Take That: A stage fit for a big show
It came out a little bit Nick Griffin but you could tell what Robbie Williams meant when he thanked the adoring Wembley Stadium crowd and said: “I’ve never felt more proud to be English than at these nights. We are the English!”
The star, whose explosive entrance on stage 20 minutes into Take That’s set is one of the great moments in live music today, wanted the 80,000 fans to know that despite his sometimes errant ways, “I have always been your son”.
Watching Williams, followed by Jarvis Cocker’s return to front Pulp the following night, was a reminder that British pop at its best still throws up charismatic, witty, sometimes frustrating but always entertaining performers who have a self-deprecating awareness that their US superstar counterparts lack.
Robbie throws a Bruce Forsyth fist-to-nose pose during Let Me Entertain You which is lapped up by the knowing Saturday night crowd. He throws in a rap about superinjunctions to show he’s lost in the same celebrity Twitterverse as the rest of us.
His whole entry, after an opening of five Gary Barlow-penned Radio 2 friendly singalongs from the Robbie-free era, bursting through the giant video screen, is like the evil villain disrupting a pantomime. A couple of Take That, Robbie-hating purists even booed.
Robbie plays along with a little rehearsed dialogue about being “sacked” from the band and throws himself in to the choreographed dance steps of Everything Changes, replicating the 90s ToTP memories of thousands of female fans.
The Take That experience, with Mark singing “If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands”, could seem a little “end-of-the-pier children’s show” if there weren’t some solid gold pop tunes at the heart of it, with Barlow’s recent Progress material giving the group an appropriately mature edge.
Williams and Cocker, whose Hyde Park Pulp reunion at Wireless, was no less of a triumph, enjoyed polar opposite career trajectories whose paths have converged.
Williams joined his manufactured group as a 16 year-old and was immediately catapulted to teen idol status. Cocker had to wait until his 30s before Pulp, created in his own image, finally ignited Britpop.
Both side-stepped the Blur/Oasis battle to create a defining song of the 90s – Common People and Angels. They enjoyed a run of hits with quirky pop songs featuring clever lyrics and wordplay, memorable melodies and often uniquely British reference points.
And both decided to modestly rejoin the band they had once outgrown for a reunion tour which reminded an army of fans what they had been missing.
At Hyde Park, Cocker is a whirlwind of scissor kicks and finger-pointing. Pulp tease the Britpop veterans by opening with Do You Remember the First Time? and unleash the fondly-remembered hits Disco 2000, Sorted For E’s and Whizz.
Cocker reminds his audience that most of these songs were written during his skulking and plotting, pre-stardom student days in London.
I-Spy is even more bitter than Common People, with the outsider Cocker stalking his prey, upending the lives of the Ladbroke Grove glitterati he despises in his revenge fantasy.
The set-closing Common People itself gains new life after Cocker, who urged the crowd to join the student fees protest, dedicates it to the property developers making a mint out of the One Hyde Park development.
Cocker’s world of word-chipped walls and pebble dash hasn’t paled in Pulp’s absence and it’s every bit as British as Robbie’s music hall entertainer desire to entertain and song lyrics mined from catchphrases and cultural references submerged in the national psyche. Neither star will ever mean a bean in middle America but we and they probably prefer it that way.
Pulp: Return to Brixton in August
Cocker and Williams’ uniquely English, witty, literate pop lineage stretches from Damon Albarn and Morrissey to Neil Tennant (The Pet Shop Boys are an inspired choice of support act for Take That on the Progress tour) through Bowie to Lennon and beyond.
Where are the successors? Lily Allen looked like she might be part of that line, perhaps Tinie Tempah or Plan B will show the same facility. So yes, a good night to be English as Robbie said.
Although he did pick up a fan’s Israeli flag and draped himself in it at the end of the show, perhaps to show this wasn’t about being excluding other nationalities.
A gesture that would have brought a political storm down on Bono but Robbie carried it off with his trademark cheeky grin.
