ROBBIE WILLIAMS – "Eternity" / "The Road To Mandalay"

This was the second time Robbie had used a clever marketing trick; pairing the last release from an album with a new track to keep his commercial fortunes afloat. By the end of the decade we’ll have the trend of re-issuing albums with a mini album of new tracks but nobody else seems to have aped Robbie’s technique here.

Eternity was the track that sold the single; I never heard The Road To Mandalay until I belatedly bought the album many years later. It was a sizeable hit at the time; a two weeker (Robbie’s first as a soloist) and held off D12 (Eminem’s side project) with Purple Pills. Not only that but after dropping to number three it rebounded to two when a single by a major pop act shot its bolt.

I have a lot of fondness for Williams these days – particularly after the next album and his more recent work, which I doubt we’ll see much of here. At the time I took him for a narcissist, particularly given his usual subject matter. But the way he’s kept making records, kept developing his style (and probably lost his shot at international success in the process)… call me naïve but I sense a genuine love for music underneath it all.

We get to discuss him once more before Feel comes along but the Escapology album was unusually released before the lead off single which damaged Feel’s chances of getting to number one. That said there were two very hyped new releases that week which may have been another factor.

Both during and after the Guy Chambers era, Robbie Williams was always curiously introspective for such a mass market sort of pop star. It’s a big part of his appeal – even his earlier, broader hits tended towards analyzing and deconstructing the tension between his cheerful public persona and his more conflicted inner life. The moment he chose to very pointedly cover George Michael’s ‘Freedom’ in the wake of his exit from Take That, through to the cheekily self-aware ‘Let Me Entertain You’ and the confessional ‘Strong’, almost everything he released was a new chapter in the ongoing public diary of what it’s like to be Robbie Williams.

My strongest impression of this chapter in his career is that it’s the time when the ‘cheeky chappie’ side of his persona started to grate, his showman smile freezing into a rictus grin. You get the impression that he would have liked to kill this particular Robbie identity off completely. But he never quite seemed to be able to figure out how to do it. He was no David Bowie, and much as he may have come to resent ‘showman Robbie’, it was and remains a part of him that’s too deeply embedded to ever be totally cast off.

This made the next few years of his career quite awkwarly fascinating, as he tried and for the most part failed to push against the limitations of the Robbie Williams brand and what his audience wanted from him. We had classical Robbie – a big hit that we’ll discuss elsewhere – then experimental Robbie, which wasn’t. Since then, I struggle to place exactly what role he fills in the pop stratosphere, though he’s still very much part of it. There’ve been the retreats, the crowd-pleasing defensive maneuvers, the occasional odditys that suggest he hasn’t totally checked out.

In this context, Eternity feels like an elegy for Robbie’s imperial phase. It might have been shot through with weariness and ambivalence – Manderlay even moreso – but it’s the last time it really felt like he knew who he was and what he was doing, however much he might have come to resent it

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I find these both rather charming – perhaps in particular “Mandalay”, the idea that the country’s biggest pop star should release something quite so leftfield, a downbeat opening shifting gears gently into something resembling the Divine Comedy’s “National Express”, and for a moment, since everyone’s thinking of Bowie just now, there’s an echo of the pre-fame Anthony Newleyisms. “Eternity” is a good shot at another Angels I guess, but not just that – an elegiac end of summer/end of relationship hybrid which I definitely like, although could have done with a bit of editing as its last minute and a half add nothing.

I was probably still up to my elbows in twins’ nappies at this point, because the videos to both were unfamiliar to me. A nice original touch – two videos that were companion pieces, much in the style of The Italian Job, with Rob larking about with his mates in Italia 90 lads’ footy holiday mode, until both the crime caper and the romance come to an end. Rob is carted off and you know the 90s are over. So, you suppose, was his imperial phase.

I dunno about that, there’s a whole bunch of bunnies and near misses to come shortly, and previous to this one there’s a bunch that did’t quite get to the top that we could all sing the chorus to.

Often enough, it’s pure timing: Nothing else sold more than this, this week(s). For all that list of “Singles unfairly held back at number two” there’s a bunch of “Singles that got lucky”, think this might be one.