Robbie Williams emerges from the bedroom of his hotel suite, shakes my hand, explains that he’s just woken up – it’s 2.30 in the afternoon – and lights a cigarette. The latter comes as something of a surprise. For one thing, we’re in the kind of central London hotel where you suspect it’s ruinously expensive to ignore the no-smoking rule, but then again, you probably don’t worry about that kind of thing when you’ve shifted something like 75m albums, a figure that doesn’t even take into account the ones you sold as a member of Take That. But for another, Williams made a bit of a song and dance about giving up smoking when his first child was born, four years ago.
“Well, I did give up smoking,” he says. “But that’s the thing with having an addictive personality. One fire goes out and another pops up. And that fire became working out and eating Minstrels. I transferred the smoking to working out three hours a day, and then eating Minstrels for three hours every night. That’s not an exaggeration. And then I stopped the working out and just carried on with the Minstrels and I ballooned to the point where the Daily Mail suggested I was akin to Elvis before he died. It was horrible, terrible. I had to go on stage, too: ‘Yeah, I know, I look like Elvis before he died. Sorry, everybody, as I’m pointing at you suggestively, pretending that you think I’m sexy.’”
He laughs. “So I went on this pretty hardcore diet. You woke up and had a boiled egg, then nothing for five hours, then had vegetable broth, then steamed veg, then nothing until the next day. After five days of that, first off, I was really fucking emotional, because you’ve got nothing, your body’s starving. And the second thing is, you just needed something to suppress your appetite, so this started again. I tried to hide it from my wife for five weeks. What I’d do, at night I’d hide my mouthwash and hand sanitiser in a safe place, then wake up an hour before she got up, climb out of the window, take my top off, so as not to smell of anything, then smoke, hand sanitiser and mouthwash, top back on, shoes off so as not to wake her up, climb back in the window.”
Alas, this elaborate deception came to grief. “You know the first smoke in the morning, when it makes you disorientated, but it’s quite beautiful? There were a few mornings when I couldn’t get back in the house for at least five minutes because I’d be so out of my fucking head. And then at one point, I mouthwashed myself with the hand sanitiser. Anyway, I’ve started smoking again. January’s the cut-off point, then I go on tour and I hope I don’t look like Elvis before he died. And, you know, when that fire goes out, hopefully the next one isn’t sugar. Or anything that will put my marriage in jeopardy.”
Addiction to Minstrels, inadvertently drinking hand sanitiser, starving yourself on boiled eggs and vegetable broth – it goes without saying that this is a substantially more rococo response to “Oh, I thought you’d stopped smoking” than you might expect. But over the course of the next hour, it transpires that it’s also very much a standard Robbie Williams answer: lengthy, frank, involved, testament to what Williams describes as his “pathological oversharing”, extremely entertaining and somehow leaving you with the sense that it must be fairly exhausting to be Robbie Williams, even when off-duty.
Cigarette in hand, he seems in a good mood. He dismisses stories that his recent single, Party Like a Russian, caused terrible offence in Moscow – “I’m grateful for the column inches, I could have released a ballad and not got any column inches, but I think it might actually be my biggest hit in Russia” - and talks happily about the fact that his four-year-old daughter, Theodora, might follow him into showbiz. “But if she does, she won’t have to be around psychologically damaging people, because Dad’s already been there. It’s like: ‘Right, those people you’re working with are cunts, we’ll find you some people that aren’t.’”
He appears unbothered even by this morning’s tabloids, which are packed with gripping photographs of removal men shifting furniture into his new London home, the palatial former residence of the late Michael Winner, over which Williams fought a lengthy and ultimately successful planning battle with his neighbour, Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. This seems very sanguine of him, given that he left Britain for Los Angeles in the first place because he was sick of tabloid intrusion; you would think the fact that the paparazzi are camped outside his house before he has even moved in might cause him to reconsider the wisdom of coming back.
“Well, the intense media spotlight that used to shine on me doesn’t shine on me any more,” he says. “There’s a story about the house, but it’s not really about me, it’s about warring neighbours, Stella Street. They might be around for a couple of months to see if they can see me throwing things at Jimmy Page’s house.”
He hasn’t thrown anything, although he did celebrate his victory in the planning dispute – a lot of which centred around underground excavations – by performing a version of Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love on stage, changing the lyrics to: “I’m gonna dig a big hole and fill it full of shit.” No, he says, he hasn’t spoken to Page. And no, he wasn’t wary of picking a fight with rock’s most celebrated dabbler in the occult.
“Well, you know, I’ve done a bit of time with Aleister Crowley myself. I’ve read some of his books. What did I learn from it? That it’s above my intellectual pay grade. That I didn’t understand what I was getting into, and that I could probably do myself some damage. ‘Oh, I’m out of my depth here,’ that’s what I picked up.”
We move on: quite clearly I’ve not been invited here to discuss his relationship with the written oeuvre of the Great Beast. Williams, 42, has a new album out, The Heavy Entertainment Show, which reunites him with Guy Chambers, with whom he co-wrote most of his biggest hits. It’s his 10th album and he’s alternately very hawkish about its chances of success and, in his words, “neurotically obsessed” with its potential failure. It’s partly just his nature, he says. “I’m neurotic and I find things to worry about, and if there’s nothing to worry about, I make something up.
“When we got put together in Take That, we were told it wasn’t going to last, you’d be lucky if you got five years. Even during the sort of imperial phase of my career, I’d be thinking: ‘Is it stopping now?’ I’m 25 years in now, but I’m still sort of waiting for the rug to be pulled from underneath me, for it all to be put back in a box and taken away from me, and for me to be sent back to Stoke-on-Trent: ‘See, you’re right, this is ultimately what you wanted, because you wanted to sabotage this, be found out for the charlatan you are, and you have to go and work for your mum at the flower shop.’
“So I think, underneath everything, that’s what’s propelled me forward, and also made me terrified at the same time. Not that working for my mum in the flower shop would be a terrifying prospect, it’s just that my life’s better now.”
But his fears are also something to do with the sheer scale of his success in the late 90s and early 00s, when, as he puts it: “I got my foot through the door, and then I fucking kicked the fucker open and then sledgehammered it to make sure that the door would die.” By popular consent, his commercial purple patch came to an end with 2006’s Rudebox, a much-derided attempt to take his music in a more leftfield direction. Although it’s perhaps worth noting that this legendarily career-stalling flop went platinum in 12 countries and sold 2m copies in Europe alone – one of the many mind-boggling statistics attached to that stage of his career (another is the one about Williams apparently being the biggest-selling non-Latino artist in the history of Latin America).
“I suppose I’ve just got to redefine success,” he says. “I’ve yet to shape it and whittle it and to convince myself that everything’s all right. You know, my last album would have been the peak of anyone’s career: double platinum, No 1, holding off One Direction for the Christmas week No 1, sold 2.3m. In this day and age, that’s a staggering success. But against my own success, there’s a light shining on it going: ‘He’s not selling 5m or 6m copies any more.’ I do realise that I’m in a place now where I’m not imperial. It’s not over by a long chalk, but I’m not imperial. When you’re imperial, it’s sort of like stepping up to a pool table and knowing you’re just not going to miss. Whatever you release, you’re not going to miss.”
He says he’s not even sure where he fits into the pop landscape any more; a look at the singles chart just before Party Like a Russian was released left him “thinking: ‘I’m fucked’, literally, ‘Oh, fuck, I’m fucked.’” If that seems a slightly melodramatic assessment of the situation, it’s certainly quite hard to imagine anyone else making an album like The Heavy Entertainment Show, where daft jokes and crowd-pleasing anthems sit alongside stuff such as Motherfucker, a song addressed to his two-year-old son, Charlie, forewarning him about his family’s history of mental illness. “Well, it’s true, there is a history of mental illness that runs through my family and through the whole human family, and the likelihood of my children having some sort of mental dysfunction is pretty high. But I’m forearmed, I’ve got a lot of information, and I don’t think they could do anything worse or get to a worse place than I did.”
Certainly, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Williams seems much happier now than he did during the mind-blowing-statistics years. I briefly met him in 2005, at the absolute zenith of his fame, when he invited a handful of journalists to a London studio to hear his forthcoming album Intensive Care. He turned up bearing a sheaf of papers, announced he had sat up all the previous night Googling everything we had ever written about him, and started arguing with everyone present about perceived slights dating back years. I left feeling a bit sorry for him: all that success and fame and adulation, and you’re up all night killing yourself because you think a critic misinterpreted a lyric on one of your album tracks six years ago. “Yeah,” he says, “but words are heavy, and we’re human. There were a lot of people who were touching the buttons of everything negative that I felt about myself, and it was all there in black and white. It’s the kind of thing that starts to make you feel agoraphobic and second-guess everything you do. There it is, in black and white, everything that I think about myself has been written down in this kind of intellectual way, where I cannot escape the fact of ‘yeah, that’s the sad cunt I am’. Anger about it kind of propelled me forward, but it’s not a quality I can afford to have right now, being a dad.”
Plus, he says, “we live in a very different world than we used to. I don’t think someone who’d left a pop band would feel the same way now. You know, one of One Direction being seen walking around Glastonbury isn’t the same as me walking around Glastonbury in 1995. There was a sort of indie fundamentalist mentality that was with us all the way through the 90s that was very apparent to me, where I was literally looked down on when I was in conversation with a lot of people in various drinking establishments. It was like people were scared that it was going to rub off on them; the Butlins redcoat or the Pontins bluecoat thing.”
It looks angry written down, but Williams says it all with a kind of resigned self-deprecation. Still, it casts a slightly different light on those photos of him, visibly the worse for wear and puppyishly following Oasis around Worthy Farm in 1995. Twenty years on, when pop stars are subject to infinitely more serious critical appraisal than so-called-indie artists these days – when whatever passes for indie music these days frequently sounds indistinguishable from mainstream pop – it’s hard to imagine the kind of widespread consternation that the sight of a boyband member daring to breathe the same rarefied air as the Gallagher brothers once caused.
“I was the underclass, because of who I was and where I’d come from, people had this contempt for me. There was this utterly pervasive contempt. When I was at Glastonbury it felt like the rest of the festival was like: ‘What the fuck are you doing here, you cunt?’ And I sort of wanted to be OK with the big boys, I wanted to be accepted, there’s a playground mentality that carries on through life and at that time, I wanted to be accepted by the bullies, and that became part of the very fabric of my DNA: ‘Oh, I’ll be accepted by these people eventually, right, here’s my new album. Oh, they’re not accepting me, they’re not coming.’ Now, I think I’m further down the road with it: ‘Look, this is who I am, this is what I’m capable of.’ About three albums ago, I sort of realised: ‘They’re definitely not coming, it’s not happening.’ I can be quite philosophical about it.” He smiles. “But then equally not, depending on what time of day it is.”
In fact, he says, he’s still riven with self-doubt. “I’ve been searching for confidence, real confidence, something of substance. It’s never coming, but I’ve realised I’m fucking brave. And I have a way of making trauma look confident on stage, and that’s my talent. My main talent is turning trauma into something that looks showbizzy. Something happens once I put my foot on a stage and very rarely does the mask slip. I don’t go up on stage alone, I go there with Robbie Williams. He turns up. Sometimes he doesn’t and I have to do it myself and that’s when the trauma of backstage plays itself out on stage. But most of the time he turns up.”
Besides, he says, fatherhood changed his outlook. Today, he’s not driven by the desire to be the biggest star in the country, or to find the approval of critics and his peers, but “making sure that we’ve got a very nice roof over our heads”.
Oh, come off it, you’ve sold 75m albums. Surely you don’t need to work.
“But I do. Because I had three years off and shit stopped working. My brain stopped working. There is a monetary aspect to this, but when I say I need to work, I need to because of that classic thing: people retire and then they die. I’ve got a great job, and it’s a great hobby really, but it’s something I need to do. And it sounds dramatic, but you die inside if you don’t. So I need to do that.”
