Sing When You're Winning Robbie Williams (Chrysalis) HHHH

It's more than a little ironic that Robbie Williams' third solo album enters the world in the same week Oasis departs it. The Gallagher brothers represented freedom to the Take That refugee, hope that there was a life beyond the stifling confines of a manufactured boy band.

It's probably as surprising to him than to the rest of us that Williams enters the millennium as the only - and perhaps the last - great British pop star. We know Williams better than we know our neighbours. We know about the drug binges, the spells in rehab, the broken romances with Anna/ Nicole/Geri. And more than that, we sometimes even care.

Williams' fame is such his music barely matters any more, yet Sing When You're Winning has had care and love lavished over it and emerges as an incredibly refreshing experience.

True, the album doesn't have a song as ravishing as Angels - but you will find a bunch of consistently great great songs, intelligently arranged and beautifully recorded, and every one with a chorus to die for.

There's a duet with Kylie, a witty pilfering of Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive, at least three hit singles and a handful of the obligatory heart-felt ballads which almost have you believing Williams has a vulnerable side. OK, most of the lyrics moan on about the pressures of fame, but they are rescued by the occasional phrase which seems to resonate beyond the usual rock star self-pity.

It's all very odd. By this stage in his career Williams should be drowning in pomposity and drug-addled witterings. After all, Oasis were.

Richard Walker

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