Robbie Williams: British people are good at devaluing ourselves
After more than three decades in entertainment, Robbie Williams is back on the road and ready to celebrate.
His new album, Britpop, is his 16th number one, breaking the previous record set by the Beatles.
The singer, whose Long 90s tour begins this week, is taking a moment to mark his achievement.
“I think as British people we’re very good at piercing the balloon of our own success and undercutting it and devaluing ourselves,” he tells BBC News. “It’s what we do best. In many ways it’s why we’re great.
“But with this one, I really want to let it sink in and I really want to stand in the middle of it and go, ‘OK, success, do your thing to me’.”
The tour will take in smaller venues, the kind he would have played at the start of his solo stardom.
The 51-year-old says Britpop is the album he wanted to make when he first left Take That.
It sees him collaborate with former bandmate Gary Barlow, Gaz Coombes from Supergrass and Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi.
But he looks back at the Britpop era with mixed feelings – he experienced professional huge success, but was also deeply depressed.
He recalls: “I was going through my own mental illness and anything good that’s happening to somebody that is in the throes of depression… they can’t experience joy and there were lots of incredible things happening and I couldn’t experience joy from any of it.
“But now I look back at it and think, what a decade. The last great decade for popular culture because everything since then has become quite vanilla.
“You don’t know 2007 from 2023, but you know the ’50s, you know the ’60s, you know the ’70s you know the ’80s and you know the ’90s and so I look back and with a wry smile and say that the ’90s was an amazing time to have a bad time.”
Robbie has spoken openly about suffering from stage fright in the past, experiencing terror before walking on stage.
He tells me that everything “clicked into place” for him when his first child, daughter Theodora, known as Teddy, who was born in 2012.
“The world started to make sense because I’d been running away from responsibility and I should have been running towards it.
“And when things stopped being about me and started to become about precious souls, I started to realise I’ve got the best job in the world.”
Williams says he also feels much happier being back in the UK, after a torrid experience with the British press, particularly in the early stages of his solo career.
“I think that everybody knows, because we’ve seen it countless times, that if you are on the crest of a wave, the media comes to bring you down and attack you and malign you at every opportunity they can. And that is heavy and brings its own problems.
“But that was then, I’m in a different place now,” he continues. “I’m left alone just to put my songs out and be married.
“There isn’t anybody at my door trying to get pictures of me 24 hours a day or trying to pop microphones and bug my house or trying to hack my phone. There isn’t any of that stuff that’s happening anymore. This is what I thought it would be like when I set out on my journey when I was 16, I’m having an amazing time.”
One thing the singer did not have deal with back then was social media, and he tells me he thinks it would have “seen him off”.
“I get way too invested in finding the negative things, everybody does,” he says. “I wonder if there’s something wired in us where we go, ‘let’s find the problem, let’s find a threat and then we’ll negate the threat’.”
Then, of course, there is the eternal question, will Robbie ever rejoin Take That? The band that launched his career.
The group currently consists of three members – Gary Barlow, Mark Owen and Howard Donald – and a recent Netflix documentary examined the group’s success.
Williams has spoken of them “riding again” and says he “absolutely loved” the documentary, adding that he had “overwhelming feeling of how much I love the boys”.
On February 13 it will be 30 years since Take That split (the first time), it’s also Robbie’s birthday.
So what was he doing that day in 1996? “Buying a Scalextric from Harrods,” he laughs. Not the rock’n’roll answer I expected.
After breaking a record held by The Beatles and winning more Brit Awards than anyone else, I ask Robbie what he wants to do next.
“I want to build hotels with my own venues in and then I want to play my own hotels,” he replies.
“I want to do a university of entertainment and I’ve got the syllabus in my mind and it would be a great revenge on education for somebody that left school with nothing higher than a D to go in and revolutionise education.”
Sign us up for the university of Robbie Williams.
Britpop by Robbie Williams is out now. The Long 90s tour began earlier this week.
