Lee Ryan: pleasantly skitz

Quoted from: http://www.lnreview.co.uk/

'August 25, 2005
Do we need Robbie Williams any more? Did we ever? Obviously it's dangerous to make sweeping statements about a person you know only through tabloid distortions and the skewed lens of fame, but Robbie Williams has always struck me as a prick. A cocky fraud with a empty twinkle in his twonky eye. An annoying, jumped-up flapper. A bore. A prick.*
So that's Robbie.
Now. Lee Ryan. Let's compare. Lee Ryan is just as buffed and boisterous. He's fresh from a boy band. And he's ploughing that George Michael furrow that Robbie so ploddingly ploughed after Take That. They're competitors.
Robbie's appeal is meant to be that he's a bit brazen, a bit 'out-there', a wild card, a ladies man (!), the cheeky chappy you can't help but like. The kind of guy girls fancy and men want to be.** He's an entertainer. That's his big ticket. A crowd pleaser. Tongue out, shorts dropped. Wa-hey!
What does Robbie do that Lee doesn't do better? No one currently at work in the music industry can drop his shorts and get his cock out like Lee Ryan. Not even Van Morrison.
Robbie and Lee can both sort of sing. Lee's new album is tremendously bland, but at the same time it's surprisingly inoffensive (except where its blandness becomes a bit too Aztec Camera-ish, like on 'Close To You'). It's cheesy, but I quite like the song 'When I Think Of You'. And 'Miss My Everything' isn't a bad Stevie Wonder pastiche. Basically - if you want to buy an album by someone you want to have intercourse with, then it does the job. It exists. And it doesn't make you giddy and violent.
And there's no denying: measured against his peers, Lee Ryan strikes you as someone it would be quite interesting to have intercourse with. He's obviously genitally fixated - like boys at school who think it's a brilliant laugh to get their cock out at the back of the class and wrap it up in elastic bands. But he's fixated in a fairly harmless way. He has gasping sexual needs - but he's not needy like Paul Danan. He's not creepy. He's funny.
Where Robbie has a nauseating swagger, Lee skitters along like a mentalist. Lee is obviously a bit of a prick, but in a strangely endearing way. His obsession with ghosts and the afterlife, for example: 'Chat to the ghosts! That's what I do!' - or: 'I think about dying a lot.'
And even when he talks about being a-bit-mad-me, he wins you over with his choice of words: 'What happens was, I was a baby and I was crawling along and she closed the garage door on me. That's why I'm a bit skitz!'
That's what all our pop stars should be: a bit skitz. It makes being a bit of a prick so much easier to swallow.'