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Robbie Williams · S1 E2
Pete Conway's Son
Growing up with a stand-up comedian dad who was never home
Stoke-on-Trent, 1986. Robbie Williams is twelve, standing in the wings of a working men's club, watching his father turn two hundred post-shift drinkers into an audience. The punchline lands, the room erupts, and something settles into the boy that no one will ever remove.
Strong (1998). Buried inside this song is the line: 'when I'm drunk I dance like me dad.' Most people have heard it a thousand times and never caught it. The father who was rarely in the house lives in every move his son makes onstage.
Strong (1998)
'Strong' is one of the most deceptively personal songs in Robbie's catalogue. The singalong chorus makes it sound like a straightforward anthem, but buried in the second verse is the line 'when I'm drunk I dance like me dad.' Guy Chambers layers the guitars to sound like 70s pub rock, a sonic portrait of the working men's club circuit Pete Conway spent his life on. Robbie sings about strength, but the song is really about inheritance.
The Circuit
Working men's clubs were the engine room of British entertainment for most of the twentieth century. Every industrial town in the North and the Midlands had them: cheap beer, a small stage, two sets a night. Pete Conway spent two decades on this circuit, good enough to make television but never famous beyond Staffordshire.
The Working Men's Club Files
“I learned how to charm a room from my dad. He worked on holiday camps.”
— Robbie Williams, Esquire, 2024
TAP TO REVEAL: The exact moment Robbie decided he wanted to be a performer.
Mr Bojangles -- Robbie Williams
From Swing When You're Winning (2001). A song about a worn-out entertainer who dances for strangers in bars. Robbie recorded an entire album of swing standards, channelling the exact variety show tradition his father spent his life in. This track is the closest he ever came to singing Pete Conway's biography.
On which ITV talent show did Pete Conway appear in the 1970s?
Next episode: 1987. Robbie is thirteen. His drama teacher gives him the lead role in a school production, and he steps onto a stage where the room responds to him, not to Pete Conway. The thing he feels is not nerves. It is recognition.
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