No Rock And Roll Fun

WILLIAMS. SADLY, NOT KEN OR SHIRLEY: Robbie Williams, poor little lamb, got himself in danger:

"In an interview with Sara Cox being broadcast on her Breakfast Show, he said he has been regularly inviting members of the crowd on stage. He said: "I got one out one night and she'd not washed and she smelt, quite frankly."

Hmmm. Apart from being really ungallant - oh, how we laugh when your name is mooted as being a potential Bond - you think there might be something about being right at the front of a stadium rock gig that might make someone a little bit smelly, you knob?

But picking out Sabine he thought: "I'm going to have a good time here so I picked a good looking one.

"She gets up on stage and she puts her hands down my pants, her tongue down my mouth and she was trying to rip my vest off and I'm singing, trying to maintain the fact that these people think I'm a bit cool.

"At one point she was locked like a vice grip and she's writhing with me. I've tried to pull her off and sit her next to me but she straddles the top of me and starts grinding - now normally this wouldn't be a problem, but there's 60,000 other people there so I try to pull her hair to make it look sexy but I'm actually trying to pull her off of me."

Apart from the clanging, clanging self-aggrandisment in this story - like any bore in a pub with a 'she couldn't keep her hands off me' tale - and the grist to amateur psychologist's mill that robbie finds an aggressively sexual woman a threat - why does he think it's okay for him to "pick a good looking one" to "have a good time" but as soon as she reciprocates, he's having to pull her hair and squeal for his mother to come rescue him?

It gets worse, though:

Williams also said he realises he has now reached the Madonna and Michael Jackson proportions in terms of the audiences he can attract.

"When you're in the middle of a storm you don't actually know how big it is. And every now and again I ask myself who else plays stadiums? The Jacksons, Madonna, U2 and I go, 'bloody hell, I must be that big'.

"You can't get a perspective of what it is or who you are or what your fame's like because you're not looking at it from the outside. I'm just a bit giddy with my own success at the minute. I mean that in a very humble way."

Do you reckon the people at EMI have attempted to introduce him to the concept of 'humble'? And, more to the point, do you think he'll ever grasp it?

Robbie, fyi, some other acts that play in Stadiums:
Brighton and Hove Albion
The S Club 8
Atomic Kitten
The Dave Matthews Band.

There are stadium acts, and then there are stadium acts - in the same way there are theme parks, like Alton Towers, and there are Theme Parks, like JCB World.