Oh bollocks, he’s back. I honestly thought Rudebox had killed the career of the spectacularly overrated Mr Williams, but it seems that a reunion with Take That has allowed him another crack of the solo whip, and Candy has become the UK’s fastest selling single of 2012.
Just like the rest of Williams’ music, Candy (written with Take That colleague and X Factor judge Gary Barlow) is a three minute exercise in smugness. It’s pitched half way between pop and those horrible swing style songs on which Williams used to do bad Sinatra karaoke, and seems custom designed to appeal to the Radio 2 crowd (which is why I can’t understand the controversy about Radio 1 not playlisting it, though their explanation that Williams isn’t relevant to their 15-29 target audience leaves a bit to be desired, Take That surely still have fans between those poles).
The lyrics are a series of non-sequiters that appear to be about an attractive and free-spirited woman named Candice (“She’s got lots of different horses by lots of different men”). The video casts Williams – that unbearably smug, self-satisfied, grin pasted on his face as per usual – as a kind of guardian angel, but one who causes harm to everyone but Candice. You could of course take it as a sad tale; the end of the song’s chorus informs us that she’s “got low self esteem and vertigo ’cause she thinks she’s made of Candy”. I don’t know about you, but if that’s true I think rather than a Robbie-shaped guardian angel who punches old ladies in the face, while singing bland pop music, Candice could do with some mental health treatment, perhaps a combination of CBT and anti-depressants.
Candy is a bouncy little song, and I get why it’s appealing to the middle of the road crowd; it’s inoffensive background noise of the type that five albums a year people like their record collections to be made up of, but the minute you actually sit down to listen to it properly it’s just another tediously formulaic pop record from a tedious man I thought had finally fucked off.
...WHAT F**KING IAN GUY? 