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Robbie Williams - News
Reality Killed the Video Star: Robbie Williams
| 05-11-2009 13:12 | 0 reaction(s) | add reaction | add news |
 How are we to read the rune of Robbie Williams's comeback album? Produced by synth-pop godfather Trevor Horn, the title of Williams's seventh album nods towards Horn's own greatest hit of 1979, Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star". Depending on how you interpret "reality" – and we're guessing Williams is no phenomenologist – it appears to cock a snook at the talent-show takeover of British pop as well.
Recently that same title appeared to go from polemic to prophecy. When, eyes agog, Williams gnashed and glad-handed his way through a performance of his engagingly odd new single, "Bodies", on The X Factor it seemed like the reality show might see off a pop star who, before decamping to California and taking a keen interest in aliens, was Britain's best-loved showman. Adding insult to his nervous performance, "Bodies" was then beaten to No 1 by 2008 X Factor alumnus Alexandra Burke.
It's clear that Williams and Horn intend this album as a stand for British auteur pop against all that is vapid and Cowellesque. The pottiness of Williams's last album, 2006's Rudebox, is toned down; the maturity of the production recalls Horn's work for Seal. You are never in any doubt that this is a Robbie record, though.
Songs like "Blasphemy" (sample lyric: "What's so great about the Great Depression?") or "Difficult for Weirdos" ("We are the futurists in the bistro") are not the sort of material you could bandy about the international pop market. Instead, Williams and Horn channel a little Pet Shop Boys ("Starstruck"), a dollop of early Depeche Mode and a hefty undercurrent of Beatles in largely successful pursuit of an orchestral studio-pop de nos shores.
Significantly, Reality… is more rueful than raunchy. A chastened, sentimental Williams has largely replaced the Robbie rampant of "Let Me Entertain You". The album's strange heart, "Deceptacon", casts him as a little spaceboy lost, watching the skies; "Superblind" considers his legacy timorously. The romance in these songs is tentative; the love on the point of flight.
This is no emphatic return to form for pop's cockiest kidult. It is far more interesting. With unexpected poignancy, Reality Killed the Video Star almost makes you feel for Williams: pop star as endangered species.
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