Reviewed on Tuesday October 27 (photo by Katrina Clarke)
“My name is Robbie Fucking Williams,” he begins… and you know the rest. The UK megastar is on yet another arena tour of his antipodean home-away-from-home, and he’s still using the same banter as the last four times he visited. He’s still flirting with women as they catch his eye; he’s still interrupting ‘Supreme’ with the rap verse from that other hit, ‘Rock DJ’. He’s still doing the same crowd participation bit (“One hand in the air! Two hands in the air!”) he used on 375,000 people at Knebworth in 2003, and it’s on the same song he opened with there as well.
Yes, Robbie Williams would have you believe that nothing has changed since the days when he was the biggest solo star on the planet – as long as you don’t ask America – and to be fair, when the fans wilfully lap up your recycled quips time after time, even those become part of the whole showbiz experience. Something would be wrong if he wasn’t using them.
The Let Me Entertain You tour’s first Sydney show starts like any other Robbie Williams concert has for the last ten years (excluding his forays into Sinatra-era swing), and there’s no reason to hold that against him. ‘Let Me Entertain You’, ‘Monsoon’, ‘Come Undone’ and ‘Rock DJ’ have the energy pumping, even if the 41-year-old former boy band heartthrob now lets his four backing vocalists do most of the singing on the latter. He postures, he poses, he grins a cheeky grin for any camera that comes near him. The problem is, where Williams’ self-deprecating egotism once charmed the masses into believing, now it all feels like one big in-joke for only those who’ve stuck with him this whole time.
And that becomes clear when Williams starts diverting from the established path. Maybe he’s just trying to be adventurous, but filling the rest of the set with covers like ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’, ‘Wonderwall’, ‘We Will Rock You’, ‘I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll’, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and the ‘My Way’ finale seems entirely self-indulgent. Not to mention the thoroughly bizarre ‘Royals’/‘99 Problems’ mashup that wrecks one of Williams’ own name-making hits, ‘Millennium’.
Already, the eight-piece band and modest (though dazzling) light show seems an understated production, at least by Williams’ former stadium-filling standards. His career was always built on some fundamentally solid pop songs (many of which, like ‘Strong’, ‘No Regrets’ and ‘Let Love Be Your Energy’, don’t get an airing tonight), and it may be that this is the start of Williams’ transition to smaller venues.
But can anything less than an arena hold his once irresistible, now borderline obstructive ego? Time will surely tell.
