Robbie Williams – Swing Both Ways (2/5)

I have no problem with karaoke. I’ve never done it myself, but I have seen Lost in Translation and looks like a wild old time. Who wouldn’t want the opportunity to step into the shoes of their musical heroes? Everyone deserves a bit of escapism, Robbie Williams included. So that he might want to occasionally slick back his hair, put on a suit and croon out some swing is a matter wholly up to him. What I am concerned with is his decision to share this act of escapism with the rest of the world.

My main issue here are cover tracks on the album, with instrumentation that isn’t note worthily distinguishable from the originals they come across as Williams doing little more than a bit of self indulgent Karaoke. With a voice that one could hardly call interesting, you have to ask yourselves do we really need another version of ‘I Wan’na Be Like You’, or ‘Minnie the Moocher’? Robbie certainly does, but we definitely don’t. Not when they’re versions like these.

As for the originals on the album, they are true to what swing has been for the last 70 years. Everything about them is either a meticulous copy or, in true Williams style a tongue in cheek reference to tropes of the genre. But, when they’re alongside tracks that are the best the period has to offer, a distinction soon becomes obvious. For all his song-writing talent (his and Guy Chambers’) their swing tracks simply do not match up to the classics and when his versions of the classics aren’t that good, well, then you’re just left with one man’s escapist desires.

And in case you’re wondering that wordplay that is the album’s title is deployed in as classy as way as you could imagine.

Daoud Al-Janabi