Me with the floor show, kicking with your torso

Continuing my trip back through the 2001 album charts.

28/01/01 : Sing When You're Winning - Robbie Williams


Our sixth solo visit with Mr Williams, our second from this blog year and our third in this calendar year (and it's only March!) and part of me feels this is peak-Robbie because he'd converted everyone post-Take That but he'd yet to scare everyone off by starting to believe his own publicity - I'm expecting it to be bearable but maybe missing the highs I kinda remember him producing slightly before this.

Yeah, the singles I remembered are "Rock DJ", "Kids" (which is probably my favourite track on the album) and "Let Love Be Your Energy" - all of which are fine without being a "Millennium", "Let Me Entertain You" or "Angels". It's all pretty listenable though - I just don't have the energy to get annoyed by him any more. I was surprised at how flat the production is in places though - it just felt they could have given it a bit more "oomph". I do quite like the album cover - although that probably wasn't what I thought at the time given how he seemed to be everywhere at the time.

We're at #10 in the charts this week on his 22nd week of an entirely expected 52 week run, with it having spent its first three week at #1. The top five this week were Limp Bizkit, J Lo (a new entry), Texas, Toploader and Coldplay - the first time in 25 weeks that we haven't mentioned Dido (ah - do you see what I did there) and the next highest new entry was Creed (#29).

Wikipedia has less text that I was expecting (150 milliPeppers) and it tells us this is his third album and a conscious move away from a Britpop to a dance-pop kinda sound. There's remarkably little else there except for telling us that his previous albums included hidden tracks, so on this one he had a hidden message 24 minutes after the end of the last track which was just him saying "No, I'm not doing one on this album". Interestingly, Wikipedia tells us that the critical response was "positive" but then includes various examples which suggest that most people said it was merely OK (three stars from The Guardian, 2.5 stars from NME) - but commercially none of that mattered because it made the top five in a load of places, including #1 in Ireland, Germany and New Zealand. It only got to #110 in the US because he's never cracked things over there but he made up for it over here selling 2.5 million copies making it the second best selling album of '00.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, discogs.com tells us this is 25 pence album but if you want the 45 rpm double vinyl album then it's going to set you back a meaty £399.99 - woah! This album isn't aimed at me, but even I have to admit there's nothing dreadfully wrong with it - but I say that safe in the knowledge I'll never listen to it again. 

21/01/01 - Decent enough, except for the last track
04/02/01 - Could have been far worse

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