The Domestic Terrorist - Robbie Williams

ROBBIE WILLIAMS : KNEBWORTH : SATURDAY 2nd AUGUST 2003
LET ME ENTERTAIN YOU

This is everything that is good � and bad about Britain. All hail Prince Williams ; the plucky loser, the underdog. The kind of boy us Brits love so, the man who came back from the edge of obscurity to rule the world � or at least part of it � armed with nothing more than a cheeky smile, a bunch of addictions and neurosis, and some songs.

But let us set the scene. A sweltering summers day, with temperatures in the high nineties. That�s above the temperature that most murders occur at. It is, literally, hotter than death. A British park, a national treasure. A massive country estate. A hill that�s over half a mile long. And probably as wide.

It�s the kind of place that, without video screens, you could conduct a scientific experiment in. Measure the speed of sound versus the speed of light, and witness a highly choreographed figure acting out the future before he�s even finished singing the last song. It�s that big. At the back, the sound from the stage could be up to 2.5 seconds behind the front of the crowd. Unless of course, you take into account the huge speed-of-light speaker stacks at the back.

I�m not good at Maths, and I�m estimating without the use of scientific theory, but a United Nations estimate of this crowd of mass destruction is that it is, in scientific terms, �fucking huge�. Certainly looking at the car park, and the litter on the ground after the show, that Robbie Williams fans are probably as dangerous as an invading army. Certainly, they�re more motivated : they paid to come here.

So Knebworth then. Place of history. Hotter than death, bigger than sound. Home of Gods, home of legendary concerts by Oasis, Pink Floyd, Queen, Led Zeppelin, and, er, that�s it. Robbie joins the rock elite tonight. And it�s live on Channel 4.

THE EGO HAS LANDED

Being the biggest musical event in British History, Robbie�s three nights at Knebworth deserve something : some kind of recognition. But what for?

Being huge, as if hugeness and popularity were ends by themselves. How insecure is an ego that it even suggests three nights at third biggest venue in the world (behind Rio�s 250,000 capacity Stadium, and Woodstock�s 400,000)? Or was it his accountants?

For being great, though Robbie undoubtedly is a cross between a hyper-literate Brighton Pier style entertainer, and a neurotic fucked up mess who makes slightly bland music with lyrics sharper than a box of knives.

Just, I suspect, for being the one guy from Take That whose appeal hasn�t got so selective that his only gigs are in his own living room. Tonight, live on Channel 4, Robbie is in all our living rooms.

LIFE THRU A LENS

I always used to believe that bands had the fans that they deserve. The Manics, with their shirted lads and their glitterati virgins. REM, with their self-consciously weird conformists. Robbie with � well, with what? Everybody loves Robbie. Even I do, in my strictly platonic lads-down-the-pub sense, but I wouldn�t want to be mates with him. He�d steal all the girls. Even if he weren�t famous, like.

I was wrong. Sometimes people don�t get the fans they deserve, but something far worse. There�s all humanity here. There�s at least 10% of all the white trash Britain can muster over the three days ; the suburban mothers, the white tracksuits, the well-meaning but straightfowarded unwashed. But that�s me in touch with my inner snob, mind you. You�ll be meeting more of him later.

There�s the schoolkids. The 6 to 16 year olds ; some bored, some misbehaving, some crying, in the heat, in the obscene crush � even several hundred yards from the stage at the top of the hill, you can barely move, let alone sit down or even pretend to be comfortable. And that�s five hours before Prince Williams takes the stage.

LAZY DAYS
There�s the family on their day trips. There�s mum, dad, little Amy and the petulantant Boy-child. There�s the lads, their tweenager contingent on the day out with their girlfriends, along for the ride, and secretly admitting when Robbie�s on that they actually quite like him. There�s the champagne mums. Your Mum and Dad are here. There they are. If you could get a signal on a choked network maybe you could call them and tell them you want a �3 ice cream. Or ring them at home when he plays Angels, cos, hey, you�re soppy. And he wrote it about his Gran, and we are family. Ohana. At a Robbie gig nobody gets left behind or forgotten.

It�s a far cry from the Wolverhampton Wulfrun, where tickets were a quarter of the price and the venue 250 times smaller. But that was a lifetime ago, where Robbie was just the fat dancer in Take That cast solo, adrift alone. But you�re never alone with Robbie - and all the other Robbies that live in his head with him. The tattooed rock pig. The all round friendly family entertainer. The philanderer. All of them live in there and it�s almost as crowded in his head as it is out here in the crowd. And that�s pretty darn crowded.

At least there�s an on-site cartel : every bit of food is sold at a uniform price, and those unethical shits who raise the prices are unceremoniously thrown off the site. But still, 270,000 lunches and dinners between �3 and �4.95 still comes to almost �2,000,000. Nice.

But with the good comes the bad. It�s inevitable that, in a crowd this big, there�s going to be an inescapable wanker contingent. Even by the law of averages, wankers will be present. There�s not enough people in the country who aren�t wankers to fit in Knebworth. Ooh, I�m such a little bitch. (don�t tell anyone)

People boil down to three basic types :

Me. And people like me. Cool, clever, well-meaning, occasional screwups. We get the jokes, the self-referential in-jokes, because we have the internet and read too much. Some of us buy post modern T-Shirts with picture of Lego men with afros, some of us don�t. That�s just the way we are.

You. Who are not me. The lengths that I will go to. The distance in your eyes. You�re not bad, we just haven�t got much in common. But you�re OK, even if we don�t share much beyond a love of Robbie and Big Brother. You�re cool. Even if you dress kinda straight. It must be great to be straight.

Them. Everybody. Everybody. As bad as the monsters in the film Them. The monsters in that film were badly animated ants. But sometimes the real monsters are people like this. People who don�t think about the people around them. The kind of people you don�t want to be in a pub near, especially around closing time. They bring klaxons to gigs at Knebworth, and let them off right down your ear. Then look very upset when their stupid children�s toys run out of noisegas. And then get out the other klaxon they had in their other pocket.

(shudders in rage)

How na�ve that I actually wanted to hear Robbie Williams. What I actually, really, really wanted to hear a great big klaxon go off in my ear, being brandished by a wanker who uses it like an offensive weapon. That�s a Weapon of Mass Destruction.

Cunts who climb, and fall down, trees : landing on someone�s head before running away as security guards arrive. They drink too much and vomit on your shoes � and you thought they were being so quiet, asleep there. They grope the bums of every man walking past, they bump into you every two seconds yelling in your ear I�m so sorry, I�m so sorry, without even considering that if you are genuinely sorry you can at least try not to do it again next time. Not as sorry as I am for standing next to you.

And then they fall over onto you because standing up is too much effort. They then try to sit on someone else�s shoulder so someone else can do the standing by proxy. Which is fine if you are nine feet tall and can see beyond them. But not if, like me, you�re only five foot ten.

I know, metric is the future, feet and inches are so� retro. Antique. But retro is cool, right?

And all the bottles being thrown at this Self-Apppointed Pyramid Of Drunks land on your head.

As I said some people are just shits, darling.

OLD BEFORE I DIE

You do know that I don�t like anybody don�t you? That�s a policy rule. I don�t even like myself, sometimes. Makes life hard sometimes.

So that�s the crowd. And my God, there�s lots of them, 135,000 a night. That�s about�(gets out fingers and abacus)� 0.50% of the country, over the next three nights. Or one person in two hundred. That�s a lot. You probably know someone here apart from the people you came to. There�s probably a friendsreunited.com stall at the back somewhere. And at least some of my ex�s are here I would say, almost definitely. Good thing the place is so big I stand no chance of meeting anyone. Cos some of my ex�s are the dread Them. Monsters programmed by mad scientists to ascertain my complete destruction. Good thing they don�t know where I am�

The place is so big, I can�t even see the back of they crowd. It�s so big that the crowd probably peels back beyond sight due to the curvature of the earth. There�s a section where Robbie asks �the people at the back� if they are OK, and from somewhere at the back of a hill there�s a distant roar. It sounds like the war cry of an approaching army.

If I was Mel Gibson I�d surrender now. Or everyone around me would say �I�m Spartacus.� : �No, I�m Spartacus.� : �I�m Spartacus. And so is my wife� . I certainly feel like part of a huge mass. In a crowd this big I just become a cell in an organism, no longer an individual. As a whole we probably look the same way that microbes do under microscopes. Pulsating, oddly shaped lumps of matter.

KNEBWORTH CITY LIMITS

So by now, it�s fair to say that there�s too many people. The crowd is too big. There�s places where my view is unobstructed by trees, ice cream stalls, and scaffolding � not many though � and even then I can�t see where the crowd ends and the car park begins. Even at my vantage point, only about a quarter of the way from the stage (that�s two hundred yards, and I�ve walked shorter distances than that from my house to see bands before), the crowd is so huge that I can�t see the bands. I can see the top of the stage, but I can�t actually see The Darkness, or Kelly Osbourne (and like, her pubescent f****** puppy-fat like, f****** pouting), or Ash (though I can hear them), or Moby, or anything.

There is a reason why we�re here. I�ll get to that in a minute, but the setting is an event in itself.

There�s The Darkness. I don�t actually see them but I hear them from the car park. And I saw them on TV, which is much what this gig is like anyway. Watching someone else�s massive TV at a huge garden party.

The Darkness are all that�s bad about 80�s cock rock, hair/glam metal, restyled in an ironic/unironic way. But it doesn�t work. For me at least, part of the appeal of the mighty Leppard, Motley Crue, Skid Row, even M�t�rh��d, is that they don�t know how ridiculous they are. When I saw Iron Maiden it should�ve been filed under Comedy. It was hilarious / ridiculous. Because they either didn�t know, or didn�t show that they knew, that it was all a joke. How sad then, that the joke is on you and you don�t even know. But The Darkness know, and that immediately doesn�t make funny. It�s like watching a comedian who uses other people�s jokes. Someone who cannot think for themselves isn�t worth our time. When the jokes on you, its not funny.

Kelly Osbourne. Yeah, lets skip that, though she is I suppose sexy in a puppyfat I-remember-when-I-was-your-age kind of way. Stroppy little git. Ash meanwhile are fabulous � offering us every single hit in a non-stop barrage of indie hits. Every time one starts, at least some of crowd, go Oh-I-forgot-they-did-this-song-as-well-they�re-really-quite-good kind of way. The new stuff they play is fantastic. Because it�s heavier than neutron soup and chock full of riffarama. Indie-metal. Fab.

Onto the main course � of a sort - well, not Robbie. But Moby : everyone�s favourite slightly weird bald techno genius who leaps around like a hyperactive child. To be fair, playing to a crowd as big and loyal as this one is a losing game. If you tolerate this, then Prince Williams will be next. Which is a great shame, as Moby�s done some of the best gigs I�ve ever seen. Unfortunately, neither I nor anyone else get to see this, just the top of a bobbing head and some footage of his band on TV. Aside from a ridiculously paced set (slow-one, fast-one, hip-hop one, slow-one, repeat until bored), Moby certainly offers a set that seems to be great fun to play, and in a better environment � a sweaty club � would be fabulous. There are a couple of suprises : the full on riffarama of Black Sabbath�s �Paranoid� is thrown out early in the set to a comatose crowd, the funky �Honey� struts like a stripper, and the hip-hop-dumb-punk-hybrid of �Bodyrock� is the best Beastie Boys song you never heard. There are also mistakes ; the mellow �Strings of Life� � just a guitar and a soulful vocal manage to destroy all the goodwill of a relentlessly party-orientated crowd - and the abrupt brusqueness of the SAS-style guerrilla-raid set sees plenty of his finer, lesser known songs abandoned in favour of crowd pleasing big hitters and covers. Still, for an obscure techno artist to still be trying new things, different colours, different shapes, and still be good whilst playing to crowds this big has got to mean something. Even if, as Leonard Cohen sang, I don�t remember what.

LA GRAND FROMAGE

Now then, to the main course. La Grand Fromage. Knebworth is a place where egos dare. It�s enormous. This we have established. You probably see it from space. The crowd slowly but imperceptably tightens. Anticipation rises. And there he is.

Suspended from the ceiling of the stage on a tightrope. King Robbie of England. Our favourite heavily tattooed, neurotic drug-snorting, promiscuous, foul mouthed, all-round lovable family entertainer. Wow, how does he do that? And everybody loves him. Because he�s a bit naughty, but nice at the same time. He leads us in a Drugs BOO / Alcohol YAY chant and the best use of expletives since Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Relight mah fire, muthafuckas.

Seriously, I don�t even need to review the music. You know what the songs are, what he sounds like, and what you think of it. Suffice to say that every song sounds like a hit � even the ones that weren�t � and that, lyrically, Robbie is our uncrowned Poet Laureate. The words are everything that huge portions of the crowd aren�t : witty, insightful, full of depth, understanding, and knowingly absurd. Lyrics don�t get much better than this. (I told you I was in touch with my inner snob). Musically it�s quite drab, but every song sounds like the most important, relevant song ever written, to who I am, to who we are, to what its like to be me, us, now, whenever he sings them. (Apart from possibly Mr.Bojangles. ) These songs are the nations alternate anthems, every last one of them. Though the set is seriously skewed away from his under-rated debut, Life Through A Lens. So no sign of Lazy Days, Old Before I Die, or Freedom. Shame. But we do get Angels, No Regrets, Strong, Let Love Be Your Energy, Feel, Come Undone - you know, all the biggies. And Let Me Entertain You is easily the best opening song for any gig, like Kelly Osborne might say, like, for f***ing ever, dood.

AWW

And you know who Robbie is. Let him entertain you. A lovable cheeky chappy who makes us, all of us, feel as if he�s an all round nice bloke. He gets crushed members of the crowd up on stage to sing with him, he has conversations with individual members of the audience, dedicates songs to couples and dares them to snog on live TV, and has a dance with his mum. Aww. Isn�t he lovely?

Instead of merely presenting songs, Robbie is one of the very, very few in the world who actually entertains. You never quite know what he�s going to do next ; even if it is flub the words deliberately, conduct the world�s biggest karaoke singalong, or mangle Take That�s greatest hits in a thrash-metal medley fashion, which, somewhat oddly, is the climax of tonights show. If only everyone was as irreverent towards their own songs. Apart from Bob Dylan, whose so irreverent one could regard him as a murderer.

Fabulous. Seriously. This is so much more fun than a Radiohead gig. If Robbie ever gets bored singing, he could become a seriously interesting stand up comedian. Or an actor. Or God. Or a professional �sleb, as they say on Popbitch.

This is the cult of personality in the flesh.

THIS IS A LOW

And with that, 135,000 people are entertained. But you gotta get high so you can taste the lows. And this is a low.

Ffwd to : one hour after Robbie�s left stage.

There�s fifty thousand cars in a queue. In their infantile wisdom, the organisers have decided to close � not open, that�s close, the exit to the car park until they�ve evacuated every last stupid pedestrian. Full credit to them, but the pedestrian exits are fenced in away from the cars to start with. The only way one might get run over is if one scaled a fence. Not likely.

There�s no burger bars open bar ones with queues a hundred people long. No T-shirt stalls so you can get a t-shirt if you feel a little chilly. No information bar a badly photocopied slip of paper. Nothing.

All we know is that there will be queues of at least one hour before we are even allowed to leave. That�s one hour for the person at the front of the queue, let alone the 100,000 behind them. One hour of badly organised, messy parking that resembles The Sweeney during a car chase. One hour of crying children, swooping helicopters, dark corners, and cold, fraught, stolen pieces of sleep. One hour of people wandering around trying to find out what�s going on, looking at traffic jams, and finding � somewhat spookily � the Knebworth Family Tomb hidden behind steel railings in the shadow of the closed T-shirt stall.

Finding an abandoned family tomb at past midnight on a Saturday is very odd. Even worse when you can�t step five yards without bumping into someone or their car.

One hour of boredom. One hour of cold. One hour of hunger. One hour of absolutely nothing at all. One hour of queues. One hour of typical stupid, shortsighted British amateurism, making people wait, for no apparent reason whatsoever. That�s Britain for you. It�s not even about the deliberate abuse of power, it�s too incompetent for that : it�s all about being given an incredibly important job, and not being good enough to do it. That�s the Brits for you. I hope I�m old before I die. But I�ll be old before I get to drive.

OLD BEFORE I DRIVE

Sure there�s some bullshit about having �at least� an hours wait before you�re even allowed to leave the car park. But, in practical terms, it�s three hours before a car leaves the park, and when we get to the junction I can clearly see that the car exit to the motorway � presumably the one that the public had to walk over to exit before travelling to a station thirty miles away (as the local Knebworth train station was closed) � was circumvented and all traffic directed to a side road entrance. So there�s no need to close the car park exits at the time that everyone wanted to use it. Because there�s no chance of anyone getting run over. Right?

The night before, the car park didn�t clear until 5am. That�s 6 and a half hours after the show : 390 minutes, or, the entire length of the original Star Wars Trilogy, in geek speak.

That�s what deliberately holding back 50,000 cars does to the roads. Who knows how many people crashed or almost crashed their cars through sheer exhaustion? How many days of work were missed by people not getting home until it was time to go to work?

People in positions of authority are stupid, British people in authority doubly so.

Whinge, whinge, whinge, moan, moan, moan. Make no mistake : Robbie Williams was � is � fantastic. Britain�s best entertainer (if not the best lyricist), and a showman unseen and unrivalled in this generation.

Knebworth though is crap. Smelly, huge, crushingly oppressive. Expensive, poorly organised, and with the visibility of high-density fog. Great band, great singer, crap fucking venue. Let him entertain us? Oh, he did. But I think it worked better as a television show.

I better check my video and hoped I managed to programme it correctly. I missed a good night of television on Channel 4. Let me entertain you, he pleaded, and how we did. If this country could elect royalty, arise King Robbie.

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