Robbie Williams, 49, reclines on a sofa in the deluxe waterfront suite of an Abu Dhabi hotel, curtains closed, a Chanel pearl necklace around his neck, lightly picked-at platters of exotic fruits within easy reach, searching YouTube for early Take That footage. He clicks, watches a little, then looks for something better. At first glance, if someone burst in, this might look like some kind of classically tragic Sunset Boulevard-esque scene: the pop star adrift, forsaken by a present that he no longer understands and that no longer understands him, desperately seeking escape in the past and its more innocent glories; hopelessly trying to find his way back to someone he can never again be.
Thankfully, no. If there have ever been Robbie Williams days like that, it wasn’t recently. What’s happening right now is practical homework and problem-solving. Tomorrow evening, Rob will be performing at a nearby arena. In his current stage show, there is a section where the onstage Robbie Williams milks comedy and pathos from talking the audience through his early years. Normally he offers them, as one illustration of the absurdities and humiliations he faced, an extract from the uncensored version of the video for Take That’s first flop single, “Do What You Like”, in which the five band members end up lying face down on the ground, completely naked, while a girl with a mop rubs jelly over the flesh of their buttocks. It’s a very Robbie Williams move: reclaiming a past loss of dignity and repackaging it as entertainment. But it won’t work in Abu Dhabi. Standards are a little different here, and this degree of nudity is not acceptable. So he’s now looking for a replacement.
He flicks through Take That’s other early promos: “Promises” (“top off in that,” he notes”), “It Only Take A Minute” (“top off”), “Once You’ve Tasted Love” (“I remember the jacket,” he says, before adding “that we had to give back” in a way that intimates a little residual baggage, or, at the very least, the echo of its memory). But he doesn’t feel that any of these clips will quite work. Next he samples an energetic early Take That TV performance in a club. Not that, either.
Eventually he finds his way to what will prove to be the solution. Cool Cube was a short-lived children’s afternoon magazine TV show on the failing satellite channel BSB. Two months after Take That formed in 1990, it was where they made their second TV appearance (the first had taken place earlier that same day). They were filmed running through over-energetic dance moves on the concrete forecourt outside a building while a crowd of maybe a hundred passers-by of all ages watched with a visible lack of enthusiasm: some with hands in pockets or arms crossed, none of them even feebly reflecting the rhythms of what they were watching. (This song, “You’re My Kind Of Girl”, wouldn’t even make the first Take That album.) After the music finished, the band members were interviewed. Rob – in a backwards blue baseball cap – was asked about the choreography, and whether he had danced much before. “Well, I didn’t do much dancing, just like local discos and everything,” he replied. “But I did enough to keep up with these lot.” He was sixteen.
Here in Abu Dhabi, Rob doesn’t watch any of the interview. How they look dancing, hyperactively going for it in front of an audience that shows no sign of caring…that’s what he needs. He knows that’ll work, and it does. The following evening, at the appropriate moment in the show, the Cool Cube clip runs; Rob introduces his former teenage colleagues, critiques the “pointlessly intricate dance routines”, then demands “take it off, it’s making me sad”. And the show rolls onwards.
A few days later, on a balcony in Switzerland, I ask Rob whether he can put himself in the head of the 16-year-old Robbie Williams back when they filmed that performance. If he can remember how it was.
“It wasn't much fun, very quickly,” he replies.
Already by then?
“Yeah. I was actually thinking before I was going to sleep last night how quickly my mental health derailed, and how quickly entering into the grown-up world did something to me that I would not recover from for a long time, if at all. Yeah, I was in trouble. And I was in trouble and I was in trouble. I was in trouble with people and I was in trouble. We weren't the gang that I hoped to be, very quickly.”
Why were you thinking about it last night?
“I don't know what triggered me. I just remember thinking: I'll have to figure out the time frame from happy carefree guy to sense of foreboding and fear and anxiety guy, and it must have been less than two months. Because I left school alright. More than alright. Obviously there's childhood trauma that everybody has, so I was the product of childhood trauma, but I was just mainly a happy-go-lucky cheeky chappie - that was genuinely it. And relatively carefree. And I wondered before I went to sleep last night how many weeks it was that I became full of cares. And full of woes and anxiety and foreboding. Because in that video they say, ‘how long have you been together?’ Two months. It happened fucking pretty quick.”
From a TV interview, November 3, 2023:
“I think that people actually fall in love with your ‘ism’. They fall in love with the mental part of you - and I mean mental in the kindest way. There's all these actors. And why do you love them? Well, because they're different. Because they don't add up. Singers. Well, what is it that they're emoting? Well, they're different because they're not normal. And I have a theory that it may be something to do with PTSD trauma mixed with generational stuff that gives you your mental illnesses and the twinkle behind your eyes. Magic, though, isn't it?...My story in itself should be all the evidence that you need that there a possibility for your dream to become reality. With me, my only thing that I had, as a 16-year-old, was a bit of hutzpah. I don't sing like Luther Vandross or Whitney Houston…or whoever that I can mention with these incredible voices. I couldn't dance like Justin Timberlake or Michael Jackson. At that point, I hadn't written a song or I hadn't written a lyric. I hadn't written a melody. All I had was a twinkle in my eye and a dream. And that's it. Then you figure the rest out.”
When you have long lived much of your life in public, your relationship with your past contorts in complicated ways. For one thing, although it is your past, the only one you have, it also has a separate existence of its own out in the world, and the past that is ascribed to you out there is not always the past as you recognise or remember it. Things can get messy. As the performer Robbie Williams, Rob has often used that past as a miscellaneous grab bag of stuff that can be dipped into for entertainment purposes, but he has generally chosen not to linger there. His preference is always to be moving forward. “It all seems to be dead space,” he explains. “The future is now.” Also, more specifically - and maybe, but maybe not, more superficially - there’s less fun to be had in looking back when your mind’s go-to place is that you don’t like the way you look and you don’t like the way you sound.
But the season for looking back comes around for everyone, sooner or later, and this nonetheless appears to be Rob’s. Sometime next year the movie Better Man will arrive, a reportedly surreal retelling of Robbie William’s ascendance by The Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey. Last month, Joe Pearlman’s intense four-part documentary Robbie Williams arrived on Netflix.
From its subject’s perspective, Rob agreed to make the documentary because good people were asking. Last year he had been approached by Ridley Scott Associates. That July he was staying a while in a Paris apartment with him family, and I listened in as he went into a side for a Zoom meeting with RSA. They needed to share thoughts and strategise, ahead of a scheduled meeting at Netflix’s London offices the following week, hopefully to seal a deal. At the time, there was no clear plan yet as to what the documentary might exactly be.
“I'd like it to be something that nobody's ever seen before,” Rob told the people on the call. “And I don't know what that is. I'm trying to think of what it is that people haven't seen before. Is it a question of throwing scenes in that are acted out? Or is it as mad as my dead granddad interviewing me and trying to understand what has happened to my life from a perspective of somebody that's worked down the pits? That sort of thing.”
Rob then added this curious coda “I think the story in itself is remarkable for the fact of how unremarkable my life and I was and am”. On the call, this viewpoint received predictable pushback. Various voices chimed in. For one thing, Rob was told, the archive material RSA had already seen was “abso-fucking-lutely unbelievable”. For another, his story was “inspirational and amazing”. Also, someone pointed out, “the fact that you are willing to be an open book and kind of express your vulnerabilities, warts and all, in a way that a lot of people don't have the bravery to do. I think that is something that people would connect with because they can see their own frailties through that process, because they've grown up with you.”
Rob was willing to concede this point. “Yeah, getting at that vulnerability and the want and the need to express what it is that ails me or makes me happy will be interesting,” he said. “I get that.”
“I actually think you've almost just demonstrated here what people will connect with,” another voice argued. “The fact that you think your life has been unremarkable.”
“No, no, look,” Rob argued “I'm an unremarkable person having a remarkable life. That's what I meant.” And then he explained how he did an online test yesterday to determine whether or not he was a narcissist. (The unreliable verdict: he was a mild one.)
As the call wound to a close, Rob offered reassurance that he was looking forward to coming into Netflix with them. He knew what to do.
“Look, I won't fuck this up,” he says. “Famous last words. No, I won't, though. I won't. I'm aware that my self-exploring of all of my isms and my darker side and my willingness to exercise them publicly would be intoxicating for somebody like that. So I'll just do loads of that.”
In conversation, October 23, 2023:
What do you want people to think of you when they watch this?
“Well, there's a range of different things. I'd like to catch a few people that think they know me, disliked me, and then now don't. I'd like to catch a few of them. I listened to the autobiography of this footballer on Audible and somebody had written a comment: ‘He's gone from being an unlikable knob to being an alright knob’. If I can do that too…”
In the car on the way to Abu Dhabi’s Etihad arena, Rob checks his phone. “People are very nice when they send texts and emails wishing me good luck for shows,” he says, “but it reminds me I’ve got a show.” He has, he says, “just general I-haven’t-done-a-show-for-a-while anxiety”.
In the dressing room, he makes final preparations. Unnecessarily attentive students of his on-stage neckwear might notice three differences today. One is the Chanel pearls. These are an accident. Before leaving on this trip, he had been playing around at home in London, trying on his wife Ayda’s jewellery to make her laugh. When he took these pearls off, he left them by the bed and they were mistakenly packed as part of his on-tour wardrobe. Discovering them in his luggage, he has started wearing them, and seems to be liking it. “It’s gone from being a bit of joke to being now actually this is what I wear,” he says. Another new addition is a much smaller necklace of red beads. This is courtesy of the second youngest of his four children: “Before I left, Coco put this around my neck and said, ‘this will keep you safe, daddy’.” The third is an absence. Normally, the onstage Rob wears a solid metallic piece that arcs close around the top of his neck, but that’s also been judged unacceptable for Abu Dhabi, given that in camera closeups it might be too easy to make out the necklace’s seven letters: FUCKOFF.
He’s been told that he should avoid swearing tonight. Yesterday evening, thinking through how he would deal with this, he declared that he would substitute the word “flumping” when needed, and he sounded like he meant it. But there’s probably an inevitability in how the onstage Robbie Williams deals with being told that there is something he is forbidden to do. Early in the show, he shares his linguistic dilemma with the audience. “It’s very difficult not being able to swear,” he explains. “So I’m going to say ‘flumping’ or ‘flunking’ all night,” A pause. “Because I can’t fucking say anything else.”
These days there’s a lot of talking in a Robbie Williams show. He sets out its parameters near the start, promising “a 33-year-old musical odyssey, featuring the highest highs! And the lowest lows!”, and by declaring “tonight will be therapy for me, but it will be entertainment for you”. As ever, sincerity and irony, self-congratulation and self-deprecation, are forever eating each other’s tails. “Nice sitting ovation I’m getting from everybody on the side,” he’ll say. “That’s lovely. No, sit yourself down. Those days are gone…” Or, pointing at a girl at the foot of the stage: “While I was singing that song, I could just imagine her turning to her father and going ‘He’s like Harry Styles, but if Harry Styles had completely melted’. Yeah. ‘He’s like Harry Styles, but if Harry Styles had completely melted and got joyless eyes from having four children and only having three hours sleep every fucking night.” Pause. “Flunking night.”
Early on, he solicits a few personal details from various fans in the front row, and uses them as a foil throughout. As here, when introducing the song “Come Undone”: “Lily, I know you don’t know much about me, but they say, Lily, that I’ve actually only got two kinds of songs. Which is true. Lily. Song number one is ‘I’m Robbie Williams and I’m flumping amazing’. But also, Lily, song number two: ‘I’m lost and lonely and I’m depressed, and why didn’t you come and save me?’ Lily, this is song number two and I’m singing it for you.”
You could try to find neat ways to express what Robbie Williams is doing here when he does things like this: that he’s flippant about being serious, and that he’s serious about being flippant. Or you could try to unpick exactly where the dividing line is between the sincere soul-baring and the showbiz patter. In truth, I think that may be a fool’s errand. What’s confounding about what Robbie Williams does when he does things like this – and what both makes it work so potently, and makes it so infuriatingly for people who hate that it could or should work – is that it’s truly like a Moebius strip. Follow either side, the sincere soul-baring and the showbiz patter, for as long as you like in either direction, looking for where one begins and the other ends, and you simply end up in the same place.
This aspect of his performance reaches its apogee before the very final song, “Angels”. Explained in the cold light of day, what happens here is not only objectively absurd but also sounds like something that could never work as part of a satisfactory end to an evening’s entertainment. Robbie Williams takes a seat at the end of a promontory out into the audience, and speaks for, on this particular night, nine minutes and sixteen seconds. What he says, which has evolved over a long tour, was sparked by first entering an empty Australian arena after an extensive Covid-enforced time-off. “And being very grateful,” he’ll explain to me, not failing to add the ever self-reflexive “And knowing in that moment, ‘oh, I'm having gratitude, that's fucking great’.” He found himself pondering how “when I’ve been at my saddest, when I’m full of self-hatred” he still always had the people who would turn up to fill these empty seats. That they liked him even when he didn’t. And how grateful he was. “And then I thought, oh, I should tell them,” he says.
That is how the long speech ends – with a heartfelt expression of gratitude – but along the way, he offers a remarkably raw and reflective autobiography. In part, tonight he says this:
“So I joined Take That when I was Lily's age, when I was 16. And that was in 1990. And it is now 2023. We became famous in 1992. So that means that in one way or another, I have been in your life for thirty-one years. Wow. And, yeah, it's been a really weird journey. I don't know if you've followed much of what I've been up to, you know, into rehab and out of rehab, alcoholism, addiction. And when I was born, it would appear that I was born with an open wound. An open wound, like incredibly sensitive. Some would say oversensitive. But I would say it's just the right amount of sensitivity because that's who I am. And I was born with this sensitivity and this voice inside my head that was a negative voice. And when I joined Take That as a 16-year-old, you would think that that negative voice would become quiet with success. But that negative voice just got louder and louder, and still does sometimes. It tells me that, or told me that I was ugly, that I was fat, that I couldn't sing, that I was embarrassing, that I was stupid. Whatever it could tell me, it would do. And to drown out those voices, I used drink and drugs, and that was a highway to hell very quickly. And 24 years ago, I stopped drinking. And then what happened was, when you become sober, you strip away all of your medicine. The self-medication that you're doing is gone. And you are just left with yourself, and it is very raw. And the person that I was left with was depressed and anxious and body dysmorphic and agoraphobic and didn't know how to speak to people, didn't know how to conversate, didn't know how to be a human. It was very, very isolating. And at the same time, I was incredibly successful. So there was very clever people writing very bad things about me. And I read every single word. And that voice used to go, ‘See, I told you you were awful’. ‘I told you you couldn't sing’. ‘I told you your songs were terrible’. ‘I told you you were stupid’. And there it is, in black and white. And the voices got louder and louder and louder and louder. And I stayed in. I stayed in. I didn't go out. Because I was useless outside. I didn't know, like I say, how to be a human. And in those moments, you know, when you're anxious and you're depressed, sometimes, and I'm sure some people in here can relate, it starts one day, and then it turns into a week, and then the week becomes a month, and the month becomes a year. And if you're unlucky, a year can become a decade, and sometimes it can become two decades. And while you're in that fight every single day, sometimes you just think to yourself, 'What's the point of carrying on? I have all the success in the world, but I'm in a mental prison that it doesn't seem as though I can escape from'. And sometimes I thought to myself, I'm going to take myself off the planet. And obviously I didn't. And thank God that I didn't. But in these moments, you hold on to anything that you can to get you through whatever particular darkness as you stare into the abyss that you're going through. And there was a big factor of why and how I got better and how I didn't take myself off the planet was... Number one, I met my wife... But number two, and this is why I'm telling you this story, number two, the big reason of why I stayed on the planet, you just hold on to things that keep you safe, and you hold on to things that are evidence that you're not a terrible person that's not awful at everything. And that thing, the big thing that I held on to, was the fact that you guys turned up and come to my shows…then I can't be a bad person because this is the evidence that I need. So, yeah, I just want to thank you on behalf of me and thank you on behalf of my family. My four gorgeous children have a father...Bless you.”
There’s quite a lot to say about this. How it shouldn’t work – the audience came here for songs and some ancillary performance razzamatazz, not for some kind of hyper-emotional TED Talk, let alone at the climax of it all – but how it so obviously does. And that everything he is saying here is sincere, but it also, in choosing to say it here, and in similar versions night after night, serves as what Rob would call “a bit”. A piece of entertainment calculated to elicit a response.
There’s an often-quoted much shorter Robbie Williams speech that he gave onstage one night at Knebworth in 2003, one that is played then repeated in his Netflix documentary as a key moment of self-definition, where he says “There's an awful lot of shit that is written about me almost every week. And I want you to remember something for me. This is Robbie Williams. This is what I do for a living, right here. I'm a singer, I'm a songwriter and I'm a born entertainer. This is what I do.” When I ask him about that, he says “it makes me cringe because ‘…all right! Good for you!’.” At the same time, he says, “it's a mixture of a bit and self-realisation: ‘yeah, this is what I fucking do’. No matter how I'm maligned or I'm represented unfairly, this is the truth of the matter right in front of your eyes. And right in front of my eyes, too.” He reflects some more on this combination. “I think that primarily authentically it's not a bit, but then even authentic bits become a bit halfway through - realising, ‘oh, this is a good bit’.” He brings up a comparable moment, this one during his 2001 Royal Albert Hall swing show, and of what was going on inside his head as it happened: “When I said ‘Mom, this is your son singing!’, I'm like, ‘Oh, that was fucking good - oh, that'll go down well’. Because my brain's working so quickly at those points anyway, that there's something said, then I'll analyse it. Then I'll expand on it. And while I'm expanding on it, I know that it's now a good bit. ‘Oh, this is good….’”
People often want to understand where the honesty ends and the entertainment begins, because they’re attached to the idea that the one is the enemy of other – or, at the very least, that the second somehow sullies and corrupts the first. Maybe it’s difficult to accept that the premise is flawed, and that the question that they’re asking is simply the wrong question.
Rob talking on the phone from the garden at home in London, doing a pre-interview for that day’s The One Show, November 3:
“I just wanted to say Robbie, I’ve watched the doc, and you’re so authentic and real.”
“Bless you,” says Rob. “Authenticity is my brand.”
In that July 2022 Zoom call to discuss the prospective documentary, the people at Ridley Scott Associates ran through a list of about five or so possible directors, but the very first they mentioned was Joe Pearlman. What initially caught Rob’s ear is that Pearlman had made Bros’s After The Screaming Stops. “I love that documentary,” he immediately responded. “Love it. I’ve watched it three times.”
Pearlman subsequently took the job, and in the second half of 2022 his documentary crew started turning up and filming. When Rob played at the Royal Albert Hall that November, a cameraman and Pearlman were there, documenting everything that they could. One afternoon, the film director Michael Gracey, who was filming footage for his own movie – these dates had been largely arranged for this second purpose - came into the dressing room and surveyed the scene in front of him: Rob in pre-show preparations, a film crew recording it all.
“This is beautiful, Rob,” Michael Gracey said. “So you’re literally shooting having your nasal hair trimmed.”
“I’m giving all of me, Michael,” replied Rob, deadpan. “There’s not one part of me that I’m not exposing.”
As ever, the lines around sincere are blurry. Onstage at the Royal Albert Hall there would be a rare moment where Rob appeared to get truly overcome, and look genuinely tearful, and slightly taken aback by finding himself that way. Maybe that’s all a bit too, but I don’t think so – I’m not sure he particularly seeks out onstage moments quite like this, and I’m not even sure he wholeheartedly likes them. Nonetheless when the documentary crew came back into the dressing room after the performance and started filming, the first thing Rob said was “did you get it?” What’s even more notable, though, is that he patiently waited for the camera to start rolling before saying this. What he’s sharing is all of it – the onstage performance, his reaction to it, but also his meta-knowingness that the reaction to it is a different kind of entertainment all of its own.
In fact, almost nothing that the documentary crew film in this period would be used. Whether or not those Royal Albert Hall moments, and others like them, were useful, following Rob on tour in 2022 wasn’t providing an obvious route to the drama required. A testament, perhaps, to the better place in which Rob’s life was, but a filmmaking dilemma nonetheless. And when Pearlman first tried to interview Rob about the past, it was hard to divert him from familiar stories and words which he had been using for years to simultaneously reveal and protect himself.
Pearlman came up with a new idea, one which the filmmakers pitched to Rob in Miami that December. “I guess that they had an a-ha moment,” Rob now reflects. They now proposed that they should film Rob watching footage from his past, and then film him talking about it. Rob agreed. “And then,” he says, “I think the documentary became something else.”
It was quite a commitment. “For somebody that is not interested to look at the past, spending 25 days being interviewed for six to 8 hours a day - that's a joke, actually,” he says. “We did it, and I'm glad we did, but for somebody who's opposed to even glancing at the past, that is holding your face to the fire for longer than you would like.”
Not that anybody told Rob, going in, that this would require twenty-five days. Partly that was because no one yet knew. (There would be one two-week session in January, and a second beginning at the end of March.) And partly it was because those around him know that there are certain kinds of information Rob would prefer not to confront head-on. “Nobody shows me the T-shirts on tour with the tour dates on the back,” he points out. “Because I don't want to know how many there is and where we are. Because I can barely deal with what's in this day, when I'm working. And to think that there is, I don't know, forty others or eighty others of these days in front of me taps into my anxiety and overwhelms me. So I like to not know. I don't need to know until there's about twelve days left. Less than two weeks.”
Pearlman suggested that Rob was interviewed in and around his bed. Often Rob would be wearing nothing but a t-shirt and underwear. It’s hard to imagine that the filmmakers didn’t privately delight in how unusual and striking and powerful this would seem, but as Pearlman would later point out, this is where and how Rob had tended to be when they had FaceTimed each other to talk about the project, and where he seemed most comfortable. Much later, when the documentary was released, many of the reviews commented on the apparent artifice of this. In an atypically unkind review, a Guardian writer saw this as both an illustration of, and allegory for, the bankrupt manipulative self-obsession of the whole pointless endeavour: Why he needs to do this in his pants is unclear. Is it meant to be a metaphor for the intimate, no-holds-barred nature of this documentary series? A nod to the fact that this is Robbie: frank and unfiltered? Or maybe it’s just a sign that Williams is a natural-born exhibitionist (as if we needed another one). Whatever the reason, the undies can’t help but underline the onanistic vibe.
The truth is that, to anyone who has spent much time around Rob in his everyday life, there is nothing unusual or surprising about seeing him like this. Many conversations do take place while he is in bed, and he is often walking around in his underwear, usually with a t-shirt on, but often enough without. For him, it’s a natural mode of being. “I remember you saying, like, years and years ago,” he tells me, “pointing out that walking around in your underpants is unusual. And I didn't even know.”
That’s why he was open to the suggestion that this is how he should be filmed. “I suppose that I didn't look at it from angle of being weird,” he says. “I just looked at it from an angle of being different and something that I was comfortable with doing. It's where I do all of my best stuff.” As soon as he says this last sentence, he rushes to qualify it, to disavow the accidental innuendo. “I genuinely don't mean sexual - genuinely. It's where I draw. It's where I think up lyrics from. It's where I come up with melodies from. It's where I have ideas for tours or businesses. It's where I sit with the kids and we watch Scooby Doo and we have family moments. It is sort of womb-like, and I feel safe there.” Maybe, he reflects, it goes even deeper than that. “I suppose that a lot of stuff that happens to me is akin to an illness of some sort,” he says. “And what do you do when you're ill? You stay in bed?”
So that’s where he was at the very beginning of 2023, in his bedroom in Los Angeles, when he pressed “play” for the first time, and a camera watched him as Robbie Williams began to watch what all the cameras of the past had recorded.
“There was trepidation,” he remembers. “Who wants to watch the car crash in minute detail? Having my life flash before my eyes over 25 days. it's a thing that not many people have done at all, ever, on the planet. It was trauma, watching it. And then you try to make light of it as best you can.” It wasn’t easy. “Nobody likes looking at photographs of themselves, and nobody likes hearing their own voice. So if you multiply that by watching yourself suffer with mental illness, breakdowns, alcoholism, depression, agoraphobia, fat, thin, all of the above, and you're in a sort of torturous headlock where you're forced to watch the car crash in slow mo. And it's all right, it's fine. It's going to work out for me. But that's what it was like. That's what it was.”
In conversation, October 23, 2023:
“It's very difficult to tell my story because I sold people something else while I was on stage, and I did it really convincingly. I sold them that you're not watching a man in spiritual and mental free fall. And I did a really good job. I did an amazing job.
The full chapter will be available from robbiewilliams.com on Friday 22 December. Robbie Williams will headline BST Hyde Park London on 6 July 2024. Buy tickets here.
