Rock review: He waggles charmingly, that lad

The album is, to be honest, a load of old cobblers. Robbie Williams's Life Thru a Lens is an aggregation of rascally gestures copped from the style-books of The Who, the Stones, Oasis and Elton John, bent to the task of shining the light of personal integrity on their curator, while having a few laughs and shedding a few tears along the way. It's not as satirical, nor as touching as Robbie no doubt thinks it is, but it has a certain camp charm to it and plenty of madcap energy. Norman Wisdom used to be excellent at this sort of thing.

This is, of course, the top tiara in Robbie's triple crown of a career. First there was Take That. Then he left Take That and became friends with Oasis. Now he has his own album and a tour around the fleshpots of middle England, with which to convince the world of his credentials as the pop star you go for when you've grown out of boy bands but don't yet want to go all the way. In Southampton on Thursday they were gagging for it.

There is something strangely magnificent about a civic hall full of 15-year-old girls doing their nuts. I'm not sure what it is that's magnificent, but it's a fact. Robbie Williams is certainly au fait. He has a charming way of walking that involves a lateral waggle, taking his middle a couple of feet sideways for every yard the rest of him travels forwards. Several girls at the front would go absolutely sparko every time he did this and have to be hauled bodily out of the melee by kindly-looking men with no necks.

This is an obligatory ritual at such shows, along with the handing out of free refreshments to those about to go sparko, and the spraying of overheated areas of the audience with giant atomisers. Also, it's obligatory for a bra to be lobbed at the star, either by a local ingenue or by a roadie dressed up as one. When the bra landed, Robbie picked it up and showed quite good timing in hooking it on to his chest and quoting Vic Reeves: "Wot? You sayin' ah've got nowt, like?!"

He's all right, Robbie Williams. He has a certain charisma, he knows what he's about, he doesn't pretend that his audience has come for something that it hasn't. Nor is he entirely without musical nous. It may not be the most imaginative choice of song for one such as he to cover, but David Bowie's "Kooks" is at least the right song. If nothing else, he deserves his moment because he is at present the real thing: pop's most authentic naughty little monkey.

One day, some languid smartypants will come up with a pithy observation that will, at a stroke, make redundant 40 years of received wisdom about what puts the funk into funky. "What you have to realise," the smartypants will say, citing the marginality of such pygmies as Muddy Waters, Keith Richards, Lee Perry and Miles Davis, "is that, in music, it ain't what you leave out that counts but what you put in."

This will immediately cause headaches for groups like Attica Blues (Subterania, Sun). Attica Blues, like Massive Attack, Portishead, Morcheeba, Baby Fox, Olive, Lamb, Cheese 'n' Biscuits and everyone on the Mo'Wax label, cleave to the opposite point of view - that empty sonic space is everything in music, and the more of it you have, the more plangent will be the things you have to say, especially if you separate those empty spaces with understated samples, the odd plonk on a bass keyboard, and wistful ambient hooting.

The trouble with this method is that it leads to competition, causing groups to up the ante on emptiness and vie with one another over who has the most indolent grooves. Attica Blues are rookies in the field, with a debut album out recently on Mo'Wax, but they are immensely slow and have hardly anything at all dividing their voids.

There are three of them in the group. One guy tinkers with samples and decks, another guy plonks on the bass keyboard and percussion, and the girl sings. They are an engaging bunch, especially the singer, who remains unpretentious in her attitude while mixing metaphors about the coming of new dawn and morals rusting and decaying. Trouble is, it appears that it's only just dawned on her that she has a lovely honeyed contralto, with a natural swoop to it and a delicate wobble in its cadence. So she sings in the way we all do when we discover the ideal spot in the bathroom, with lots of sustained notes and drawn out vowels. Which is all very well and mood shaping, but palls a bit after the sixth number in which forward motion has been suggested by a doubled-up bass thump deployed every three seconds like a tent pole under a rigidly guyed canopy of clicky sounds and hooting. As the King of Prussia might have observed, Attica Blues are splendid indeed, but perhaps they do not play enough notes.

There was no shortage of notes at Ronnie Scott's on Wednesday, when Elvin Jones brought his Jazz Machine to Soho in time to celebrate what would have been his old boss, John Coltrane's 71st birthday. Jones is the polyrhythmic octopus who did most in the early Sixties to suggest that modern jazz could be the intellectual experience you felt in your bones, your water, your gristle, in fact in every part of your corporeal being. His huge, circulating platforms of rhythm stood both as launchpad and control to Coltrane's feverish explorations of inner space and have come to stand as one of the fundamental motions in modern jazz. There have been drummers with greater range, but none, surely, who has so gleefully made an incredibly complex structure come over with the simplicity of a bodily function.

Jones's accuracy may not be quite what it was but my, the old man has a lesson to teach. His interpretation of the standard "You Don't Know What Love Is" chiefly featured pianist Carlos McKinney and pulled and sucked at the sensibilities like a really good narrative. One was reminded of the important fact that musical time is elastic in a way that lived time isn't and that it isn't the quantity of notes you play that counts but the relationship the notes bear to each other and to the space in time they displace. There's probably a moral in there somewhere.

Robbie Williams: Wolverhampton Civic Hall (01902 312030), tonight; Manchester Academy (0161 275 4815), Mon; Liverpool Royal Court (0151 709 4322), Wed; Leeds T&C (0113 280 0100), Thurs; Glasgow Barrowlands (0141 552 4601), Fri. Attica Blues support Morcheeba on their national tour starting on Tues at Sheffield Leadmill (0114 275 4500).

Nicholas Barber reviews television, page 6.