Millennium (Robbie Williams)
"We've got stars directing our fate" over sweeping James Bond strings — Robbie Williams' pre-2000 anthem gave him his first solo UK number one in September 1998. In America it was supposed to be his big breakthrough; it stalled at #72, which tells you the whole strange story of his career on this side of the Atlantic.
"Millennium" arrived on 7 September 1998 as the first single from Robbie Williams' second solo album, I've Been Expecting You, and went straight to the top of the UK singles chart — his first solo number one, three years after walking out of Take That. Written with his songwriting partner Guy Chambers, the song built its entire drama on the string theme from the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice, which is why Bond composer John Barry and lyricist Leslie Bricusse share the writing credit.
Those famous strings aren't actually a sample. When the label discovered that re-recording the orchestration would cost about a tenth of the fee for licensing the original, it commissioned a new recording — arranger Nick Ingman conducted a 26-piece string section at London's Angel Recording Studios to recreate the Barry sound. The Bond connection carried straight into the video: directed by Vaughan Arnell and shot at Pinewood Studios, it casts a tuxedoed Williams as a smirking 007 spoof, complete with a jetpack sequence — and a tiny Bond Bug standing in for the Aston Martin. It won British Video of the Year at the 1999 Brit Awards.
The song's title was perfectly timed merchandise for the pre-2000 mood — half toast to the future, half eye-roll at the anxiety around it — and it went platinum in the UK. But its American run is the revealing part. "Millennium" was pitched as the record that would finally introduce Britain's biggest pop star to the US, and it limped to #72 on the Billboard Hot 100. For most Americans it came and went as a shiny one-off from a singer they couldn't quite place — the man filling stadiums across the rest of the planet remained, here, the guy with the Bond-strings song.
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