Robbie Williams’ reveals what he really thinks about his fame, fans and his beauty secrets

IF you have ever left a snarky comment on Robbie Williams’ social media about his looks you could very well have driven him to the needle.

The Botox needle that is.

The 42-year-old British superstar has shattered the usual celebrity cone of silence to reveal his now not-so-secret beauty secrets.

“I’ve had Botox and some fillers and something done to my chin,” he admits. “And I really like it. With the last few albums I put out I looked on social media people were saying ‘F--- he’s aged’. And I was like ‘Yeah, I have’. I was tired, I had mental illness and stress and whatever was going on up there was coming out in my face. The truth of my mind was written on my face.”

Hitting the TV circuit to promote his new album The Heavy Entertainment Show, Williams — a notorious self-Googler — is thrilled by the lack of comments on his new appearance.

“No-one was saying I looked old. I don’t think I’ll take it to that Hollywood freaky level. We’re at the beginning of people outing themselves as this being a usual thing.”

A serial over-sharer in an increasingly beige era of pop stars, Williams previously admitted to having a procedure to thicken his hair.

“Guys don’t talk about having their hair done. They do not talk about it in public, but I did. I thought ‘Yeah, I’m gonna try this sh — out’. I had something done I didn’t need done, I was just bored. I will try anything once. Not just related to vanity, but anything. Kangaroo meat? Sure, let’s have some f---ing kangaroo.”

Promoting his Swings Both Ways album three years ago, Williams was about to turn 40 and struggling with the idea of being a pop star going grey.

“Pop stars shouldn’t be grey but pop stars also shouldn’t have badly dyed hair! I saw a few photos of myself with badly dyed hair and I thought being grey is infinitely better than that f---ing mess you’ve got on your head right now. So this is it, I’m going for it. I’m 42. In pop star years that’s 1042 years old.”

Williams’ last two tours have literally started with him walking on stage and stating “allow me to reintroduce myself”.

He’s the first to note that his “imperial period” started to wane when he split — acrimoniously — with Guy Chambers, the co-writer of anthems Angels, Feel, Let Me Entertain You, Better Man and Rock DJ and the bulk of his albums which have sold more than 75 million copies.

Subsequent albums saw Williams try different co-writers and musical direction — most infamously 2006’s Rudebox. The white hip hop title track was deemed career suicide by some. During our chat when asked about mistakes Williams notes “don’t rap on a record”.

However the album saw Williams become one of the first superstars to work with Mark Ronson (their Lovelight remains one of his finest singles) as well as the Pet Shop Boys and William Orbit. The experimental “career suicide” album still sold close to five million copies.

By 2009’s Reality Killed The Video Star, made with iconic producer Trevor Horn the record’s only major hit was Bodies and he’d ‘retired’ from touring; a usual method to push sales.

2012’s Take the Crown was mainly written with young Melbourne musicians Tim Metcalfe and Flynn Francis, who Williams met through his wife, American actor Ayda Field. Field and Williams have two children, daughter Theodora Rose (four) and son Charlton Valentine (two), who spend their time between their LA and London homes.

(Francis and Metcalfe co-wrote Motherf----r, on The Heavy Entertainment Show, which is Williams’ gift to his son.)

A European stadium tour for Take the Crown saw Guy Chambers joining Williams on stage for the first time since 2002, healing a rift that started when Williams wrote the hit Come Undone with different partners.

Chambers and Williams’ partnership was reactivated for his second swing album, Swings Both Ways.

Chambers has co-written and produced the bulk of The Heavy Entertainment Show, much of it what could be called “vintage Robbie”, but in their renewed creative relationship Williams is now openly seeing other people.

“Guy’s like my brother and with any family there’s classic dysfunction. This time because there’s other people about, and there wasn’t in the beginning, it’s very much like a football team. There’s someone else who could take your place so you better f---ing score. And that does bring the best out of Guy.”

Ed Sheeran co-writes the funky Pretty Woman. “I sent him an email, he sent me that song,” Williams says.

“There’s a quality that’s happening there with Ed Sheeran and Bruno Mars that I’m not reproducing. I’m not as good as that. That’s where I should be. It’s because of Ed that I wrote 80 songs for this album. The first albums I’d write 17 songs. By the Reality Killed the Video Star period I’d just smoke a load of weed and come in and try and do things — if we did, great, if we didn’t, fine. So now I’m like OK, I get it.

“You realise when you are pop you sort of can’t miss, because you are it, and then it goes away and it becomes something else with someone else. You see what’s going on in the charts and there’s a Shake It Off or Uptown Funk, there might be five songs a year that do what they do, maybe less, and they’re really special. I’m in a position where I’ve got to go out and find them. I’m not pop any more, I’m not that, I’m not riding the precipice of it being me. So I had to work harder.”

Mixed Signals is a song written by the Killers that they gifted to Williams via their producer-in-common Stuart Price. It’s as good as Mr Brightside or When You Were Young, and now it belongs to Williams.

“The Killers are connoisseurs of rock,” Williams says. “They are also great gatekeepers of the finely tuned, mystically crafted pop song. And they gave one of them to me. That made me feel good.”

While The Heavy Entertainment Show is his eleventh album, Williams views it as his sixth — the one that should have followed 2002’s Escapology, his last pop collaboration with Chambers.

“It’s the sixth album. It’s the one that follows the fifth. I didn’t value what I had on the fifth album. I wanted to do anti that. F---ing with chemistry, self-sabotage, wanting to experiment, broaden my horizons — you could put that all in the same pie. Now I’m in a position where I’m going ‘OK, let’s do the sixth album, what would that sound like?’ That was my goal. I’ve done it.”

Samples of each track were put on Williams’ social media. Naturally, he monitored the reaction.

“I don’t think I’ve seen a reaction to an album of mine from the fans since Escaplogy where it’s universally being received through the sampler as ‘Yep, this is what we want, this is the person I fell in love with’.”

Most pop stars insist they never read the comments. Robbie Williams, thankfully, is not most pop stars.

“I read everything. Yes it’s dangerous. Yes it crushes the soul. But I’m addicted to it. Yes I concentrate on the bad ones. I’m addicted to a lot of stuff that makes me feel full stop. Feel angry. There’s an energy in that that’s addictive. I’m addicted to stuff that strokes my ego, there’s an energy to that. I’m addicted to everything about it.”

Williams says his success — which began with Take That almost 25 years ago before becoming even more popular as a solo act — doesn’t provide vindication or silence the negative voices.

“(My biggest success) was happening at my most lack of self worth. I didn’t say f--- you when I sold 1.6 million tickets in a day and broke the world record. I was saying ‘I shouldn’t be having that, I don’t deserve this, how the f--- will I live up to that?’ I’ve never bathed in the luxury of putting two fingers up to everybody because I believe in the negative aspect of my brain. Success staves off those people actually killing me. Or destroying my very core and my very being.

“I used to say during the imperial phase when an album would come out and I’d own Christmas ‘Well it’s not this year’. I was in a boy band where we were led to believe it was going to last for two minutes and it’d all be stripped away. And it stuck. I thought I’d end up living in Stoke on Trent working for my mum in the flower shop. That’s how it feels.”

Robbie Williams - Love My Life (Lyric video)

However Williams admits he’s genuinely back in love with having “the best job in the world”, preparing to tour with his kids who give him the perspective he dangerously lacked before.

He’ll tour The Heavy Entertainment Show next year and is back in promosexual mode, even though he admits every major TV appearance causes his “trauma” — including his recent Graham Norton chat about self-love, which he obsessed about for a month before it happened.

“I’m in a place where the trauma is manageable. It’s not destroying me or making me want to obliterate myself with drink and drugs and feelings. A lot of that has got to do with the work I’ve done on myself, but also my wife and my kids. I go to work and there’s a purpose. We’re going somewhere, we’re doing something. The purpose makes everything make sense.

“This is my job. It’s what I do. I heard Bob Dylan say performing is his job. I had a conversation with Bono backstage and he said ‘I see myself as an actor’. OK, I get it. Bob Dylan goes to work. Bono acts. I can do that. And with the kids everything makes more sense. Before I was on stage staring into the abyss and the abyss stared back and it fried my head, I couldn’t make any sense of anything. There’s no support groups for A-list celebrities — ‘How come I’m frazzled and don’t understand?’ It’d be interesting to have a support group for A-list celebrities when they become not A-list any more. ‘OK, who’s going to have a word with him?’”

The Heavy Entertainment Show (Sony) is out Friday and is available for pre-order now.

Originally published as Robbie: ‘I’ll put it all out there’