"Millennium" started being written in 1997.
Robbie Williams and producer
Guy Chambers were at Blah Street Studios in
Hampshire, where Williams expressed the idea to do something based on
James Bond. Chambers sampled "
You Only Live Twice" by
Nancy Sinatra from the
1967 Bond film of the same name, which featuring what he considered an "iconic intro" that "grabs you straight away". Williams wanted the addition of a
hip-hop beat, which was achieved by speeding up the sample. Chambers then created a simple
bassline for the verses. When Williams' lyrics were mostly done, Chambers felt it lacked "an obvious title for the track", and suggested "Millennium" for being "both strong and topical". Chambers said in a retrospective review, "There was a lot of talk about
the millennium back then, it's a bit like the '
Brexit' word now". Chambers asked for a "
football chant", which only had a melody before Williams came up with "come and have a go if you think you're hard enough", a phrase used by
Melanie C during the
1997 Brit Awards and directed at
Liam Gallagher, whom Williams was also feuding with. The whole writing process took about four hours. Chambers described "Millennium" as "the simplest song Robbie and I have ever written - only two chords. And it's written in
D flat major, which is very unusual in
pop music." Once co-producer
Steve Power heard the demo they found potential for a single given it showed a different sound from Williams' debut album
Life thru a Lens. As Power explained: "It had the more programming-based feel that we wanted to introduce on the second album in order to get away from the guitar-based feel of the first album, and it already had the chorus hook, the Bond theme sample, on the demo version, which I remember mixing before last Christmas."
Trident Studios in London was used for the majority of the recordings, including drums, bass and samples for the backing track, and the backing vocals, which included three female session singers and male vocals by Williams' guitarist
Gary Nuttall. Williams' vocals were done at Jacobs Studios in
Surrey. Williams suggested using a sample only accompanied by a
hip-hop beat. Guy Chambers found a beat by speeding the sample up. The record label,
Chrysalis Records, discovered that a new recording would cost only one tenth of the licensing fee required to sample "You Only Live Twice", so they asked for a new string section that still acted as a recognisable
pastiche of the song.
Nick Ingman arranged the orchestra, which according to Power "was in the wrong
key for 'Millennium', although we did want it to sound like the original sample in the choruses and we did refer to
John Barry's
original score for that", and conducted a 26-piece string section, plus harp and four
French horns, at
Angel Recording Studios in
Islington to the programmed backing track, with a guide vocal over the top. Power said the song used most of the 48 tracks offered by the
multitrack tape: "We had about six tracks of backing vocals, and nine tracks for the strings. Then there were the programmed tracks; and when you get into programming, you'll layer about four kick drums to tape! For speed, and to keep the creative flow going, we put them all down to separate tracks rather than spend time deciding which one we wanted loudest when recording. So we had a lot of independent outs from the programmed backing track onto separate multitrack channels, like the programmed percussion and sampled noises. Then there were the unused scratching tracks, and the live percussion - all in all, I think we filled maybe 36 or 38 tracks in total." ==Chart performance==