Intensive Care (Explicit Lyrics)

Beating Time

INTENSIVE CARE (Explicit Lyrics)
By Robbie Williams
£8.49 (Amazon)
(This is a review of one song from the CD.)

Sin, we sometimes think, is an outmoded word, meaningless to the average person in the street. That may be so, but Robbie Williams certainly believes that his audience understands that there’s more to sin than over-indulging on cream cakes; that it involves, perhaps, some elemental break in a relationship with the living God.

Indeed Williams, whose live performances help to justify his claim to be Michael Jackson’s heir as the King of Pop, is certainly more than just a recovering coke addict veering between Byronesque confidence and Othellic self-doubt. As his new album Intensive Care shows, his earlier, somewhat incoherent flirtations with big ideas about life, death, heaven, hell and angels were not the mumblings of a cynical hack mining religion for its sense of gravitas. Rather, they seem to have been the harbingers of a genuine, if unresolved, yearning for God.

So in the song ‘Sin, Sin, Sin’, Williams recognises the wrongness of his actions but carries on regardless. On ‘Make Me Pure’, defiance is mixed with a yearning for a different way of life… but not yet:

‘I got a ton of selfish genes and lazy bones
Beneath this skin
Oh Lord, make me pure — but not yet.’

Similarly, he is aware of the danger inherent in presuming on God’s continuing grace:

‘I stopped praying
So I hope this song will do
I wrote it all for you
I’m not perfect but you don’t mind that, do you?
I know you’re there to pull me through, aren’t you?’

He has seen the light in the hallway but doesn’t want to make for the door. But how long, he wonders, will God keep it open?

Williams seems to have been granted more than a glimmer of the truth but is consciously choosing to suppress it. This is what Paul writes of in Romans 1. What’s the first step along the road to debauchery? We suppress the truth about God. Adam and Eve suppressed the truth about God who had their best interests at heart and was not, as the serpent suggested, withholding something better from them.

Williams may have his reasons for wanting to suppress the truth, but this album is a moving confession that reveals a heart honest enough to know that it loves what chains it.

Lord, release him — and us — from the sins we cherish, into your intensive care.

Mark Greene

Printed with permission from The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity website (020 7399 9555, mail@licc.org.uk). Visit http://www.licc.org.uk for articles and events listings.