Lux Expo, on Monday night, was host to the first of two shows from Stoke-On-Trent's finest export, and it went exactly how you thought it would. Today Radio's Stephen Steps Lowe shares his thoughts on a remarkable show.
As you look across the Lux Expo forecourt, you can't help but feel slightly underwhelmed, this is no criticism of the organizers, who've done a grand job of taking an incredibly drab location and kitted it out for a monumental series of shows, but it does lack a little something.
There's no history, there's no backdrop...it is, after all, a car park in a financial sector a few hundred metres from a supermarket. Fortunately, tonight's star attraction has the history, the drama, the nous, nay...the chops, to charm the birds from the trees and also to have revelers part with reasonably hefty wads of cash to attend tonight's show.
To paraphrase Mr. Williams 'it'd better be good'.
Before we get to the main course, there are a couple of tasters on the menu and it is with Luxembourg stalwarts Dream Catcher that we begin. Not to be confused with the K-Pop band of the same name, Dream Catcher are celebrating their 25th anniversary this year and the Celtic-Pop project of John Rech is the perfect soundtrack to those first after-work drinks. No strangers to the stage from years of gigging, the band look, sound and feel entirely at home playing what must surely have been their biggest show to date. They get the crowd in good spirits and spread happiness and excitement throughout their run through of their better known tracks. Their brilliant new live LP Under A Blood Red Ground is available here.
The same cannot be said for poor Gaz Coombes. As much as it pains me to write this, his deft musicianship is left to waft around in an atmosphere, that if we are being kind, is disinterested. And, if we are being honest, could not give less of a shit. Many of the audience spend the time working out if losing their spot in the crowd is really worth heading to the bar for another quick schlurpp. Whereas openers Dream Catcher had the fortune of being a known entity across the Duchy and possess a genuinely amiable frontman, you would be hard pressed to find anyone who knew that Gaz was behind a band that were MAHOOSIVE in the late 90's and early 00's. Perhaps if Coombes had played Alright or Caught By The Fuzz the crowd would have perked up a little. It's a shame, to be fair, as Coombes and his band play a tight set packed with terrific cuts such as Deep Pockets, Long Live The Strange and Turn The Car Around... it's just he doesn't connect and it all feels rather flat as a result.
The Main Event
The keenos of the world had been camping out since Sunday evening to get prime viewing in the golden circle (if you are yet to see the dash to stage front, prepare yourself for the most polite amble you will ever see online) and excitement ramped up with every passing second, or any time a curtain twitched or a head popped out from behind the speakers. Was there subtle shade thrown as Back For Good filled the air? It mattered not, as at bang on 9pm as the first licks of Take The Crown's Hey Wow Yeah Yeah burst out of the PA, you could feel several thousand people being whisked immediately back to a much younger time.
For me, that meant being 15 years old. It meant a curtains haircut. It meant I was not really supposed to like Take That (though I did). It meant girls (and some boys) losing their fucking minds when Take That split in 1996 and it meant some (not all) losing their minds all over again right here and right now, some 27 years later.
"Good evening, Luxembourg, I'm Robbie. Fucking. Williams and I'm fucking amazing" and with that we are into Let Me Entertain You... and for a good 5 minutes or so, everything is right with the world. First one hand in the air, then two and the smiles you see across the Expo could heat the Coque's cooler waters for a good few months, such was the energy. And then there came a misstep, the first cracks begun to show. A peak into the well-oiled machine that is the 'production' of Robbie Williams.
Set designer: 'How many screens do you want, Robbie?' RW: 'YES'. He stops the band during Monsoon and repeats, verbatim, the 'joke' he made at a show in The Netherlands. You'll have seen it, about his age and Long-Covid. It's good-natured, and of course he sells it. Of course he does. But it is also calculated and cynical. And it is then that you realise, despite being battered into submission by hit after hit, by joke after joke and nod after knowing nod, when Robbie says he is the World's Greatest Performer... he means it, 100%, he is performing. He is entertaining. But there ain't no business like show business.
Robbie tells us from the off that the evening is going to be entertainment for us and therapy for him, as he walks us through a 31 year career - taking in a good chunk of his sizable back catalogue (though there is curiously no place for Millennium), Strong ("one of my lesser-known tracks") is followed by a colossal Come Undone (one of my personal faves) and a portion of Could It Be Magic follows a tidbit that die-hards may already be aware of.
Williams is self-aware to know that this is all pantomime, when he discusses Take That's first music video...the god-awful soft porn jelly fest that is the promo for Do What You Like, Williams has the video paused on his pert bum cheeks and delights in telling us that they were his 17 year-old buttocks. And just when you think he is in danger of disappearing up his own projected orifice, it hits you square in the feels. If you look closely, and peel the onion that one bit more, you recognize what he is saying, he is delivering it with comedy mugging like a young De Niro, but he was seventeen. Unprepared and naive. Exploited. Damaged goods. It explains the arrested development. The perpetual Peter Pan. The little boy lost and the constant need for affirmation and adulation.
For every blistering rendition of a (excuse me) bone fide banger, we get (sometimes cloying) segues into the turmoil that surrounded his departure, we hear that he has still not really moved on from the way he was treated. There's barely concealed contempt for his former friends - though he is smart enough to stay away from slander. He details how he was not liked by his bandmates, how he broke all the rules, how he struggled with depression, alcohol, drugs and loneliness and how this all came out during an ill-fated visit to Glastonbury with 'a boot full of bubbly and a pocketful of cocaine', where he proceeded to make all the headlines for all the wrong reasons hanging out with Oasis completely off his noggin'. And then Robbie blasts out a rendition of Don't Look Back In Anger with no hint of irony.
"When they said, 'come to Luxembourg, we've got a HUGE show for you', I thought, yes, that sounds lovely... where will this show be? In a grand amphitheater? Across a grassy green vista? In front of a huge and beautiful palace? No! It's in a fucking car park!" he says, acknowledging the unorthodox locale after performing The Flood, a track from the brief reformation record Progress.
There was crowd work. Of course there was. A lot of it. Poor unsuspecting 'Hawee' (Harry)... took a fair amount of the 'bantz' as did an overawed Stefanie - to whom Robbie eventually dedicated She's The One to - after initially suggesting it did not matter what her name was... a reference to his days of being a teensy bit of a lothario. Love My Life is touchingly dedicated to Hawee's 5-year-old daughter Eva. T-shirts are lobbed into the crowd from Robbie's bin. Robbie declares that sections of the crowd want to mother him while others attempted to grab his junk, "animals" he jokingly calls them. He makes call backs to Luxembourg placing 13th at Eurovision many moons ago and then slaps us silly with immense versions of Candy, Feel, Kids and Rock DJ to round up the main set.
The band, the dancers and backing singers have been incredible. They allow for Robbie to drop in and out of the bits he'd best avoid while skipping around, twirling his cane and whipping the crowd into a frenzy. He's both Fitzgerald's Gatsby at his own party bored of going through the motions and Wonka hopped up on forty bags of skittles. The stage design and lighting are also spot on. But it is when the mask drops that you get a sense of the real Robbie. One who is probably difficult to be around. Petulant, preening and prone to self-doubt. Yes, multi-millionaires can get the blues. His ID, Ego and Superego wrestle for control. There's who Robbie was, who he now is, who the crowd need him to be and who he wants to be. There's a sense that we will never really know which of these is the true one, so blurred are the boundaries. So frayed are the edges.
Bedecked in lounge wear, and after a short intermission, Williams returns for a three-song encore of the wonderful No Regrets, She's The One and the inevitable Angels and by this point, drinks are spilled, arms are around shoulders and people are singing into each other's faces and phones.
Robbie Williams said in his recent interview that Luxembourg should expect the 'World's Greatest Showman', to complain that the set was polished and precise, is to miss the point. Robbie Williams as a trademark knows exactly who Robbie Williams as a performer is to his audience. They want the cheek, the sass, the confidence. They'll weather the bluster and the bravado, and just when you think he may have lost you, he pulls you right back in.
There are few people in the world who can do what Robbie does. Fewer still who can do it so often, so well and for so long.
As the audience drifted away and those that had opted to tippy toe over the fences (some even ripping through the tarpaulin or hanging off walls of nearby buildings), to catch a glimpse of one of the last remaining 90s legends, were serenaded by a-capella intros to his biggest hits*.
Whether or not a truly capacity crowd will bring anything different to Tuesday's performance remains to be seen - also if the track listing varies any. Even more intriguing will be if the pauses, the interludes, the knowing winks to the cameras are in the same spots. For all of the performance, the pomp and the pejorative, Robbie Williams came to Kirchberg and did exactly as he said he would.
After all, were you not entertained?
*I could not tell you if RW was onstage at this time, as we had made a swift exit to beat the traffic - of which there was absolutely zero.
DB3 will bring you a flavour for Tuesday's show.
