No Regrets
by Robbie Williams
Writers - Williams/Chambers
First released - 1998
Original album - I've Been Expecting You (Williams)
Producer - Guy Chambers, Steve Power
Subsequent albums - Greatest Hits (Williams); In and Out of Consciousness: Greatest Hits 1990–2010 (Williams)
Other releases - single (UK #4)
Not one but two Neils sing backup on this 1998 single, which appears on Williams's U.K. album I've Been Expecting You and his U.S. album The Ego Has Landed. There's of course "our" Neil, and then there's Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy. Williams reportedly phoned Neil up one day and asked him to drop by the studio to provide backing vocals on, as he described it, "this new Pet Shop Boys-style tune I've just written."
I wonder if it's the "vicious melancholia" (as one writer has put it) of this song, dedicated to his former Take That bandmates, that made him feel it was in a PSB vein.
In 2022, Williams re-recorded "No Regrets" with Metropole Orkest—a Dutch ensemble that eschews classical music for jazz, pop, and film scores—for his career-spanning retrospective XXV (for his 25 years as a solo artist). As one might expect, Neil's support vocals are not part of this new recording of the song.
List cross-references
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