I hate the 1975. If you follow me on Twitter you already know that, but it's been a while since they've done anything and it always bears repeating. The only good attempt at a defence of The 1975 I've read came from, I think, Steven Hyden: the 1975 are important because there need to be big, fun, hateable rock bands. I see the logic in that: people have to play SOMETHING at parties, and weirdo kids like me need SOMETHING to rebel against. But do them Wilmslow cunts fit the bill? Big - probably the biggest in England, only Arctic Monkeys could really fight them on that. Hateable - my lord, yes. But fun? If I'm remembering rightly, two of the first three songs on their recent album Notes On A Conditional Form are a plodding orchestral overture and a song where Greta Thunberg tells you to stop littering. Not exactly Van Halen- or Aerosmith-esque party animal good times. And I'm pretty sure Guns 'n' Roses never released an eighty-minute double album full of UK garage sketches, preachiness, and a song about the lead singer pissing himself, though since no one apart from Axl has actually ever listened to Chinese Democracy, we'll never truly know if I'm right or not.
Point is, big, fun, hateable rockstars are great, and the 1975 are not that. Arctics aren't either at present; they were perfect for it around Suck It And See and AM but Tranquility Base was such a pretentious arty-farty left turn that no one except Alex Turner and I thinks it's fun. Robbie Williams, however, was the absolute pinnacle of the genre. He may not have been a "rock star" musically but everything else was there, from the stage presence to the tunes to the crippling underbelly of drug abuse and depression. Better yet, he realised and acknowledged his place in the grand scheme of things - Robbie Williams circa 2003 believed himself to be an entertainer, a showman in the tradition of working men's clubs and Butlins and the sorts of joke-a-minute simple comedy his own father used to perform - "Naff Britain in microcosm", the book terms it - and I don't believe there are many other singers that would consider themselves a part of that sort of tradition anymore.
Let me change tack for a second. From what I can understand, Feel: Robbie Williams, Chris Heath's biography that followed Robbie through most of 2002 and 2003, was quite controversial when it came out. The book is a pretty long and pretty deep dive into what makes Robbie tick, and that includes the good - setting up charities in Stoke-On-Trent, his hometown; trying to forge an artistic identity of his own; growing up as a person and trying to look after himself - and the bad - the casual flings; the temper tantrums; the probably untreated ADHD that makes it seemingly impossible for him to focus on any idea for longer than a couple of weeks. People that idolised Robbie had to come to terms with the fact that all told, he's a bit of a bellend. Understandably so as far as I'm concerned, once you get a window into the absolute state of his life, but a bellend nonetheless. This, I suppose wasn't normal. Outside of the tidbits one would receive from interviews, TV appearances, and most likely the gossip magazines, people in the early 2000s didn't get this kind of warts-and-all view of a celebrity's life.
This era is, of course, completely fucking alien to me, because my memory, only goes back to, like, 2007 or '08, and that was peak TMZ era - Britney shaving off her hair, Lindsay Lohan's breakdown, whatever Perez Hilton was. Once that sort of thing died down Twitter was en vogue and by then it was far too late, for both celebrities and for us. Social media killed TMZ and Hello! and such because social media killed celebrity overall. The mystique is gone. We are treated to Adele's otherworldly singing once every five years, sure, but also we get to see her navigate Insta live for the first time and hear her Tottenham-urchin-child speaking voice in all its glory. The insanity of certain popstars - Ye obviously springs to mind - is mundane, because they broadcast this insanity on the same platforms we use to broadcast our own; the wiser ones - think Frank Ocean, or Rihanna, or the aforementioned Adele - disappear for as long as is possible between releases and never publicly share anything untoward. Can you imagine any modern celeb being CAUGHT being as messy as the mid-2000s tabloid fodder? Like, sure, famous people are messy on their Insta stories or during Meltdown May on Twitter, but they put that shit up on purpose. Robbie et al would be trying to escape the public eye, on a mad night out or a quiet night in, and yet they were thrust in front of its disapproving gaze all the same. Before Twitter, the front cover of OK! - or indeed, a tell-all book like the one I'm supposed to be reviewing - was your only chance to see behind the veil.
Look. Check this paragraph from the middle of Feel. Heath is trying to cover for Robbie's, shall we say, idiosyncracies, and explain how the book is not a portrait of a monster but of a normal human being.
"For each occasional intemperate outburst or careless opinion or rough and cruel turn of phrase or misfired joke that I choose to note or record, imagine for a moment how your own life might appear, documented, like this, if someone were with you all the time, encounter after encounter, day after day, as you mingle and deal with people you love and people you tolerate and people you dislike and people you fear, at your highest an at your lowest, at your most timid and your most carelessly, recklessly outspoken, at your drowsiest and at your most caffeinated, at your most thoughtful and when you couldn't care less about anything at all."
Hahaha. Yeah. Imagine if we all willingly decided to have every single moment of our lives recorded, photographed, and documented for posterity, readily available at any moment to our friends and our foes. Lol. That would be fucking dystopian as all hell. Haha.
 |
| all of western civilisation for some reason | skills and driving ourselves completely mental | welcome to celebrity???? |
Point is, this book is an unintentional dispatch from a bygone era, as foreign to me as smallpox and Catharism and being nice to girls. I talked in Announce Grosseteste about how celebrities performed the job saints once did, but celebs have themselves been replaced by influencers - people just like you and I, except with rich parents and plenty of exploited employees just that little extra bit of gumption and determination to really achieve their goals. Do you see how every time we stray further and further from God's light? I don't mean that as a value judgement (I do), I just literally mean that we go from people that did the extraordinary through their relationship with God, and will be remembered forever as a result, to people who do extraordinary things but are occasionally revealed to be mortals like us in the papers, to people for whom their normalness is the whole selling point! Just something to think about. No, K-Pop guys don't count as celebrities, celebrities require agency and K-Popstars are cartoon characters that aren't allowed unsanctioned personality traits or personal lives. Idiot. (This is a double movement, by the way! Celebrities became less unique in their constant surveillance and documentation, we all became more constantly surveilled and documented, and everyone ends up feeling worse! Let's GO!)
That insight into being a celebrity at the last moment you could really BE a celebrity makes it interesting enough, but what's even more interesting to me is that Robbie kind of seems to know this, and the moments where he gets a bit introspective, or goes a bit meta, are just as interesting to a nerd like me as the comings and goings of his sex life or his being suspended upside down for his Knebworth gig. He reads the 1986 Smash Hits yearbook and notes that "pop stars were so much more interesting then... It almost makes me cry". I felt much the same reading this.
See, Robbie's a nerd too. He keeps and reads old Smash Hits yearbooks, for one thing, but he wears Momentary Lack (sic, it's Lapse) Of Reason-era Pink Floyd shirts, he namedrops Norman Wisdom and Charles Hawtrey, he escapes parties to watch films alone, he felt he wasn't cool enough to hang with Oasis (the Gallaghers agreed), he is obsessed to a fault with football. He spends nights playing Championship Manager (now, twenty iterations later, called Football Manager), desperately trying to get Cardiff promoted, staying up pressing "Continue" until the sun rises. As he started to remove himself from the 'sex and drugs and rock and roll' part of his career he takes that same sort of hyperfocus and applies it to the topic of his own celebrity.
A recurring storyline is his desire, or lack thereof, to escape 'Robbie Williams', the concept, the celebrity, and be someone else, whether that's just 'Rob from Stoke', or a husband and father, or 'Pure Francis', an alterego he invents and then drops partway through the book having created most of an album around the concept. 'Pure Francis' is, though, another example that proves Williams understands the place of artifice in entertainment. "Don't follow your dreams, keep it unreal" (said to some models in a music video he's filming, I think), and words to that effect, appear frequently throughout the work. "I do cabaret quite often... Bono said 'some nights I'm an actor on stage' and I thought 'thank fuck it's not just me'..." For Bono, someone Williams seems to idolise, to confirm this must've meant the world.
I should explain why I think that's good. It probably seems pretty out of character for me, with my myopic focus upon narcissism - "he's lying about who he is!", but think about it. The blog's called "sprezzatura", not "narcissism" - I'm not a psychiatrist, I'm just a tit with a blog - and the first thing I wrote about was YouTube - entertainment! - not politics or philosophy or any of that other high-minded wank. And besides, narcissism actually abhors artifice. See how I wrote "he's lying about who he is!" as the ultimate accusation? That's actually good! That's how you defeat narcissism! Narcissism is not strutting about on stage like you're the dog's bollocks, that's just what Pop Culture would like to you think. "Cor, that Robbie, 'e ain't 'alf in love with 'imself, eh?" you are supposed to say as you read Hello! or OK! or watch him perform. "What a narcissist!" Wrong. Narcissism is inability to change.
From 'Can Narcissism Be Cured?':
Instead of trying to stop playing a role-- again, a move whose aim is your happiness-- try playing a different role whose aim is someone else's happiness. Why not play the part of the happy husband of three kids? Why not pretend to be devoted to your family to the exclusion of other things? Why not play the part of the man who isn't tempted to sleep with the woman at the airport bar?
"But that's dishonest, I'd be lying to myself." Your kids will not know to ask: so?
Robbie despises every aspect of touring. But every time Robbie gets on stage on the Escapology tour and plays the role of "Guy That Doesn't Fucking Hate Touring And Everything That Comes With It", he's practicing anti-narcissism. Every time he goes to a PR engagement or another and acts the fool to entertain everyone, despite being a relatively thoughtful guy that knows his shit musically and just likes backgammon and ChampMan, he is demonstrating peak sprezzatura. When he's a sweetheart to some fans and takes them for a bev and manages not to fuck them, he is playing a role whose aim is their happiness, not his own. This is not to say that he's a healthy bloke - he's definitely not - but the problem the tabloids want us to think he has is not the problem he has, it's our problem. "'But that's dishonest!' Your fans will not know to ask: so?"
 |
| you already know what it is |
Worse still, when he takes the mask off - when he is, truly, himself - it's received very poorly! When he says he cannot be fucked touring some country or another because it mentally and physically drains the life out of him, he disappoints millions of fans and screws his team out of fuck knows how much coin. When he is less than pleasant to some crazed fan that won't leave him alone it probably breaks their heart, not to mention the hearts of the fans reading. "If you are a Robbie Williams fan and want to remain a Robbie Williams fan do NOT read this book" goes one Goodreads review. This is the thing about not being a narcissist: it's very fucking difficult. Not only will every fibre in YOUR being want to stop trying and go back to normal, every fibre of everyone around you would also prefer you stopped trying. The disorder, as Lasch/Alone/I see it, manifests to stop you from getting hurt. It's a defence mechanism. Narcissus' parents just wanted him to have a nice life. They didn't know he'd never find love and drown in a pool or owt. Removing the defence will really sting, but it will make you a better person in the long run.
The running joke that led me to even read this book in the first place was something me and my friends have been joking about for a few years now. It's an old, oft-repeated tale about the song "It's Only Us", that I mention here; FIFA wanted to licence the song, and Robbie said yes, but on the condition that his local club Port Vale were included in the book. This, in its own way, sums it all up. Weaponise your own pull, your media perception (incredibly famous popstar that would sell thousands of extra copies of FIFA, but enough of a diva to get away with seemingly frivolous demands) to do good for others (the fine people of Burslem). The Robbie before the book was clearly a far worse person - addicted to all sorts, sleeping with whoever, flaking out on any and every obligation - than the one we meet at the end - who has quit everything except cigs, who is trying to find someone to love, who is expanding musically but still pulls through for the band in the end on tour. He changed what needed to be changed. And crucially, he remains a stellar entertainer, culminating in his nailing a set of Knebworth dates that very few musicians (off the top of my head I can only think of Led Zep and Oasis) pull off.
There's a particularly surreal moment where, having finished performing at one of the Knebworth gigs, he reaches the hotel only to find himself still on Channel 4, since the broadcast of the concert was delayed (both for adverts and in case of mishaps, I presume). He watches himself performing live on TV for a sec. For a brief, brief moment, he is Narcissus gazing into the pool. But then he heads upstairs. To literally see yourself from outside yourself, the way other people perceive you, the ways you affect them, is almost too obvious a metaphor for what Robbie has to do over the course of this book. Narcissism asks you to cocoon your real self off from the world so you can never be hurt, never feel anything, positive or negative. Robbie does the exact opposite, sometimes to his benefit, often to his detriment. After all, the book - and the song - is called Feel.
(A funny aside that I couldn't fit in to the body of text anywhere is that he keeps blowing Kevin Spacey off when Spacey asks to meet up - I have no idea if that was in knowledge of what he really was or not, but it turned out to be a hell of a shout, eh?)
Comments
Post a Comment