ROBBIE WILLIAMS – "She's The One" / "It's Only Us"

“It’s Only Us” struck me on first listen as Robbie Goes Manics. Not bad.

Lots more to say about “She’s the One”, later…

the melody for ‘She’s the one’ reminds me of John Lennon’s ‘Love’ from the ‘John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band’ album, which given Karl Wallinger’s Beatles fixation is not surprising. Both songs are a bit insipid but at least Lennon’s is short and not over arranged. I’m not sure that Robbie ever sounds that convincing when he’s expressing affection for anyone other than himself.
‘It’s only us’ is fun although I can’t imagine it reaching number 1 on its own. The video should be preserved as an embodiment of a late 90s vision of the future.

I think “She’s The One” has grown on me through sheer repetition of hearing over the years. “Moderately insipid” is probably not an unfair description, but it’s competent enough – I’m afraid my main association of this performance of the song (and I can’t recall the exact details or context so am desperately hoping this is not a freakish invention of my own imagination) was of Tony Blair (or, if not him, some of his most senior New Labour spinners) using the song in a tribute to Mo Mowlem – I’m not sure whether when she was still alive or not. – in some ways actually one of the less nauseating appropriations of popular culture undertaken by New Labour – but still a bit insiduous. So I always think of the no-nonsense lady who told Ian Paisley to f. off whenever I hear this song – which may well not have been either Robbie, or Karl Wallanger’s intention.

The other interesting point is just how straight a copy – almost a carbon copy, but with more invigorated singing – this is of the World Party original. It’s a very long way from their best song, of course. But Robbie just about scores points in accordance with the “do it better or do it differently” maxim.

“It’s Only Us” I don’t recall hearing at all. It’s fairly slight if passably entertaining.

A tad surprised that there hasn’t been more mention of the video before now; certainly I think of it whenever I hear the song. Robbie is trainer to a pair of young ice-dancers, the lad (looking a little like a young Steve Coogan) goes over in training, and our Rob steps into the breach, and with his young partner delivers a blinding performance in front of some granite-faced judges. I’m not sure if we’re supposed to believe that Robbie is enamoured with his young female charge – making some association between the video and the song – there isn’t really any evidence of that on the film. I seem to remember some commentary on the performance too, though that was absent from the clip I just watched. I don’t remember the flip ever getting played on the radio.

It would have been about this time that some of us were startled to learn that Mr Williams was among the top ten most influential musicians of the millennium about to end, one place ahead of a Herr Mozart of Salzburg, according to a well-publicised poll. Yeah, right.

Yes, of course. At the end all the judges give full marks of 6.0 except for the British judge who awards them 6.1 – Davies says something like “and the British judge getting a bit carried away there!”

Doesn’t Robbie go under the name of ‘Bob Williams’ in this vid, or am I thinking of something else?

I like “She’s The One”. The World Party original is indistinguishable from Robbie’s version, all but for Robbie’s more forceful delivery. The vid is one massive ego-wank, but this was part of Robbie’s appeal, and it seemed obvious to me that he was always going to stand out while his his Irish rivals were mining nuggets of blandness. Anyway, STO in either of its guises is a pleasant listen.

On the flip “It’s Only Us” sounds like Feeder. Not entirely sure if that’s a good thing. (6)

Forgettable songs (whether in limp or non-limp flavors) with avoid-like-the-plague Rom-Com titles from which nothing good can come. I enjoyed the vid for STO; Williams isn’t my sort of thing but there’s something basically enjoyable about his Peacock routine. Bravado (at least in small doses before it gets sickening) *is* a pop tonic, and the whole package feels assured and competent in the way that mid-’80s Phil Collins stuff often did for better and for worse:
4

Wallinger adores Prince as much as McCartney, I think. The Waterboys ‘Whole Of The Moon’ had as much to do with him as it did Mike Scott (Wallinger on piano, organ) and the way the Waterboys changed direction after the split is instructive.

“Bang” is the best World Party album to my ears, but I’m not sure if that’s a commonly held view.

I boarded World Party’s “Ship of Fools” when it reached number 4 on the Australian charts in 1987, and picked up Private Revolution on tape shortly after. Its jumble of influences didn’t entirely make sense at the time, but I must have listened to it a lot because it sounds very familiar when I relisten to it now. As well as relics of the Waterboys on “All Come True”, there are hints of Prince, The The, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, and not a lot of Beatles at that stage (that became more obvious later, most clearly on his cover of “Happiness is a Warm Gun” on the Thank You World EP). Private Revolution is a problematic album, and some songs I liked at the time don’t work for me now, but a few tracks have lasted: the two mentioned, the title track, and “It’s All Mine”.

The next album was the critical breakthrough, and I well remember Rolling Stone raving about it (four stars, if not more). Goodbye Jumbo blended the debut’s disparate influences into a more coherent whole, and married them to some excellent songs: “Way Down Now”, “Put the Message in the Box”, “Is it Too Late?” and “Thank You World”. But for me World Party reached its peak in 1993 on Bang!, which is almost all peaks itself. As well as the well-chosen singles, “Give It All Away”, “Is It Like Today?” and the George Harrison-esque “All I Gave”, it features some great album tracks in “Hollywood”, “Radio Days”, “Sunshine” and “Kingdom Come” (not to mention the Beach Boys-inspired hidden track “Kuwait City”). It’s the album I would hand to anyone new to World Party, and I can’t fathom AllMusic’s measly three-star rating; they seem hung up on one 26-second track.

I listened to Bang! a lot in the mid-’90s, and eagerly awaited the follow-up. But by the time it arrived in 1997, Egyptology was competing for my affections with the glory days of Britpop, and couldn’t win. Looking through its tracklist doesn’t trigger mental samples of melody the way the first few albums do, so I can’t have listened to it nearly as closely as those. Hopping around it now in iTunes, I remember “Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb” and not much else, apart from one stand-out song – and it wasn’t the single, the this time poorly-chosen “Beautiful Dream”.

“She’s the One” was the highlight of Egyptology, and everyone paying attention knew it, not least Wallinger’s collaborator on Bang!, Guy Chambers. After winning an Ivor Novello award for it and performing the song on Later… with Jools Holland, I imagine Wallinger was wondering why his record label Chrysalis wasn’t capitalising on a sure hit for the album’s second single, so I’m not surprised at his initial dismay when they handed it to Robbie Williams in 1999 for this Chambers-produced version.

Williams’s “She’s the One” is such a faithful cover that removing the vocals would have left a creditable World Party karaoke track: too heavy on the strings, and missing the rock finale, but near enough. Williams’s delivery, too, is as close to Wallinger’s as he can manage. Yes, Karl wuz robbed, but he came to terms with it, as the songwriting royalties (no doubt much higher from a Williams performance than a World Party single would ever have managed) helped sustain him in the years following an aneurysm in 2001.

As a World Party fan I’d give the original a 7 or 8, and there’s enough of it in Williams’s cover to warrant a 6. “It’s Only Us” is enjoyable enough to give the double-A single the same.

(Thanks to this entry, I’ve now learned that World Party’s last album – 2000’s Dumbing Up, better than Egyptology but not up to their memorable best – has finally got a successor, the 2012 5-CD compilation of b-sides, demos, live tracks and new recordings Arkeology, which is on Spotify. Hooray!)

#21: I forgot Way Down Now! Oddly, since it’s the bit of the Glastonbury set I thought I remembered the best.

This was Robbie in what we might call (with apologies to Tom for nicking his cherished PSB-related title) his imperial phase, where whatever he tried he came up smelling of roses, even when chucking a few barbs at Gary Barlow in obscure corners of his albums. “She’s Only Us” is a beautifully performed version of a top-notch song, with the Beatley touches nicely in place but not done to death – I like Wichita’s Rutles analogy above. Rob’s a cheeky chappy in the video but suitably charming on record – although I’ve a special aversion to videos that interrupt the song. We were talking the other night about whether videos necessarily complement a song or not; this one jars rather, you’re distracted from the song by the story playing out in the vid, and when the song stops for a crucial bit of ice-skating story you’re going “hang on…”

I don’t remember “It’s Only Us” from the time at all – wasn’t following the charts as closely as I used to but it’s still odd how this one got away. But blimey, Rory at #1 is spot on about Robbie Goes Manics – during the chorus I kept expecting it to become “Everything Must Go”.

#8 Yup, by all accounts (that I recall) part of the deal for getting “It’s Only Us” onto FIFA 2000 was Port Vale in the game, and they were shoehorned in with “Rest Of The World” along with a grab-bag of teams from unlicensed leagues. (The licensing has grown since then – including the Football League and other second divisions in FIFA 2004 – but the ROTW category remains, largely a Greek-Turkish-Argentinian-South African mix these days. We’ll meet a band named after one of the last of these in 2007.)

Got fond memories of both of these songs actually. I stuck with FIFA 99 (and 98, because it had features 99 didn’t – a World Cup mode with every single international team on the planet, and the never-to-return five-a-side mode) for so long that I never got 2000, so never got the chance to be as sick of IOU as I would’ve done. (Those preceding FIFAs had been respectively introduced with near-bunnies “The Rockafeller Skank” and “Song 2” – this was the start of EA going big on soundtracks, which was to become a defining feature of their games for years to come – and I did get bored of those for a while.) I ended up rather liking IOU for a while when I heard it again: this was at a time when I was enthusiastic about singing but thought my voice was uselessly low, and I threw part of it into a filk parody of pop songs being consistently written for high male voices.

This is ironic in a way I only just realised (never knew this was a double-A until now!) because She’s The One was one of the first songs I tried out with my singing teacher at university in 2006, and I very strongly recall awkwardly flitting from one octave to the other in a manner not entirely consistent with ducking out of high or low notes. Ironically considering it was this teacher that sent me on what turned out to be a wrong vocal path, and very possibly this lesson that instigated it, I suspect this song rather suits my voice now! (In no position to check right now, what with this seasonal cold…)

Bought this, though was rarely played. Just like today, it feels like a bit of a non event this one.

Possibly uninterestingly, but when legal action forced Robbie to give up his royalties for the uncredited Loudon Wainwright rip off “Jesus in a Camper Van”, subsequent pressings and digital releases of the ‘I’ve Been Expecting You’ album replaced the offending track with It’s Only Us. Stable door/horse, I suspect, but still.

I don’t think I’d heard It’s Only Us since it came out, but listening back to it now it’s decent enough – the comment about it resembling Everything Must Go-era Manics is pretty accurate. Throwaway, but fun.

She’s The One is the better track and it was the one that I remember getting the bulk of the exposure at the time. It takes a little bit to get into top gear but it finishes very strongly, and holds up as one of his better ballads. Can’t say I’m all that familiar with World Party though, but by the sounds of things I should investigate further.

I’ll be nice and go for an 8 here.