While we’ve been away a furious rift has opened up between beef-eating British patriots and pizza-guzzling American monoculture.
Over to our colleagues at the Daily Mail. “Brits have been forced to defend Robbie Williams after a debate erupted on social media,” the voice of Godalming bellowed a few days ago. It seems Americans have been “slamming his new musical monkey biopic and claiming they ‘have no idea who he is’.”
Michael Gracey’s Better Man, which replaces the singer with a CGI chimp, did, indeed, generate some puzzlement at its autumn premiere at Telluride, in Colorado. One or two observers, scanning the programme too hurriedly, anticipated a potentially disrespectful biopic of Robin Williams. The reviews were generally positive, but there was, from those observing elsewhere in the United States, a fair bit of: “Who the hell is this guy and why is he getting a simian testimonial while American stars like Dirk Turdkicker and Texas Lilly Hogfat remain uncelebrated?”
The debate picked up as the film was released to raves over Christmas. “Americans bullying Robbie Williams but what they fail to understand is he signed the biggest recording deal in British music history,” one British TikTok user responded. Bullying? Let’s not get carried away here.
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The debate does, however, open up an interesting conversation about which British (and Irish) stars translate to the US and which do not. Sometimes the problems are obvious. Often less so. In Williams’s case, it is tempting to blame his end-of-the-pier humour and light-entertainment aesthetic. Not a crazy suggestion. There is something of George Formby or Norman Wisdom about the often-disappointed ape in Better Man.
On the other hand, one can hardly think of a more quintessentially English superstar than Elton John: born as Reg Dwight, raised in Pinner in north London, obsessed with Watford Football Club. But, more than 50 years ago, John and his people initially positioned him as a singer-songwriter – something in the then-fashionable Jackson Browne vein – before he pivoted to demolishing his piano while dressed as Marie Antoinette. And so they found a way into the sometimes conservative US market.
More particularly, it is pointless to discuss Williams’s failure to break the United States without pondering the previous underperformance of Take That in the same territory. Good luck trying to imagine how the boy from Stoke could have made it to superstardom without initial boy-band breakthrough.
Few rules hold up. Westlife had only one hit in the US. Boyzone didn’t make it big there either. So the US had no time for that era of British or Irish boy band? Well, One Direction were huge and – suggesting again what might have been for Robbie – delivered subsequent success for Harry Styles. They had, perhaps, a zany rock-gang energy that, since The Beatles showed the way, Americans have craved from their British and Irish stars. They can get the mommy’s-boy stuff at home.
It used to be said that you can’t make it in the US without actually going there and working your butt off. U2 knew this and, in the mid-1980s, threw everything at a series of tours promoting music that, conveniently, was often about the United States. The slight whiff of postpunk never got in the way of an anthemic sweep you didn’t then get from performatively miserable contemporaries such as Echo & the Bunnymen.
There was a parallel there with Elton John a decade and a half earlier. He toured frantically with a music that offered variations on something Americans already knew they liked. His August 1970 gig at the Troubadour in Los Angeles propelled him to US stardom before he had properly made it at home. John and U2 liked the US. The US liked them in return.
In contrast, the NME reports that The Stone Roses “didn’t want to tour in America until they could fill the enormous Shea Stadium”. They stayed away for the first album. By the time of the indifferently received second album it was too late. Back in the 1960s, The Kinks, for reasons still obscure but attributed to anarchic onstage behaviour, were refused permits to tour the US. The US lost out on rock’s greatest storytellers.
Yet, though the puritanical Americans might want it otherwise, the passage from British to American success is not just about hard work. Many is the Old World band that returned home miserably after months on the bus from Tuna Fish, Iowa, to Hatstand, Wyoming. Sometimes it really is to do with being just a little too foreign. Amazingly, the tartan-clad, ashen-cheeked Bay City Rollers did eventually make it in the US. But Robbie Williams did not.
Considering his American underperformance alongside that of millennial contemporaries such as The Kooks and Kaiser Chiefs, Rolling Stone magazine, in 2022, came to a stark conclusion. “The common denominator was that these exports were just too British.” Too much George Formby. Not enough George Harrison.
