Robbie Williams Info Board

It’s really not very difficult to discern Robbie Williams’s favourite conversational topic. Even Robbie is quite clear on which subject he finds most enthralling — himself. His self-absorption is monumental, but at least it has earned him some insight into the life of the UK’s biggest pop star. As he said a couple of years ago: “By all rights, I should be in Stoke-on-Trent in some pub right now talking about how I used to sing when I was a kid. I shouldn’t be a famous pop star. However, I do work bloody hard and I’m bloody good at it so I do probably deserve it after all.”
There, in a small but perfectly formed soundbite, lies the appeal of Robbie Williams. You can just see the big grin. Cocky enough to half-believe that he deserves the money, attention and acclaim; vulnerable enough to wonder out loud if it isn’t all some big cosmic mistake.
For the man Noel Gallagher of Oasis once derided as “the fat dancer from Take That”, the surprisingly tall lad (he is well over 6ft) from the Potteries has done more than OK.

His record sales are touching 35 million, he re-signed to EMI in 2002 for £80 million, last year he played a record-breaking three dates at Knebworth to an aggregate crowd of 375,000 and he is about to release his first greatest hits set. On the downside, he’s a recovering drug and alcohol addict, he has split from his long-time songwriting partner Guy Chambers, and he has failed to break into the one market, America, that would ensure he would become, as he once forecast to a horrified Bono, “the biggest celebrity ever”.

Here we warm to his cheeky grin, affable rudeness, puppy dog eyes and tempestuous personal life. But why has the nation fallen quite so hard for Robbie? What makes him so special? A large part of the fascination stems from his having lived nearly half of his 30 years in the spotlight of fame. Since he joined Take That when he was 16 and subsequently became part of one of the biggest pop phenomena of the 1990s, his life has played out in the manner of a particularly far-fetched soap opera. Not only has Williams been subject to all the stories about drugs, sex, recriminations, rumours, and weight problems, he’s enthusiastically embraced the concept of speaking freely about all these issues. Even the recent official biography, Feel, by a friend and journalist, Chris Heath, is marked by an apparent candour rarely evident in other puff biogs.

It’s as if Williams just can’t help himself — his self-obsession is such that, as in the video for Rock DJ, he wants to strip himself down to the bone, exposing himself, making himself transparent. This willingness to engage with the public, through the conduit of the media obviously, is what marks him out as unusual. Though Williams may grumble and whine about how he is treated in the media, his conspiracy with the fourth estate has ensured that he has attained a level of popularity and inspired a degree of affection with the nation that has probably not been seen since the days of Diana, Princess of Wales. Like the Princess, Robbie appears to be an open book. His public utterances are designed to make people love him more. He needs to be loved. The boy just can’t help it . . . Except it’s not quite as clear-cut as that. Although Williams is revered as a masterful entertainer, with a wicked sense of humour and an outrageous lifestyle, and has thus managed to become all things to all men, there is something strangely insubstantial about the man. It’s as if in giving so much away he’s not kept much for himself.

The trajectory of his very public career offers pointers to how this has happened. Right from the start of his time with Take That, Williams was made to feel unworthy. The band was built around the songwriting ability of Gary Barlow, a man Williams still despises, calling him mean and mean-spirited. The band’s manager, the flamboyant Nigel Martin-Smith, didn’t like Williams and made this clear. Martin-Smith, to whom Williams refers as “the spawn of Satan”, was one of the prime movers along with Barlow in the removal of Williams from the band. Much of Williams’s drive is still derived from his hatred of Barlow and Martin-Smith — he needs to prove them wrong and to rub it in in the process.

Although Williams was relieved finally to leave Take That after an acrimonious split in 1995, he hardly set the pop world alight immediately with his solo career. There followed the, at the time, momentous meeting of minds with Oasis’s Gallagher brothers at Glastonbury (I was there, and can report that there was some inept keepy-uppy with a plastic football and lashings of lager, but little more) that was seen as a key point in the takeover of the mainstream by Britpop and which led to Williams embarking on his notorious year-long lost weekend during which time he dusted himself liberally in Class A drugs and soused himself in alcohol.

Although now four years into abstinence, he admits that he was totally out of control to the extent that Elton John “kidnapped” him to put him in rehab. For a few years afterwards he denied that he had ever had a problem with alcohol or drugs. In a 1997 interview with The Times, Williams derided suggestions of addiction as “complete and utter rubbish. At the time of the reports that I was battling with addiction I was sitting in my nan’s house, having a cup of tea. I’ve done a few drugs, and I had some good times on them, then I had some bad times on them, and then I stopped. But I never needed them, which is what I believe the dictionary would say ‘addiction’ means.”

Of course, Williams could exemplify the definition of “in denial”. Although such bare-faced deception is not unusual in pop and makes cynics of journalists who interview flaky pop stars, Williams’s lies are just a little disconcerting as they undermine his reputation for honesty and straightforwardness.

A quick glance at his recording career since his 1997 debut solo album, Life Thru a Lens, would confirm that the only constant with Williams is his lack of constancy. Over the course of five albums, image-wise he has careened from the Kiss make-up and swagger of Let Me Entertain You to the suave James Bond stylings of his second LP, I’ve Been Expecting You, to the Fifties jazz-crooner-with-sensible-hair-and-mobbed-up-pals look of Swing When You ’re Winning (the album which, by the way, sewed up the Saga market, who had always loved the loveable rogue but previously found his music too loud).

Furthermore, his music has proved to be equally diverse, with the glutinous balladry of Angels contrasting with the pop extravagance of Millennium, the Chas ’n’ Dave funk of Rock DJ clashing with the epic melancholy of Feel (probably his best song). Now, to add to that, we have the new single, Radio, a rather unpleasant Eighties concoction that sounds like a Duran Duran B-side sung by a cartoon baddie. This magpie musical approach is indicative of an artist who wants everyone to love him. Williams is desperate to be cool, but is even more desperate to ensure that he’s liked by as many people as possible.

Williams’s odd lack of focus is also evident off stage, where, commendably, he has involved himself as a Unicef ambassador, raising awareness of Third World poverty and disease, as well as contributing to charitable projects in Stoke-on-Trent. Balance this against his prodigiously ruttish behaviour with women and, if hearsay be true, with men, and his oft-quoted desire to settle down and have a family, and you see that the real Williams is probably so deeply buried in self-propagated myth and rumour as to be invisible and, perhaps, untraceable.
Do the public care if the big-grinned cheeky chappy is the real thing? Are they really bothered whether Robbie is happy/suicidal/straight/gay/a genius/a philistine? Of course not. The Williams construct, with all its impossible angles and teetering façades, is a riveting edifice, brilliant entertainment. Who cares if it’s real?