Chris Heath - Feel: Robbie Wiliams

Feel

Feel:

Robbie

Williams

by Chris Heath

Contents

Before

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

After

Before

Yeah, Im a star, but Ill fade, he sings. If you aint sticking your knives in me, you will be eventually.

One more, says Guy Chambers, his principal songwriting partner, producer and musical director.

August 2002. Late afternoon. Robbie Williams is in the vocal booth at Record Plant studios, a rectangular building on an unassuming Hollywood side street, singing a new song called Monsoon. Like many of his songs, it is a thick stew of insecurity, honesty, immodesty and self-deprecation.

He starts again. Ive sung some songs that were lame, he begins. Ive slept with girls on the game.

Apart from the vocals, this new album is mostly finished. Rob came to Los Angeles at the beginning of this year and stayed because he discovered he was happier here. He had just released the Swing When Youre Winning album, his fourth in five years, and finished a tour that had left him exhausted and miserable. To those around him, he announced that he was having the next year off. He knew he deserved it, and he knew he needed it. That didnt necessarily mean he knew what to do with it.

In the end, he has found himself making another record. His daily routine is to come down from his house in the Hollywood Hills for a few hours before dusk, listen to the latest mixes, make suggestions, and sing.

I think the middle eight shouldnt be as hard, Guy tells him.

But it sounds great, argues Rob.

Itd be nice to have colour in the middle, Guy persists.

OK, says Rob. Lets have it beige.

Guy rolls his eyes.

Rob tries Monsoon again, getting into it a little more now, playing air guitar as he sings. When he reaches the chorus, he lifts his shirt to show his nipples. There are nine people in the control room. Some are involved in making the record in various ways; some are simply there. I have just spent four days driving from Oklahoma City - Rob seems fascinated, and a little bewildered, that someone would want to be alone with their thoughts for that long - to be here. To watch and listen, to catch up with what has been happening in his life and to write a few words about it. I had bumped into him by chance this January at the Sunset Marquis hotel, where he was living while he decided whether Los Angeles was the place he wanted to be; the most recent of a series of occasional but friendly encounters over the years. I presume it was that chance meeting that prompted his invitation to be here now.

I imagine Ill be around for about a week. Maybe ten days.

Back in January, after we stumble upon each other on the patio of the Sunset Marquis, he invites me up to his villa to play backgammon. He thrashes me as we chat. Its good to see him, but he seems antsy and unsettled. When a girl hes been momentarily seeing telephones the room, he pretends to be his best friend Jonathan Wilkes (who is also in town, but out), says that Robbie is not here right now, and takes a message for himself that he will probably never return.

Between rolls of the dice, he sketches out his predicament as he sees it. Though in truth he is deeply proud of the swing record that has just come out, today he speaks as though he had been counting on it being a failure. As though it had been his foolproof way to torpedo his career, lighten his burdens and take the pressure off himself. And now his ploy is backfiring. The album, considered enough of a gamble by his record company that they had refused to accept it as a full Robbie Williams album for contractual purposes, is now on its way to becoming his most successful album yet. He should be feeling triumphant, but instead he feels as though he has just scored another in a series of own goals.

After a while, I have to go and work, but I see him later in the hotel bar, the Whiskey: not drinking, but where the drinking people are. He now has a huge blue tattoo down his right forearm, MOTHER. Because he loves his mother, but also because he needed a different kind of pain this evening, to take his mind off his mind. He has relied on this breather from work to help him feel better, but so far he doesnt - he feels worse, and now he has all the time in the world for those feelings to confront him. He has been sober for over a year, but now he feels the closest he has been to breaking his sobriety.

As it gets late, he sits with some people he doesnt know, chatting, and then realises what it is in their manner that he recognises so well. They are coming up on ecstasy. He calls them on it and discovers he is right. And they have plenty more, with them in the bar, right here, and are happy to share.

Go on. Treat yourself. Have one.

He is so tempted, but he forces himself to bed instead.

A few days after that, he returns to the tattoo parlour. He likes the way MOTHER looks and he wants something to balance it on the opposite forearm. He asks for six other letters, pushed together to offer balance: ILOVEU.

In the studio, they abandon Monsoon for now and move on to something else. Me and My Monkey is a long, lunatic, narrative song about the adventures of a man and his monkey sidekick; written in Bangkok and set in Las Vegas. For reasons that the song does not explain and its singer may not even know, the monkey, who habitually wears dungarees and rollerblades, leads the narrator into a perilous world of guns, pimps, gambling and simian prostitution. At the end of the song the story is unresolved. Rob acts out the dialogue as he sings it, standing on the scooter he is forever riding round the studio.

Do you like that, Dad? he asks. Today his father, in Los Angeles to visit his son, is amongst the control room crowd. Until a couple of weeks ago, they hadnt spoken in well over a year.

I think thats incredible, replies his father, Pete Conway. (It is his fathers name that is the assumed one, not Robs. His father was born Peter Williams; Pete Conway, which he lives and works under, is the name he took when he became a professional comedian. Someone else was already trying to entertain people under the name Peter Williams.)

We wrote that, we did, says Rob, mock pride disguising real pride.

Guy persuades him to do the vocal again. Back in the booth he says, Turn my vocal right up turn the light off lets get some vibe in here

Guy fiddles with the switches and the lights go down in the control room.

Not the light off in there, you tool, comes Robs voice. In here.

I couldnt find them, Guy explains.

But what a marvellous tool you are, continues Rob in an affected posh voice. If you were a tool, youd be a Black & Decker workbench

The lights eventually go off around Rob, and he sings the song again, in the dark. After the line the monkey was high he does a loud snorting noise.

I find it disturbing not being able to see you, says Guy. Youre probably naked with a hard-on. This is not baseless speculation. Rob has already been naked for quite a few vocal performances while making this album. For one of them - a cover of the Lynyrd Skynyrd song Simple Man that has since been discarded - he wore a Superman costume.

Its very liberating, singing naked, says Rob to Guy. Pause. By Louise Nurding.

Whos Louise Nurding? mutters Guy.

Rob doesnt bother to explain. Instead, he and Guy have a reasonably heated argument of a kind you dont hear every day, about the voices in which a monkey and a baboon pimp might actually speak. Rob lights a cigarette and, as the match flares, he is briefly lit up in the vocal booth. Hes not naked.

Today is the first time I have heard these songs. Before he leaves, Rob announces that he wants me to hear one more. It is called Cursed* and is about a departed friend, though he doesnt explain that today. As the track plays, he sits me in Guys chair at the recording desk, props himself on the desk, facing me, and leans forward to sing the sad, angry words from inches away, directly into my ear, spraying slightly as he does so.