Robbie Williams Info Board

Beverley Knight's decision to team up with Robbie William's old producer has resulted in her finest album in years. Angus Batey met them

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The first impressions of Guy Chambers’s studio in North London are of a hive of rock star activity. Easing past a phalanx of microphone stands and a stack of tapes marked “Annie Lennox”, you stumble upon an engineer seated at a vintage mixing desk that was once the property of Abbey Road Studios. A staircase, decorated with framed Beatles posters, leads up to a small living room. Lying on the table, beside laptops and an acoustic guitar, sits an invoice relating to a Charlotte Church session. Downstairs there is a knock at the door, and in walks the former Westlife member Bryan McFadden, who has arrived early for an afternoon of writing and recording with the man whose penmanship and production skill helped to make Robbie Williams a superstar.
Clearly, Chambers hasn’t had much time to regret the decision to stop working with Williams. According to contemporary reports, the partnership ended when Williams told him to stop writing with other stars, or stop working with him. That, though, is ancient history — THE EYE is not here to pore over the detail of that over-analysed contretemps, but to talk songwriting with Chambers and one of his most recent collaborators, Beverley Knight. Famed primarily for her powerful, gospel-reared voice, the 32-year-old proves with her fourth album, Affirmation, that she deserves recognition as a songwriter, too. She has written or co-written all but one of the songs, and her collaborators include Coldplay’s leader, Chris Martin. But the album’s bedrock writing partnership is that between Knight and Chambers. Together, they wrote her new single, the rambunctious rock stomp Come As You Are; the album’s breakbeat title track; a breezy, introspective song entitled Under the Same Sun; and No One Ever Loves in Vain, an emotive, piano-led lament for a dead friend that fizzes with defiant optimism.

“The best songs, I think, are the ones that are the most emotional,” Chambers suggests. “Angels is very raw, and with Feel, Robbie was at his absolute lowest point. He didn’t want to write that lyric, but he wrote it because he had to. That’s the sort of lyric that I’m interested in, not just words that rhyme nicely. And I think all of the songs that we’ve written for Affirmation are very real.”

No One Ever Loves in Vain certainly falls into that category. An affecting ballad that allows Knight’s voice to soar and that boasts a chorus with the sort of swelling chord progression favoured by the Beatles, ELO and Oasis, it was the first song that Beverley and Guy wrote, on the first morning that they started working together in May 2003. Its lyric and overall tone resulted from Knight’s attempt to come to terms with the death of her best friend barely three months earlier.

“Everything was very fresh,” Knight remembers. “It was something that was definitely going to be written about on the album, but I hadn’t faced up to it. I knew that broaching the subject would be tough, but when Guy came up with the title, that was the key.”

“It was like I had already got on to her wavelength by a sort of wonderful fluke,” Chambers adds. “I’d written a little riff on the piano at home that morning and come up with that title. Then Bev told me what had just been happening in her life, and how the title had summed it all up. It was almost like I’d read her mind.”

They may seem an unlikely pairing, but it doesn’t take long listening to them talk songs and songwriting, or indeed require much listening to their work together on Affirmation, to conclude that the Chambers and Knight partnership works on numerous levels. Theirs is a union of opposites: Knight, pushed to the forefront at church as a child and loving it ever since, and Chambers, the reluctant front man whose own attempts at being a pop star ended in failure. You sense that, in each other, they have found the perfect foil.

“In my house there was always a scramble for the piano,” Knight smiles, recalling her attempts to keep her brother and sister away from the keyboard during her childhood in Wolverhampton. “We’d try to play the songs off the radio or the hymns from church. And, of course, when you go to church, if you have even a tiny amount of an ability to do something, they’re like: ‘Right! You’re playing next Sunday!’ ” By 14, she had decided that she wanted not just to be a pop star, but to write her own songs as well.

“When I was 14 I felt there were things I could say,” Knight avers. “The more I did it (songwriting) the more I felt comfortable. As far as I was concerned, this was going to be my path — singing songs that directly affected me, and which, when they were given the right expression, could go on and connect with other people. But it wasn’t until I was about 20 that I thought any of it sounded any good.”

As for Chambers, he had one of his songs recorded by Marc Almond while he was still a 22-year-old music student. He went on to join the Waterboys, and then World Party, but remained a largely frustrated songwriter and ambivalent performer. He formed a group, the Lemon Trees, that got signed, but were dropped before releasing their second album. Given the huge success his songs have achieved since (one Lemon Trees song, Lazy Days, made it on to Williams’s first album), it might seem odd that Chambers didn’t make it as a performer — but that’s not how he sees it.

“The reason that it didn’t work out was because we didn’t have a star in the band,” he says. “There wasn’t someone like Rob or Beverley at the front to deliver the songs, to sell them. You have to have that. You have got to be uninhibited as well, and a bit larger than life. I think all the great people I’ve worked with are larger than life. I’m not, and I don’t want to be.”

Working with Knight has been an education for Chambers, who credits the singer with enhancing his understanding of grooves as opposed to melodies. He has also been refreshed to find that she is a confident and skilled lyricist.

“Most of the time, I actually sit down with the people I’m working with and we work on the lyrics together,” he explains. “With Robbie it was line by line, even though the songs are about him. Most of the lines are actually his lines, but he would come up with so many ideas that somebody had to write them down. I’m good at that, and he’s not.

“I’m good at sitting down with a pad and working it out, helping with the structure. But Bev would just wander off while I was fiddling about putting the tracks together, and a couple of hours later she’d come back with the lyrics pretty much finished.

“And the way we put the records together is very different,” he continues. “Working on these songs with Beverley has led me to work in a much more stripped-down, less showy way. The Robbie records are very layered, and full of little gimmicks, in both sound and writing. They’re more like Abba records, there’s always something going on. But with Bev it’s been about stripping it down and finding the absolute core of the song, which was exciting for me.”

And Knight, for her part, is delighted with the results. “I feel really strongly about working with Guy, and he’ll be my starting point for the next album,” she says. The problem now will be keeping the creative juices flowing as she begins the laborious task of promoting an album that the boss of Parlophone, Miles Leonard, has said is likely to be the best his company will release all year.

“I think you have to write regularly to help you process the s*** out better,” Chambers says. “This is one of the problems with being an artist — there isn’t enough music going on, and too much promotion.”

“If you have massive breaks from it, you lose the practice of songwriting,” Knight agrees. “Then you have this great big run-up to get up to standard before the real magic comes. You rise and fall on songs. Not on anything else, but on the songs. So it’s essential to keep that side alive.”