Robbie Williams - The Road To Mandalay

"The Road To Mandalay" may very well be my favourite Robbie Williams song. It's taken from his breakthrough album 2000's Sing When You're Winning, when he co-wrote his songs with Guy Chambers, the songwriting partner that has done him the most good sales-wise and not least quality-wise. It's an excellent pop tune, a cross between It's Immaterial's "Driving Away From Home" and a hodgepodge of Divine Comedy songs, succeeding brilliantly on its own in being fabulous. The video has nothing to do either with the 1926 silent movie of the same name, or with Rudyard Kipling's poem that also was turned into a song by Oley Speaks and popularized both by Peter Dawson and Frank Sinatra. Instead it's a homage to heist movies like The Italian Job in a Southern European, Mediterranean setting. Very well made, and obviously expensive to shoot.

Watch and listen