Robbie Williams

Reality Killed the Video Star

(EMI)

Rating: 3/5

Robbie Williams' albums have increasingly come to focus upon the singer himself; as he observes here in the opening 'Morning Sun', "a message to the troubadour: the world don't love you anymore". The song was supposedly written about Michael Jackson shortly after the singer's death, but as Williams noted during his Electric Proms comeback show, "I thought it was about [him], but it's actually about me".

Certainly, there's no avoiding the obvious self-referentiality of the album title, which puns on producer Trevor Horn's pivotal Buggles hit 'Video Killed The Radio Star'. And it's hard to read the brief 'Somewhere' as anything but an autobiographical reflection on Robbie's lengthy, lonely, lost weekend in the LA wilderness, with its rueful advice to "take your chance in life, go out and find a wife, don't get stuck in the state that I'm in".

But elsewhere here, the signs are that the now-married singer has regained his waning zest. Rudebox's Pet Shop Boys electropop stylings are restricted to a few tracks such as 'Last Days Of Disco' and 'Difficult For Weirdos', while the mainstream musical influences are as tried and tested as the Elton-style plodder 'You Know Me'

Robbie being Robbie, of course, there are a few curiosities disturbing the smooth surfaces conjured up by Horn. In 'Blasphemy', he trots out a few typically tactless references to senile dementia, the deaf and dumb, and the Great Depression. Older, then, but wiser...?

Download: 'Morning Sun'; 'Bodies'; 'Difficult For Weirdos'