Robbie the angel of Mission Concert
Close to 25,000 flooded the estate paddock on Saturday to see Williams
Anyone who expected Robbie Williams to give anything new to the Napier crowd would be overthinking.
But it doesn’t detract from the fact that Williams is a phenomenon to rival the Mission Concert itself.
They’ve had near parallel careers, so to speak, and based on Saturday night, neither has a use-by date.
Thirty-three years after embarking on a music career, almost 26 as a solo act, and after almost 31 years since the first Mission Concert in 1993 – including two giant acts this year – close to 25,000 flooded the estate paddock on Saturday to see Williams.
Many were there for eight hours. And similar numbers were set to do the same today.
This is Hawke’s Bay’s biggest event. It’s yet another gift after all the region has been through since the floods of Cyclone Gabrielle nine months ago.
An ideal sunny afternoon turned to a genuine Hawke’s Bay twilight, and a chill came on once the sun disappeared behind the hill. Be ready for the chill.
But the primer is on throughout, with Napier Girls’ High School boarder and Dannevirke teenager Molly Pawson getting the show on the road soon after the gates opened and the most eager of the queue had ignored the urgings from the security staff to “slow down” as they bolt for the prime spots of General Admission.
She’s followed by previous Mission support acts Danica Bryant, a Bay View lass now up from Wellington with her band, Stretch, with his cellist and drummer, and Ladyhawke, the now-44-year-old, from Masterton and the rest of the world, with her band – the volume turned up a notch with each new arrival on stage until the blast greeting the appearance of Williams soon after 8pm. In an evening dominated by the sound, screen and light show, Williams gets it going the now standard opener of the hand-clapping Hey Wow Yeah Yeah, from his ninth solo album in 2012, merging with Let Me Entertain You, from the first, in 1997.
On what is also now an oft-told life story from the pathway of a lad with no rules, to being one of the “five Manchester boys” in the band, to the point where he could tell the rest “I am ******* famous,” he makes it soon clear he has one particular purpose on the night.
“The No 1 rule is you must love your audience,” he says, and is soon focusing some of the attention on them, getting close and personal with “Simon and Cathy” at the front of the crowd, and later another couple, getting around the issue of having to ask a bloke if he didn’t mind him talking with the man’s wife.
Ah, the lad is a bit of a cad. But it’s all part of reaffirming to the crowd – on one occasion with a touch of actual emotion – that having said he’d never get married and have kids, he’s been married 18 years, has four “kids”, and that this is all the reason he’s “still on this planet”.
There’s a harkening to it through the evening as he reels through the hits – Strong, Love My Life, Supreme, Feel, and Kids – and a Don’t Look Back
In Anger cover.
They’re all there before what might have once been called the “encore” but which in this case arrives more than half an hour before it’s due to end.
No Regrets, She’s The One, and Angels were truly some way to end, the crowd obediently raising their cellphones in salute for a display of moving lights of their own making.
Dame Kiri Te Kanawa never had such an opportunity when she did the first Mission Concert in 1993, and these nights in 2023 end on one hand with a reflection on how far technology has taken the concert entertainment industry over the three decades, and the return to reality as the crowd throngs towards the gates, impeded by some just not yet ready to leave, and some nearleglessly unable to.
It’s Williams’ fifth concert expedition to New Zealand. The first was in 2001, the “Escapology Tour” act came two years later, with Duran Duran at Auckland’s Western Springs (which has seen Elton John, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Marley and the Rolling Stones), the “Let Me Entertain You” tour in 2015 (Auckland and Wellington), and then last time in 2018 (Auckland, Dunedin).
He gets around, this boy, but he’s been a bit quiet lately, having in the last eight weeks done just the Singapore Grand Prix, with Post Malone and Kings of Leon, and on October 18 a gig in Abu Dhabi.
The concerts in Napier, the only ones in New Zealand, crank up a tour of 11 dates in Australasia, the next in Sydney on Thursday and the last at Nicola Estate Winery, near Perth on December 1, before heading for two opening the ski season at Schladming, Austria, on December 7-8.
The point is the Mission concerts have made Taradale, Napier, and Hawke’s Bay very privileged, and Saturday was one of those occasions.
And even on a chilly night, 49-yearold Robert Peter Williams had a go at baring that famous chest.