20 September 1998
September 1998 is earlier than I had remembered for Robbie Williams’ ‘Millennium’, though I suppose it was only a year and a bit until the Y2K bug and flying cars on the moon. Anyway, here it is. This isn’t the first piece of James Bond music to go to number one in Ireland: ‘Nobody Does It Better’ topped our charts in 1977, and strictly speaking the extract of ‘You Only Live Twice’ used here is a cheaper re-recording, not an expensive direct sample of the original.
The John Barry homage in the music and the 007 cosplay in the video distract us a bit from the song itself: just what is ‘Millennium’? In truth, that ‘You Only Live Twice’ extract is the load-bearing part here, and the rest is really, really poor. Lyrically it’s at a T-shirt-slogan level of buzzwords for “cynicism”: players, pawns, making money, liposuction. The chorus is unable to get past dusty cliche: I checked, and “falling from grace” is on page 2 of Songwriting For Dummies. Then ‘millennium’ is randomly shoved in to sound showy and topical, with no connection to the rest of the song or the James Bond angle. You could try and spin it all as some sort of wry fin de siècle take on our materialist post-religion society, but that’s far more thinking than this naff, lazy, uninspired record is worth.
In another sense, though, the James Bond dressing-up is central to this project and to the proposition of Robbie Williams, Pop Star. Music hall and end-of-the-pier variety shows never died: they just got subsumed into other parts of English pop culture. In the ’60s and ’70s it was pretty much de rigueur for pop stars—Cilla, Dusty, Tom Jones—to present their own shiny-floor light entertainment TV show. In the ’00s and ’10s English pop music itself actually becomes a shiny-floor light entertainment TV show. Robbie is somewhere between. Even without the subtle clue of calling a single ‘Let Me Entertain You’, his shtick was mugging for the cameras, releasing stunt-casting duets (Kylie! Nicole Kidman!) and using videos as skits to raid the dressing-up box and shill for laughs. When your pop persona is old-fashioned twinkly-eyed Saturday night family entertainer who does James Bond impressions, as if Ant and Dec had a child together, then the music will always be just whimsical filler like ‘Millennium’.
