If Robbie Williams could sum up the year that he left Take That in one word, it would be “intoxicated”. “Intoxicated,” he repeats, nodding his head. “I was a fully-fledged, fully-blown, self-medicating addict. So unfortunately, it wasn’t a lot of fun - which is why I’m a sober person right now.” He pauses, recalling the chaotic year that was 1995. “But it wasn’t as heady and as exciting as you might believe in movies and stuff. It was just sad and depressing and tiring, and y’know… the heart ached.” He frowns. “And I was lost.”
Thirty-two years is a long time in showbusiness and Williams - who joined Take That when he was 16 - has felt every one of them. It’s close to midnight and the now 48 year old is on a Zoom call from Ibiza, where he is holidaying with his family - wife Ayda Field, and kids Teddy (9), Charlie (7), Coco (4) and Beau (2) - and some friends.
I was looking for a tribe, and looking for a career, and I was looking for friends in all the wrong places
The biggest pop star of his generation looks relaxed, healthy and content; hair undeniably greying, but a long way from the “intoxicated” state of mind and body that he felt before he would eventually kick off his solo career proper in 1997. Now, the 25th anniversary of Williams as a solo artist is being marked by the release of a XXV, a new collection of his biggest hits that have been rearranged for orchestration by Dutch pop and jazz outfit, the Metropole Orchestra.
Williams has certainly squeezed a lot of living into the past 25 years. And looking back now, he can perhaps see more clearly where he may have gone wrong. When he refers to feeling lost, and says, “I was looking for a tribe, and looking for a career, and I was looking for friends in all the wrong places”, you can’t help but recall that infamous Glastonbury 1995 photograph of him, bleached blonde hair, clearly inebriated, with his arm draped around Oasis’s Liam Gallagher. Now, he says, he has finally found a sense of contentment. At what point did it arrive?
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“I guess a couple of years ago,” he shrugs, half a grin on his lips. “Genuinely. It’s just been seat-of-your-pants kind of stuff, day in, day out and album to album. It was great finding Guy Chambers and being in a band called ‘Robbie Williams’, and we would write for that band. And I suppose getting your foot through the door and your feet under the table… I dunno.” He falters momentarily. “It just moved too fast for me to understand what it was. And now, as a 48 year old, I would say that my tribe is my family: my wife and my four kids, and my nearest and dearest. There is a purpose now. I do a job, and daddy goes to work, and it all makes sense now.”
Looking back on his musical output - 12 studio albums including a Christmas record and two swing-themed albums, several Greatest Hits and Best Of collections, a live album and more - he has mixed feelings. Hindsight, experience and perhaps a small dose of wisdom has given him a new perspective on his back catalogue.
“I’m always three steps ahead of where I am, so I never really look back,” he shrugs. “I know this [new] album causes me to reflect on what has happened - but having heard them with the orchestral arrangements, I think I was closer to where I wanted to be than I actually thought. I’ve never been happy with anything I’ve ever done; I always thought that I would find it in the next album. And the minute that it goes out there and is released to the world, it becomes something other than the thing that I loved when it was just mine. But as it happens,” he concludes, “I understand that about myself now. And I’m looking forward to all the other projects that I’ve got coming down the pipeline.”
Williams has always enjoyed surprising people. For a mainstream pop artist, his career has taken several unexpected swerves, from the “Pop God” era to “swing revival” artist long before the world had suffered at Michael Bublé’s hands. He has collaborated with a varied list of names: Rufus Wainwright, John Grant, Pet Shop Boys, Dizzee Rascal, Avicii and country star Brad Paisley among them, and like anyone in the game for so long, has traversed both peaks and troughs of fame and fortune.
“I’ve done the archetypal thing that people do when that huge success wanders away from you: you spend a couple of albums going ‘s**t, what was it that I did?’ and then you try to do what you did erroneously,” he admits. “I’ve always tried to live outside being predictable. And unfortunately, things that I’ve released - or at least a couple of things - have been more predictable than I would have liked them to be. Now I’m going back to that place where I just wanna do my own thing and see what happens.”
My career couldn’t happen in 2022; it had to happen in 1997, when we were different people, thinking in a different way, behaving in a different manner
Although he won’t be drawn on what songs may fall into that “predictable” category, it’s safe to say that he enjoys singing some songs more than others these days.
“Well, it depends how much life that I’ve got in my bones,” he says. “You can always do a ballad or a mid-tempo song, but when you have to do Let Me Entertain You and Hot Fudge and Kids, and all of those things - when you’re up for it and the endorphins are kicking in, they’re magic. But when you’re not, you’re like, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, I feel so f**king middle-aged’.”
Some of those biggest hits were co-written by Guy Chambers, Williams’s most successful collaborator. The pair famously fell out in the early noughties, but later reconciled and Chambers had a hand in the new arrangements on XXV’s tracklist.
“I think it was just a combination of luck, sliding door moments and riding the crest of a wave in the perfect opportunity,” he says, of their long-running partnership. “My career couldn’t happen in 2022; it had to happen in 1997, when we were different people, thinking in a different way, behaving in a different manner. And times were wilder. I’m glad that we lived through the last period when we were kings and queens; it was fun, and it was huge, and it was massive, and it wasn’t dispensable, and it was provocative, and it was controversial, and it was a heady mix of dysfunction and eccentricity. And it was the last time that the charts were like that.” He shakes his head. “I got to close the door.”
A sense of “purpose” has kept him in the game, he says, despite that wildness and sense of abandon being dimmed with the music industry’s colossal changes over the years.
“I’m constantly in search of the perfect pop record,” he agrees. “I did experience taking three years off and it was the sh**test time ever. My brain turned into Swiss cheese and I was lethargic, and I understood why, when people retire, they die. I need purpose - and without purpose, left to my own devices, not very good things happen. So I just keep going. I keep trucking.”
One thought that the sumptuously-arranged tracklist of XXV does elicit is the fact that Williams - despite arguably having both the perfect profile and the requisite swagger for it - has never sung a Bond theme. The new orchestral arrangements of No Regrets and Millennium are particularly Bond-esque.
“Obviously, nobody would turn down a Bond theme, and the version of No Regrets on this album has got Bond written all over it,” he agrees. “But I think that my time in the sun for being linked to doing a Bond theme is probably over. I’m not saying that it’s over forever, because careers have a habit of going up and down. That being said… I’d never turn that offer down, that would be an honour. But is it likely? I doubt it.”
Jeez, what can I moan about? I’ve had an unbelievable run
Regardless, he is “absolutely” certain that he has at least another 25 years left in him as a solo artist, yet is similarly enthused by the idea of rejoining his Take That bandmates for another round at some point in the future, having spoken to Gary Barlow and Mark Owen at the beginning of the summer.
“There’s no plans on the horizon, but plans change very quickly,” he says. “And I love writing with the boys, I love creating with the boys and I love being on stage with the boys. It feels good, and it’s just good for the soul. So I reckon that will be happening; when that is, I don’t know.”
Looking back on his career at such a significant milestone might have left him feeling melancholic at any other time in his life, but not now. The Robbie Williams of 2022 - the one enjoying a holiday in a luxury Ibizan villa with his wife, children and friends around him - might seem like a stranger to the Robbie of 1997. But today, he agrees, life is good.
That said, there are a few things he would have done differently over the years.
“I wouldn’t have released Rudebox as the first single off [the album] Rudebox,” he says, only half-joking. “Apart from that, I mean… I don’t look and go, ‘Woe is me, I should’ve done this’. Yeah, there are a few songs that I wish I’d released instead of different songs, because it would’ve made my stage set much better, going forward. That being said… Jeez, what can I moan about? I’ve had an unbelievable run. My daughter often says, ‘Daddy, that’s not fair! Life isn’t fair!’ And I always say to her, ‘If life was fair, I wouldn’t have the career that I’ve had’. So,” he says, allowing himself a smile as he raises an imaginary glass, “here’s to life not being fair.”
XXV is released on September 9th. Robbie Williams plays the 3Arena on October 29th, 30th and November 1st
