-style shows.

It pretty much worked but seemed in the end a diversion, something he seemingly acknowledged with the more hits-oriented 2015 tour that was pointedly titled Let Me Entertain You. Was that a request or a demand?

No longer prepared to take chances, Heavy Entertainment Show is Williams aiming at every target, not in some scattershot manner but deliberately broad and minutely targeted. Like the final days of an election campaign this candidate has read the polls and is all but calling you personally.

So the Marc Bolan vamping and Ziggy Stardust power of Bruce Lee brings the glam pop mesh to balance the low level slinkiness of the duet with Rufus Wainwright, Hotel Crazy, and its more overtly southern R&B; cousin Pretty Woman.

Likewise the brassy Tom Jones-meets-Oasis swagger of Sensational closes the album with "I'm here and I'm staying" overtones, just as the album opens with a self-aware pop monarch reclaiming his spot with some Jack Jones swing in the title track and the comic bombast comes in the clunky Party Like A Russian.

There's the quite beautiful ballad of vulnerability in David's Song, for close quarters; the updated George Michael/Kylie Minogue pop of Sensitive, for adult dancefloors; and the made-for-singing-while-driving confessional (which since Take The Crown, and marriage and two kids is more future-positive than self lacerating), in Love My Life.

Of course we get the song with a big strutting chorus emerging from slow-build verses that says yes, I'm a brazen chap but it's more cheek than crass. This time it is Motherf...er, a song which title notwithstanding is a letter to his kids offering hope they can rise above a family history of questionable choices.

And if you think the rock end of his potential audience has been neglected beyond the multiple guitar parts of Motherf...er, fear not.

Mixed Signals breaks out of its husky working man in cut-off flannelette shirt verses into a husky working man in hard-worn jeans chorus that sounds like Bon Jovi going their half strength Springsteen. Or more accurately, since the Nevada band the Killers contributed the song to Williams, it sounds like Springsteen fans the Killers giving it the full Bon Jovi going the half strength Springsteen.

Does all that sound busy? It is. Does it sound unfocused? That's harder to say as while the musical choices are certainly not focused, the point of the exercise is very clear. Does it sound of mixed quality? That would be true, though that's for not as damaging as there being a shortage of great songs.

The problem for Williams is that since he's trying to be a pop star for everyone it is really hard to get a handle on what kind of pop star he wants to be. If he's not clear it's hard to see how we can be, and he's running the risk that in seeking everyone's love he may end up with no one's love, only their general interest.