taking sides: Robbie Williams vs Scott Walker

... words, errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, fail me

(me too)

Robbie Williams by a nose in this one-legged race.

I've heard Robbie Williams, though. Not much to write home about there, I'd say, but he's perfectly inoffensive otherwise. I liked the track that sampled "You Only Live Twice," but only because of the sample.

That would be an interesting squabble. Polar opposites, those two.

I don't think Scott Walker is pretentious. What does that make me? You can't argue that Tilt is the Hope Diamond compared to the rat turd that is your average Robbie Williams release.

have you heard Acen's 'Trip II The Moon (Darkside)'?

Pashmina, eloquently argued.

Williams is crap, but Walker is so overrated here. ILM has completely fallen for his existential schtick that was old news in 1951, and the hoary old pseudo-mystique of artist-as-recluse-who-only-puts-out-an-album-decade.

Robbie doesn't have a "Tilt" or a "Climate Of Hunter" in him, though.
Maybe the world only needs one of each, though.

Scott Walker, on the other hand, is a fucking genius.

strange too, because everyone always tells me i should LOVE walker. i love the divine comedy and pulp and all those who are argued to have "come along and ripped off his sound". i own three scott walker cds and literally can't make it through a whole one. they are unberably weighty and boring and fey and limp and just don't sound very good to my ears.

but robbie williams is just garbage

can i opt out of this t/s ?

No, I haven't. Should I?

Coming soon to an ILM thread near you: "Taking Sides - Pablo Picasso vs. Heinz Baked Beans in tomato sauce", in which Frederick T will argue that Picasso wasn't any good because he painted people's faces with one eye higher than the other and stuck on the side of the head and all in the wrong colours and they didn't even look like proper pictures of people or anything; so obviously the beans must be miles better and that this is proven incontervertibly by the fact that so many more people have purchased tins of beans in the last week alone than have ever owned an original work by that pretentious Picasso twat.

wow frederick what daring iconoclasm! how invigoratingly counter-intuitive! you're exposing whole new worlds of thought to me!

i don't like robbie williams much.

I'm sorry but I really, genuinely, completely fail to understand this.

Once again, whilst at a push I might be able to understand that, just possibly, someone whose listening pleasures had never extended beyond what's in the charts and what's played on mainstream FM radio between, say, 7:00AM and 7:00PM, might just find Tilt a little bit of a shock to the system the first time they heard it; I completely fail to understand why anyone who's capable of enjoying more than about 10% of the different music that's discussed on this forum would have the slightest problem with it.

I mean, OK, I know it was on that stupid list that Mojo produced recently, but we're really not talking about anything like Trout Mask Replica or Space Is The Place (both albums which I enjoy myself, but can understand perfectly why they might send plenty of otherwise perfectly acceptable human beings running screaming from the room with their hands clamped firmly over their ears); this is not especially difficult music!

Is it?

it's not so bad if they're as good as everyone says, but I've bought TWO scott elpees now on the basis of the broad 'Scott is good' consensus and both have been big disappointments. i think his lyrics are laughable even before you take into account the silly fx thing he treats his voice with *and* the gloopy disneyish production.

to which i reply with equal and opposite banality:
i like him, therefore he is an artist

Some of the Walker Bros material was pretty good. The sixties solo albums were embarrassingly bad (a song with the plot of a Bergman movie or a Camus novel I mean COME ON), some of the country stuff is nice, the avant-garde material is painfully bad.

xpost

Aargh can you maybe unpack what you mean by 'pretentious'? it means you personally don't get what's going on, right?

Is Tilt particularly "difficult" music?

Do please try to keep up with the rest of the group Mark dear.

I just can't see that it is - and indeed I have gathered together a positive wealth of scientific research data to prove me right.

Case study no. 1, is the partner of an aging punk rocker from Reading.
In order to protect her anonymity, we shall refer to her only as "C*".
After occasional but regularly repeated levels of exposure to it over the course of several years, C* is finally starting to come 'round to some Beefheart (curiously enough, seeing the Magic Band live and seeing / hearing some of the material played instrumentally seemed to be the key) but she still struggles with TMR and Decals and can't handle anything Sun Ra recorded after about 1960.
She positively loved Tilt the first time she heard it.

Case study no. 2 is her daughter "C²".
C² hasn't really been force-fed any of this stuff in the same way her poor long-suffering mum has, and she has got to be the closest thing you'll ever find to "someone whose listening pleasures had never extended beyond what's in the charts and what's played on mainstream FM radio between, say, 7:00AM and 7:00PM".
Indeed, she has just about the lamest taste in music of any teenager alive, bless 'er little 'eart.
She also found it perfectly listenable, raising only a single bemused eyebrow at the lyrical content.

Prety damned conclusive findings, I'm sure you'll agree.

Brel loved Walkers versions and told him he could record anything else he wanted from his catalogue. I probably prefer the Brel, there is no way Walker could have sung something as shattering and intense as 'mon enfance', but for the campy silly ones he does a great job.

how do you shoehorn williams back into this? compare his rat pack covers to sinatra's originals? ha ha ha

I only have "Tilt" and "Scott 4", both of which I like a lot. I alo have "the Electrician" on cassette somewhere. That is a fucking awesome track.

I don't have any problems with any artist being "pretentious". If "pretentious" is a pejorative in your world, then get yr ass down to the record store, and pick up a copy of "just enough education to perform", which is, you know, "unpretentious" taken to the ultimate degree, and therefore surely the best thing ever.

Unless of course, by "pretentious" you mean "arty that I do not like".

Robbie Williams is a fucking clown, a muppet. A lot of his singles that I've heard just sound like pastiches on another artist's style, and enough of them sound like re-writes of older hit singles by other people. He's fucking rubbish.

In other news, Heinz baked beans have been declared superior to Cross & Blackwell's beans by a group of baked bean industry insiders.

A late attempt to nominate Pablo Picasso as a contender for this fiercely-contested honour was disqualified by the judges on the grounds that Mr. Picasso unfortunately failed to fuilfill the necessary criteria for entry, since none of his products are available smotherered in tomato sauce and sealed in a tin can.

The Walker Bros material was good. But there's a lot of naive buying into the tortured artist pose here for such a bastion of anti-rockism.

It was baked bean eaters (Radio 2 listeners) who voted for Angels.

Robbie Williams, on the other hand really has genuinely suffered for his art.

I mean, getting some of those tattoos done must have really smarted.

however i do see your points, some of the time i do wonder what the f**k he's on about. there are enough magical moments to keep me coming back tho', and it's really the same throughout his work, flaws and all.

"It was baked bean eaters (Radio 2 listeners) who voted for Angels."

Aaaah, so the baked beans were inside them rather than vice versa?

This was a genuine misunderstanding on my behalf and I retract my earlier comment and apologise humbly and unreservedly for having made such a hugely misleading statement and for any distress that I may inadvertently have caused to any decent, honest, law-abiding baked bean industry insiders or baked bean eaters.

Just out of interest, did anyone else think Robbie's last(?) one, "Listen To The Radio"(?) sounded like something that you might have expected to hear if they'd released an extended version of Kilimanjaro, complete with all the songs that Julian Cope had written and demoed but which were (perhaps erroneously) ultimately abandoned because he didn't think they were strong enough to be included on the album.... or something like that?

Or was that just me too?

"Bite! Bite!" -> "Ouch! Ouch""

(Stephen Duffy co-wrote it didn't he?)

I'm now going to have to spend the rest of the day trying to stop my brain from constantly playing an imaginary tape loop of Robbie singing:

The bats have left the belltower
The victims have been bled
Uh-well-uh bay-huh-bee it's orlrite
OOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooooh - bite!"

(x-post)

Scott? He's fantastic, but can be heavy-handed.

I'd love to hear Robbie do Montague Terrace In Blue, Duchess, Old Man's Back Again or Big Louise. Actually Get Behind Me is pretty Robbie-esque, I can really hear him doing that one.

he beggins to softly whistle a familiar tune into his empty, reverberating pint of adnams; it's only him and the beer now, just him and the beer. he's loving angels instead

hello howard orange

(needless to say "frederick t" is nothing to do with me, because i would do, and have done, this sort of thing a gazillion times better)

I think you'll find tt was Howard Donald and Jason Orange - and if anyone can explain why my brain has insisted on retaining that piece of information when it's discarded so many other far more interesting and amusing facts, then don't bother to do sop 'cos I expect I'd only forget it again before I.... uh.... whatever.

Now there would be an interesting TS...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/38532000/jpg/_38532043_mark_owen_97_150pa.jpg

Not to be cofused with the similarly-named footballer Mark Owen, obviously.

http://www.vi.nl/upload/162287_340_1084979479539-Michael-Owen-11.jpg

pint empty
triple 20
pint empty
triple 20

he warbles

an overland train rumbles by, rattling the glasses and cutlery in the dishwasher.

Yes! the backing track! now to recreate those sounds! he'll rebuild the pub, train and glasses inside the soothing £1700-per-day confines of Matrix Studios in Highbury! With Mark Knopfler on guitar!

Soutine is all but forgotten

Williams methodically removes his make up backstage at knebworth and tucks into a snowy trough of the old bolivian-poverty-causer. Maybe his people will chase down the reclusive star behind those songs he sang tonight and get him to write some stuff for the next album... yes, that's the way forward.

I think I'll go stand on the beach with a gun in my hand.

Christ almighty who the fuck was Frederic T?