And all at once I owned the earth and sky

A new year to start the New Year - starting my trip back through the 2001 album charts.

30/12/01 : Swing When You're Winning - Robbie Williams

There's a reasonable argument I should reject this album, but it was such a surprising cultural moment that even I don't feel I can, so it means we're starting the year with one that "we" own. This is our fifth visit with Mr Williams - I'm determined not to enjoy it, but I also have to admit I'm not going to hate it nearly as much as I would like to. 

You know what? This is perfectly fine. Completely inessential, but he's not doing anyone any harm. For the most part, it's classic Sinatra-or-thereabouts tracks which Robbie does a decent job with on the vocals (along with some slightly peculiar guests) and they've obviously got some decent musicians in to lay down the backing tracks. He rarely does anything wildly original with them but, most importantly, he doesn't ruin them either - I don't feel the need to listen to any of them again (although I'll take "Have You Met Miss Jones?" if forced to), but if they introduced some great tracks to a new audience then I guess all is good. The one exception is the opening track, "I Will Talk and Hollywood Will Listen" which is an original composition on which he's sounding very sorry for himself and it just doesn't really fit the mood - which makes its position on the album a strange choice. But overall, I don't see there's a lot to complain about here. 

We're at #1 in the charts this week on his sixth week of a 31 week run, with it spending the first seven weeks at the top - it's somewhat surprisingly managed 14 runs over the years, with it managing 85 weeks on the charts in total and last being seen in '14. The rest of the top five this were best-ofs from Gabrielle and Blue, Stereophonics and S Club 7 and the highest new entry was The Hives, which was all the way down at #84, but somehow managed a 39 week run with it peaking at #7.

Wikipedia has a decent amount on the album (181 milliPeppers) and it tells us this is his fourth solo album and it's "inspired by the Rat Pack era, especially singer Frank Sinatra" - phew, thanks for letting me know. The guest stars are Nicole Kidman, Rupert Everett, Jane Horrocks, Jon Lovitz (a US comedian) and, quite obviously, Frank himself - one of the session musicians was a friend of the family and apparently they liked Robbie's vocals so agreed to allow them to include Frank.

The entry also notes that this album started a bit of a craze for Rat Pack style albums, including offerings from Pop Idol and Westlife - I suspect I'll be brave enough to reject them if they trouble me at some point in the future. Critically, it was actually pretty well received with even NME being less sniffy about it than you might expect - but it didn't really matter what they said because commercially this was critic-proof. It got to #1 in a load of places and has sold nearly 2.5 million copies here and also, somewhat peculiarly, went down very well in Germany, where it spent 83 weeks in the chart and was the fourth best selling album of the decade and Austria, where it was the best selling album of '02. Just weird.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent version for 50 pence and the most you can spend on it is eleven quid - I guess there really are a load of copies out there. And if you own it and love it, then I will generously allow you to do so - I don't think he's adding anything to the genre, but at least he's not murdering it. All of which means I'm now going to head off and listen to the Westlife offering so I can get properly annoyed about something...

1994 - Certainly not the worst year