Robbie Williams Info Board

Take that, you Robbie bashers
Chris Heath explains why being famous, and rich to boot, is nowhere near as much fun as it looks in his Robbie Williams chronicle, Feel

Rafael Behr
Sunday September 26, 2004
The Observer

Feel: Robbie Williams
by Chris Heath
Ebury Press ?18.99, pp438
Being prodigiously famous, and rich to boot, is nowhere near as much fun as it looks.

To be precise, being a pop megastar, recovering alcoholic and jaded Lothario means that life is not as much fun as it used to be. And, come to think of it, it was never that much fun because all the drink and the drugs and the women were really a desperate cry for help by a depressed victim of the cynical, exploitative fame industry.

So, all in all, who'd choose to be Robbie Williams? Not Robbie himself is the short answer to a two-year-long question posed by Chris Heath in a magazine interview that started in 2002, ran on a bit and became a book.

When Heath, a Rolling Stone feature writer, starts his tenure as court chronicler to the Williams entourage, Robbie has just moved to Los Angeles. He is splitting up with long-time songwriting partner, Guy Chambers, while finishing work on Escapology, his fifth album. The hero is moody, funny, exuberant, paranoid, depressed, introspective and bored.

Two years later, Escapology has sold millions. Robbie is even more famous and rich. He is still moody, funny, anxious, exuberant etc.

But in the interim, he has blurted out a life story in random spasms of sincerity: carefree schooldays in Stoke-on-Trent; bullying in Take That, the boy band that made him famous; a wilderness of coke and booze; detox; anti-depressants; a gigantic solo career.

Robbie's world emerges in non-linear fashion, a Venn diagram of goodies, baddies and necessary evils: The parents (good), the fans (not bad), several Heat magazines' worth of showbiz A-listers (mostly bad), Take That management (very bad indeed).

Then there is Robbie Williams, the media clone, fuelled by tabloid editors' cheque books and paparazzi flash bulbs, evil nemesis to the real Robbie Williams.

It is this volatile relationship between the man and his fame that emerges as the most enduring affair in Robbie's itinerant life and Heath wisely builds it into the main narrative edifice, sticking on for effect the shiny bits of showbiz anecdote that he has magpied away over the course of their long conversation.

It is a phenomenal piece of journalism. Not only did he secure access to, and win the trust of, a volatile and insecure pop diva, but he turned what could be a tedious litany of disingenuous modesty, boasting and poor-little-rich-kid self-loathing into an absorbing essay on fame and the music industry.

Heath necessarily ends up plastering his own judgments over the cracks between grotesque tabloid fictionalisation of Robbie's life and the performer's own failure to articulate. He makes it his business to set the record straight: Robbie is not gay, Robbie means well, Robbie is not a snob, Robbie is basically a decent bloke. How would you like it if your private life was everybody's business?

It all gets a bit polemic. But then Heath should know. Or at least he clearly knows better than most of the hacks who write about Robbie Williams.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1312990,00.html