During one of my recent quizzes where I do get crowd reaction, I played She’s The One by Robbie Williams and mentioned it was a cover of an old World Party song to which someone challenged saying, “It can’t be, Guy Chambers wrote it.” I disagreed but explained that Guy did produce it and that there was another Guy Chambers connection to the song. The response was, “I though Guy only wrote for Robbie.” Having set the record straight, I carried on. At the end, he came to apologise for challenging, I said, it’s not a problem, I love the interaction, something I don’t get at one of my, now ex-quizzes. I said, tell you what, I’ll write the story on the website, so, here it is.
As a lyricist, Robbie Williams has collaborated with several songwriters, none more successfully than Guy Chambers, although they were to fall out spectacularly. His contribution to Robbie’s 1998 album I’ve Been Expecting You was invaluable as the pair had written 12 of the 13 tracks, She’s the One was the only one he didn’t.
Guy was born in London but spent his teen years in Liverpool and when he was 18, he moved back to London and studied composition and piano at the Guildhall School of Music. In mid-1985 he briefly joined The Waterboys to replace lead singer Karl Wallinger on tour when they were supporting Simple Minds. The following year he joined Wallinger in his new band, World Party. In 1992, Chambers formed his own band, The Lemon Trees with bassist Paul Holman, guitarist Paul Stacy, keyboard player Alex Lewis and drummer Jeremy Stacy and charted five UK hits none which got higher than number 52 and were eventually dropped by their record label.
Wallinger wrote, produced and recorded She’s The One and it appeared originally on their 1997 album Egyptology and Wallinger was awarded an Ivor Novello Award the following year. That same year is when Chambers and Williams began collaborating and gave the slightly despondent Chambers the renewed vigour he needed.
Did writing come easy to Chambers? “It started from playing the piano. I discovered at an early age that it wasn’t enough for me to just play music on the page, like Mozart or Bach, I wanted to improvise. I started improvising when I was about seven or eight and luckily my piano teacher didn’t think that it was evil. She encouraged it,” he explained to Songwriting magazine. “Then, when I was a little bit older I wrote a string quartet. I also wrote an opera when I was at school, which the school performed. I had some pretensions of grandeur. You could argue that I still have them now. But in terms of writing pop songs, I didn’t really have enough confidence until I was 18/19.”
Their collaboration began with Lazy Days in the summer of 1997 and it was followed by South of the Border and, arguably, their best-known song Angels which ‘only’ reached number four in the UK. Three more hits followed in 1998 including the number one Millennium and, in 1999, came Strong and She’s the One which was a double A-side with lesser-heard It’s Only Us. It didn’t stop there, they continued into the new millennium with Rock DJ, Kids and Supreme.
Back to She’s The One, and the opening line, ‘I was her, she was me, We were one, we were free, And if there’s somebody calling me on, She’s the one’ sounds like, not only an extension to Angels, but also a love song between two very close people. Sadly, that is not the case, it was tribute to Karl Wallinger’s mother who had recently passed away and it’s what prompted him to write the song.
The backing on Robbie’s cover and World Party’s original are very alike and that’s because Chambers used World Party’s touring bass player and drummer to record Robbie’s version. No one had mentioned to Karl about the impending Robbie cover much to Karl’s annoyance. Around the same time, Karl suffered a near-fatal brain aneurysm. It caused both sides a problem with a very bitter Wallinger saying, “The song had a much better time than me, popping off to the Brits while I was at home eating crackers dipped in water” and Robbie, who retaliated by dropping the song from his live shows, exclaiming, “Ungrateful bastard. I bet he was fucking happy when the royalty cheque came in. It will go on the Greatest Hits and earn that bastard even more money.”
Presumably, to wind Wallinger up even more, Williams, when he did sing it live, often said it was one of the best songs he had ever written, when Wallinger heard about this he called Chambers on the phone and unleashed a torrent of abuse saying, “Your f***ing friend Robbie Williams, tell him from me that he’s a c**t.”
The CD single included a bonus video track shot at an ice rink for which Robbie had tuition from Olympic gold medallist, Robin Cousins. When Robbie’s friend and fellow entertainer, Jonathan Wilkes, was performing She’s The One in Brighton, Robbie walked on from the wings with the words, “Do you want a hand, mate?” He and Jonathan subsequently recorded Me and My Shadow for the album, Swing When You’re Winning.
One track on I’ve Been Expecting You was Jesus in A Camper Van and Robbie and Guy were accused of plagiarising Loudon Wainwright’s song I Am The Way (New York Town). The judge awarded Wainwright 25% of the royalties and ordered that the song be removed from future pressings of the album. It’s Only Us was not initially on I’ve Been Expecting You, but eventually replaced Jesus in A Camper Van.
Robbie Williams is also the title of a new four-part Netflix documentary released in November 2024. It was directed by Joe Pearlman and includes hundreds of hours of previously unseen personal footage, the majority shot by Chambers. It covers the difficult period and the growing tensions of their relationship as well as Robbie’s drug addiction and fame, and his agonising breakdown, but a happier ending of their eventual reunion in the studio.
In a post-docu interview with GQ magazine, Chambers reflected, “I have mixed emotions. They were such seminal experiences for me – meeting Rob completely changed my life. That was the reason that I filmed it – I knew that I was in a different dimension, and I knew that it wouldn’t last long. I was amazed that I got to five years, to be honest. But despite the difficulties we had on a one-to-one basis, we were still writing really well together.”