Five seconds into the room and Robbie Williams is up and running. He orders two triple espressos and comes over to look me up and down. “I like your socks,” he says, and gives them a little feel. “I fucking love socks, me.” He shows me his own socks. They are lovely: ribbed navy with a pink trim around the ankle. “Yeah, I fucking love socks.”
There is a rhythm you must adjust to around Robbie, and it is not the normal rhythm of life. Extremely sharp and uncommonly warm when he wants to be, the 31-year-old singer carries his emotions precariously close to the surface. He is always alert and yet somehow constantly bored. His sensitivities explain in some way why Robbie is the one pop star of the celebrity age who has to walk an eternal tightrope between public adoration and absolute vilification.
The first time I met him was in his London home, a penthouse in Chelsea. I really wanted to like him as a human being. I did. I left his company feeling slightly high.
This time we meet in a London hotel suite. He is in town for seven weeks — his longest spell since moving to Beverly Hills two years ago. He is promoting his new album, Intensive Care (this is his only press interview). He is bored with his flat already — hence the hotel, he tells me, and while he has kept up his obsessive Scrabble habit, he has also been hitting the town with his celebrity friends.
It is clear by now that if any pop star defines the age, it is him, rather than someone such as Chris Martin, who enjoys blanket support from the record industry. Every pop singer launched on a major label since Robbie’s hit song Angels has attempted to touch the cloth of his frayed hem by some weird form of proxy.
Robbie’s former songwriting partner, Guy Chambers, has become a pop byword for metamorphosis, farmed out, at great cost, to write with everyone from Britney Spears to Charlotte Church in an attempt to signify maturation. Will Young liberally borrowed the look of his first album from Robbie. When Robbie’s amiable photographer-by-appointment Hamish Brown recently agreed to shoot former Blue singer Lee Ryan for a magazine cover, Ryan’s people were practically dancing cartwheels down the street. The implication of all this is not difficult to read: that by some form of pop osmosis, some of Robbie’s magic might wear off on them.
Only Kylie Minogue, ever canny, got the fact that it might be Robbie himself who was at the heart of his staggering success, and invited him to write for her half a decade ago. He still openly smarts at the fact that Minogue’s record company would not release the exemplary club anthem that he and Chambers fashioned for her as a single, on the grounds of its being too gay: “Too gay! For Kylie? Imagine!”
But then, he says, “I’m still looking for the rules of what is and isn’t pop music. What isn’t pop? There should be a pop amnesty where everyone reclaims it. There is still snobbery. Anything that is considered throwaway is considered invalid. But the evidence that’s staring me in the face is that I must be ‘that thing’ to the people who are coming to see me. Because there’s an awful lot of them now. I’d love to be able to go and see Robbie Williams live.”
Born in 1974 in Stoke-on-Trent, Robbie came of age just after the warped chemical nirvana of acid house had turned the north-west of England into a reckless party zone. He’s a ceaseless attention seeker, super-bright, but failed by the education system, naturally compulsive and very good at looking like he lives in some sort of outer-sexual hinterland where anyone is game, so long as they adore him. (He named an amalgam of his first two British albums The Show-Off Must Go On when they were compiled for American release.)
Five years ago, he gave up drink and drugs. He upset every prediction, revisiting the charts with a sequence of huge hits. Since getting clean, he has had to find alternative outlets for his outlandish compulsions. He is currently in thrall to the paranormal and Egyptology and, for this afternoon at least, believes there are serious career options available to him in these fields: “That Arthur C Clarke better watch out!” He carries around a great vat of nervous energy that makes him at least as wearying as he is scintillating company. His caffeine habit probably doesn’t help.
He is fascinating on the subject of addiction. “I believe that if you’re fucked up — and I’m still fucked up, just not on drugs — it’s a bit similar to being in an elevator,” he says. “There will be floors where you can get off and recover. There are sobriety portholes. It isn’t the Sixties any more. People don’t have to die because of their addictions: they get clean. It’s quite simple.”
His new album (his ninth since Take That) is a poppier update of the sound of his great heroes, The Smiths. Echoes of Morrissey are all over the songs The Trouble With Me and Your Gay Friend. The highlight might be Make Me Pure which, like all Robbie’s best songs, is concerned with not wanting to die, but being absolutely rubbish at life. In this respect, he has nailed an unspoken modern condition.
In a similar manner to the artist Tracey Emin, Robbie has a genius for self-analysis. He processes everything as it is happening. It is why, in a culture steeped in nostalgia, both of them seem so modern. “I am fascinated by what makes me, me,” he says, before adding, chillingly, “and I know. That’s the thing. There are centuries of madness behind this DNA.”
Yet self-knowledge is not the end of life. Robbie has yet to reinterpret himself through the eyes of another. Probably one of the most eligible bachelors in the world, he has been single for six years.
“I’ve got a few things to sort out before I’m ready to go into relationships again,” he says. “I’ve realised that more than ever this year. I just thought it would be about getting sober and then you’ll have a fulfilling relationship. Well, I’m nearly five years into that now … five years sober. I just can’t think about relationships at the moment. I’ve got another 18 months of freewheeling madness here: I go on the road on this massive tour … I need to be in a different kind of shape and mindset to do the kind of work that needs to be done to have a relationship.”
Does he ever feel that he’s made a trade-off, that by giving himself over to this startling career, he has forsaken personal happiness?
“Not really. Would I have had it if I hadn’t had this career? … I might not be grown up enough until I hit my forties to handle anything like that.”
Intensive Care is Robbie at his most autobiographical. Ghosts has the opening line that also ushers in the album — “Here I stand / Victorious / The only man to make you come” — as bold as any you’ll hear this year. It is addressed to a former girlfriend, and there is a sad underside to it. What kind of a boast is this to make from a teenage boy to a teenage girl? If anything marks the album, it is the invincibility of youth and the sadness of its inevitable demise.
“It’s actually letting go of my romantic expectations of what growing older would be. Your expectation of sex and of drinking and of taking your first E, or maybe of being on the TV or in a loving relationship, then the expectation of all of that stuff is just so beautiful and perfect. But you know that the reality of all that stuff is not quite so beautiful. It’s messy and addictive and fucked up. Killing the expectation — or maybe just letting it go gently — is the best thing that I can do with it.” — Â