COME UNDONE

I knew back then I'd hit rock bottom when I started listening to Robbie Williams (the Prince Harry of 'Take That') as my redemption soundtrack. Especially as for years, previous to falling upon 'hard times', I thought the guy was a smug twat and couldn't bear the sight of him. In many ways I still can't. And yet, I recognised some small part of myself in his broken, narcissistic persona, like the lonely loser sitting at the end of the small town bar who is waiting for someone to buy him a drink before regaling them for hours with a litany of his personal woes. We all have one of them lurking in the recesses of our subconscious craving attention.

As a cultural snob, it was quite a moment to admit to myself that I was listening to Robbie Williams anthems to rally my self esteem back into the realm of the living but there I was playing his music and it was really happening. I could no longer judge others from upon high above the clouds on my cultural equivalent of Mount Crumpet like an erudite, know-all Grinch. I was now straying dangerously close into Alan Partridge territory listening to MOR rock ballads on Radio 2 in the afternoon in a desperate attempt to stave off a premature manopause, a few decades too soon.

My drugs of choice were confined to a lethal cocktail of 'Angels', 'Better Man', 'Feel' and 'Come Undone' and each time I played them I could feel my cultural credibility eroding before my very eyes as if the liking of his music was some deliberate act of self-sabotage. Looking back, it seems oxymoronic that something that was breaking me down in one sense might build me up in another but such was the method to my madness back then.

In my defence, I was working in a record store at the time and my boss had a tendency to play endless chill out compilations that were the musical equivalent of a permanent bad hangover in Ibiza, though I can think of worse places to have hangovers - somewhere like Stoke-On-Trent (RW's birth place) perhaps? I was clearly itching for some emotionally incontinent anthems to break free from the 'Buddha Bar'/'Cafe Del Mar'/'Hotel Costes' bland wallpaper comps threatening to suffocate and numb me from feeling anything. But Robbie Williams?

As President Biden might say - 'Come on, man!"

Watching the current 'Robbie Williams' (Netflix) series (2023) I've cringed at the needy, self-important pound shop showman who closer resembles a cruise liner Elvis impersonator and thought back to how I could have ever found myself so broken that his songs were somehow healing me from a low period of my life.

Then again, it might have been worse.

It could have been Gary Barlow.