First published on October 27
“Hello, love!”
I’m in Robbie Williams’s £17.5 million Kensington mansion. It is, without doubt, a) the jolliest £17.5 million Kensington mansion I’ve ever been in, and b) the only £17.5 million Kensington mansion I’ve ever been in. There’s a 4ft gold-plated Lisa Simpson on the stairs; adorable children running around everywhere; and the dining table is covered in paintings of multicoloured butterflies. I’m pretty sure there’s a Banksy in the hallway. The mood board is “contentment, serotonin, clever LA wife entirely in charge of decor”.
Williams comes for a welcome hug, which, tragically for his mansion carpets, knocks a half-drunk can of Diet Coke from my hand. I dissolve into apologies.
“Don’t worry,” Williams soothes, as lovely members of staff appear to mop up my awfulness. “The last interview I did here was with Dan Wootton, and he broke the sofa as soon as he sat on it.”
Forewarned, I sit gingerly, trying, as always, to be as un-Dan Wootton-like as possible.
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These days, Williams — sober for 20 years — is on a health kick. In his cream-coloured tracksuit and New Kids on the Block baseball cap, he seems serene and slim, almost gaunt. The former “Blobby Williams” (© all tabloids) is very thin. At 49, you can suddenly see on his face his peasant Irish forefathers who stood in the driving rain sighing over a wet dead donkey.
“Babe, I’m on Ozempic,” he says, happily. “Well, something like Ozempic. It’s like a Christmas miracle. I’ve gone from 13st 13lb to 12st 1lb. And I need it, medically. I’ve been diagnosed with type 2 self-loathing. It’s shockingly catastrophic to my mental health to be bigger. My inner voice talks to me like Katie Hopkins talks about fat people. It’s maddening.”
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In tribute to his new-found thinness, there’s a buffet of healthy snacks — carrot sticks, hummus, olives — laid out for us to eat during the interview. The kind that only appear when you have a full-time chef on the books. Williams grabs a falafel, dips it in the hummus, takes a bite, and then pulls a deeply unhappy face.
“Turns out that wasn’t a falafel. It’s a chocolate energy ball,” he says, sighing, placing the deceptive remains on a side plate.
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He still swallows the disgusting mouthful, however. He’s registered his protest and now cracks on. There’s no time to waste. He has a lot to talk about.
THIS IS THE FOURTH TIME I’VE INTERVIEWED ROBBIE WILLIAMS. The first time was in 1996, just after he’d left the juggernaut of Take That, in a blizzard of headlines and crying girls, and was preparing to release his pointed cover of George Michael’s Freedom. Within two minutes of saying hello he grabbed my hand and shouted, “Run!” and we sprinted to the pub round the corner. We drank two pints and two shots in less than 14 minutes before eating mints — which he had, Scout-level prepared, in his pocket — and returning to his management company’s office, where they were supposed to be keeping him sober.
The second time I met Robbie Williams it was 1997, when we drank Long Island iced teas in TGI Fridays until we could barely stand, then we went back to his flat where the bathroom was covered in vomit — “Not mine!” He then played songs on his guitar that eventually turned into his first album, Life Thru a Lens. He was absolutely convinced that he could make it as a singer-songwriter. The rest of the world was pretty sure he wouldn’t.
The third time it was 2005 — and he’d been proved right. He was now, post-Angels, the biggest artist in the world. He had a broken arm and a penthouse apartment overlooking the Thames and was by turns bitterly angry (about Take That), sullenly withdrawn (to an MTV camera crew), guilelessly friendly and open (to me), and so helpless that his assistant had to help him put on his shirt. Buttoning him up like a mother while he chain-smoked and sang Je t’aime… moi non plus in the style of Bernard Manning. It was genuinely one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen — Vic ’n’ Bob level hilarious.
On every occasion, I was aware I was meeting someone both charming and honest, but also at the pointy end of a fame utterly incomprehensible to anyone who has not made headlines, played in front of 375,000 people, been photographed from a helicopter or caused the stock-market value of his record company to rise and fall on a single quote (when he signed his record-breaking £80 million deal with EMI in 2002 and gave a jokey press conference shouting, “I’m rich beyond my wildest dreams,” the share price immediately dropped by 1p).
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WE THINK, IN THE 21ST CENTURY, WE KNOW WHAT FAME IS. It can turn dark, right? But when the darkness falls, at least all your tears fall onto Carrara marble work surfaces or into glasses of champagne, or onto the face of the supermodel you’re banging. And it is, therefore, one of the less pitiable darknesses in the scheme of things. A fun darkness.
If anything is likely to change your mind then it’s the forthcoming four-part Netflix documentary Robbie Williams. Using 30 years of behind-the-scenes footage, it follows a 16-year-old boy from Stoke-on-Trent all the way through to his darkest apogee, in episode three. This is where Williams — at this point the biggest pop star in the world — is backstage before playing Roundhay Park in Leeds in front of an audience of 90,000, on a tour where he’s played to 3 million people worldwide. At this point, Williams’s life consists of pills, undiagnosed mental illnesses, failed rehab attempts, failing health, injuries, stalkers, death threats and a series of romantic relationships — Nicole Appleton from All Saints, Geri Halliwell — that have fallen apart due to press intrusion.
Pole-axed by exhaustion — “I just feel… nothing” — Williams is stretched over a sofa and put on a massive IV steroid drip to help get him on stage. Once he’s there, he knows everything will be fine — however tired or mentally ill he is, once he hits the spotlight “Robbie Williams” always turns up and puts on a show. “Robbie Williams” has never let Robert Peter Williams down.
But this time, when he reaches the centre of the stage, he is alone. For the first time, “Robbie Williams” doesn’t turn up. As the band start playing behind him, the singer’s face is in a rictus of terror — he looks like a light entertainment Francis Bacon Pope, melting with adrenaline and cortisol. A panic attack has him in its teeth: “It’s like those nightmares where you don’t know what’s happening and you can’t remember anything and you’re terrified. It was like that all night.”
At one point he looks to the sky, crosses himself and mouths, “F*** me,”in absolute despair while, ironically, Let Me Entertain You plays at full blast.
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It is a hideous watch. In the documentary, Williams now — rewatching the footage — can’t bear it; he fast-forwards to the end. He covers his face with his hands. It clearly provokes a visceral response.
Today he says, “It was like watching a crash you were involved in, but in slo-mo. [Making the documentary] was like enduring your mental illness at a very, very slow pace, over a very, very long time. And it’s a niche thing to experience, you know. There aren’t many support groups for it.”
He sighs.
“When they asked me to make the documentary, I came up with a jingle for it. ‘Trauma watch!/ Trauma watch!/ Have a trauma watch!/ I was in Take That then I left Take That/ Then I did drugs and I got real fat.’ ”
He pauses.
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“They didn’t use that in the end.”
To understand the story of Robbie Williams, you really need to be in 2023, where we’re at the beginning of a much better system of diagnoses.
“Oh, I’ve got them all,” Williams says with immense cheerfulness.
Go on.
“Dyspraxia, dyslexia, ADHD, neurodiversity, body dysmorphia, hypervigilance… There’s a new one that I acquired recently: HSP. Highly sensitive person. Post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD]. And, obviously,” he says, with a proud flourish, “I have an addictive personality. I haven’t got narcissistic personality disorder or split personality disorder, though. I looked at them last week and, obviously, I chose all the worst options. So if I did have it, I would proudly tell you. But I am collecting them all, like Scout badges.”
This, then, was the child that auditioned for Take That at the age of 16. Of course, in 1990 we didn’t really know about any of these disorders or divergences. As Williams puts it in his song, The 80’s, “School was a laugh/ They didn’t have ADD/ Thick was the term they used for me/ Over and over, repeatedly.”
In The 80’s — which is proof that Williams really did turn out to be a great singer-songwriter — he sketches out the world that Take That provided a potential escape route from: “I smoked Consulates and Park Drive, drank Nookie Brown/ Learnt how to skive/ Polo mints to hide my breath from my mum/ Did a little weed cos it felt like fun/ Did a little bit of speed if my friend had some…”
Its sequel song, The 90’s, which is equally gorgeous, then explains what happened next: “I got no GCSEs, nothing higher than a D/ Couldn’t tell my mum because she’d batter me… She said, ‘That man’s been on the phone and you’ve made the list!/ You’re in that boy band, son, come and give us a kiss!’
“Boys I don’t believe it, I’m gonna be famous!/ Pick you up in a Porsche and buy you lots of trainers/ I met the other guys, one seemed like a cock/ I think it’s gonna be like New Kids on the Block.”
The “cock” was, of course, Gary Barlow, with whom Williams feuded for years; they are now, finally, friends again. The footage in Robbie Williams shows how, even in those early years, Williams was an agitated square peg in the round holes of Take That. Despite him singing lead on the No 1 hit Everything Changes, it was still seen as “Gary’s band” and Williams was put at the back; chided, live on air on Radio 1, by the others when he made jokes. Outside the band, he was a god. Within the band, he was the exasperating little brother who needed putting in his place. It looks like a dizzying emotional mix for an unstable, needy child.
“Now it’s dinner with Versace, lunch with Princess Diana/ And I’m gonna get battered if I go out in my manor.”
“Well, there was a contract out to kill me at a very early age,” Williams says with a resigned shrug. “Seventeen, eighteen people wanted to kill me. There was a lot of jealousy and resentment where I come from. And then Mum wasn’t safe — she couldn’t even leave her house or open her curtains. She was overwhelmed. So that f***ed me up too.”
You felt shame, as if you’d contaminated her with your problems too? You’d made her as unsafe as you?
He nods.
“Shame. That’s the hardest one to deal with.”
The whole “death threats” thing isn’t paranoia or an exaggeration, by the way. In his first biography, Feel, there’s a passage where Williams finds bullet holes in the window of his house and doesn’t even mention it to his team for a few weeks, so commonplace had it become by that point.
“So I didn’t feel safe at home and I didn’t feel safe in the band. There was no safety anywhere and I felt constantly vulnerable. But… that’s PTSD, isn’t it?”
Feeling “unsafe” in the band: tell me about that. Because I think most people would assume that all the limos, hotels, money and adoration would feel greatly comforting.
“Well, it would be interesting to do a documentary about boy bands and girl bands,” Williams says, leaning forward on the sofa. “About what they think they’re going into, and what actually happens. Because if you just take Take That as a case study — and all the boys have mentioned this publicly, so I’m not busting anyone’s privacy — you’ve got Gaz [Gary Barlow] who became bulimic and agoraphobic and didn’t leave his house, who forgot how to write songs and slept under his piano. You’ve got Howard, who contemplated suicide. You’ve got Mark, who ended up in rehab. You’ve got Jason, who can’t hack it and has just, like, disappeared. And then you’ve got me. So that’s your case study: there’s something that solidifies and calcifies in those five years — which is the traditional lifespan of a boy band — that causes mental illness. It’s five out of five.”
Or, as The 90’s puts it, “We’re all a bag of nerves and not a band of brothers.”
In Robbie Williams, it takes 40 minutes — the first episode — for Williams to go from being a bright, ambitious, working-class kid from Stoke-on-Trent, cheerfully break-dancing on breakfast TV, to a bloated, bleached-blond ghost turning up backstage at Glastonbury with Oasis, tooth blacked out, swigging from a bottle of vodka. He leaves Take That — which is announced on the news — and then, within minutes, the news crews turn up again to see him leave home for rehab.
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Even in this dark moment, Williams is droll. Addressing the camera crews on his doorstep, he blinks and says, with camp peevishness, “Can I just say, I’m appalled at the turnout? When Michael Barrymore went to rehab, he had loads more people outside.”
There’s no doubt about it: if you want a documentary about a series of crushing, catastrophic lows, Robbie Williams serves it up with blistering candour.
“WHEN I MET THE NETFLIX PEOPLE, the question I had to ask them was, ‘Can you polish a turd?’ ” Williams says, tentatively eating an olive — then relaxing when it turns out not to be a chocolate olive. “I know everyone’s got a story, or a turd, but I want my particular story, or turd, to mean something. Like, I know everyone’s really interested in the trauma aspect and the addiction aspect, but I’ve always thought, ‘Well, there’s more to me than that.’ I wanted to break with the form. I need things to be… different from what they were.”
And this is different from how things were; this is a break with the form. For, in Robbie Williams, the twist in the format is that, in each episode, we see all the footage from Williams’s decades of chaos and addiction — but at the same time Williams, in 2023, is watching it. He reacts and provides a sometimes appalled, sometimes emotional but more commonly incredibly amusing commentary on the whole thing. He’s basically Gogglebox-ed himself. This is the Robbie Williams Peep Show. You get to hear every thought — the ones that most people suppress — said out loud. It’s like a very traumatic sitcom.
“We spoke for 25 days, 6-7 hours every day,” Williams tells me. “It was intense. But you have to show it to all the people who just go, ‘Oh, it’s tomorrow’s chip paper,’ or, ‘Nobody believes what they read in the papers,’ or, ‘Brush it off.’ Well,I was incredibly mentally ill. You can’t brush that off. That’s basically like people saying, ‘Don’t be sad,’ to someone who’s mentally ill. And we know not to do that now, don’t we?”
One of the most fascinating things about Robbie Williams is seeing how unexpectedly ahead of his time he has been throughout his career.
So much of what we think of as modern celebrity now — brutal candour about sex, body image and mental health; sexual and gender fluidity; breaking the fourth wall by directly addressing the audience about the whole concept of “fame” — is there, over and over, even back in 1996, 1997, 1998.
Here’s Williams on Top Of The Pops in 1998 in a gold mesh dress, predating Harry Styles’s former boy band member in a frock shtick by a whole generation.
Here’s Williams cheerfully describing himself as “49 per cent homosexual”.
Williams’s most postmodern statement on fame — the video to Rock DJ where, to impress his female fans, he first takes off all his clothes, then strips off all his skin until he’s just desperate, dancing meat — would look more at home in the work of Lady Gaga a decade later. Gaga also, notably, switched from her electro-pop mode to a covers album of easy listening classics, like Williams, but without being accused of producing a “consumer artefact made for Christmas Day biliousness”, as the NME dismissed Williams’s similar Swing When You’re Winning.
And Williams’s constant openness about his mental health was genuinely pioneering. It’s hard to remember that his admission in 2004 that he was on antidepressants was a massively big deal. These days, every celebrity admits it. It’s just… normal.
“There was a line I wanted to have in the documentary, which we had to lose in the end,” Williams says, grinning. “ ‘I moaned, so Lewis Capaldi could wail.’ Stonking!”
Like a self-amused dad, he laughs at his own joke. “But that is what I was. Lewis Capaldi without the tic.”
For someone who is regularly seen as just “a jazz-hands light entertainer” or, in Noel Gallagher’s persistently sticky description, “the fat dancer from Take That”, Robbie Williams has been far weirder, bolder, more guileless and more interesting than the press have given him credit for. The “only” people who seem to have noticed are his millions of fans.
“It’s odd,” I muse. “There’s a definite cohort of ‘cool’ people — the kind of people who are into, I dunno, Radiohead — for whom you are the go-to punchline for something that’s ‘not cool’. And…”
At this point Williams interrupts me, looking as agitated as he will all day.
“It’s interesting, because I was once taking some amphetamines to lose weight — you know, medical amphetamines — and they made me very angry, and I wrote a blog about all the Britpop bands that were really dismissive or sniffy about me. I’d gone down a TFI Friday rabbit hole watching all these ‘cool’ bands from back in the day, and I suddenly had this massive revelation while I was watching them: they were all incredibly f***ing average. I was like, ‘I remember you, you c***s. Being backstage at some TV show and looking down your noses at me and… you’re f***ing shit.’ It was like a kabuki drop, you know? ‘Oh wow, I thought you were all better than me and you’re all just… boring.’ ”
“The thing that intrigued me most,” I continue, as Williams sits there still looking indignant (“I just want to say, I don’t usually get angry these days. I don’t have any testosterone at the moment and I’m usually very chill”), “is that the things you do that seem to provoke the most derision from the ‘cool’ people are actually when you’re most scared. In the documentary, we finally see that when you’re doing your ‘smug’ James Bond face in the Millennium video, or doing a Norman Wisdom impression on The Voice, those are the days when, actually, you were incredibly anxious or having a full-blown panic attack. Those that don’t like you seem to be having a subconscious, animal revulsion to your fear. You do have a tic. It’s looking arrogant.”
Williams nods emphatically.
“I was talking to Michael Bublé about this ages ago,” he says. “We had a chat on the phone for like an hour and a half. It was very, very helpful. And he said the same thing: whenever he looks like he’s the most confident man in the world, that’s actually when he’s the most scared.
“In the documentary, at Glastonbury, where I come on stage all like [Williams recreates his aggressive, triumphant advent on stage], I’m absolutely f***ing terrified. [The girl band] Daphne and Celeste had just been bottled off stage at the Reading Festival and I’m like, ‘That’s going to happen to me here. They’re pissing in the bottles right now that they’re going to throw at me.’ So it’s all a performance.”
He looks reflective.
“Growing up, I loved TV, film, big characters — I felt safe when I watched Morecambe and Wise, Tommy Cooper and The Two Ronnies. So that’s where I go to. Actually, shall we go somewhere else?”
For the past few minutes, Williams’s oldest child, Teddy, has been sitting on his lap and stroking his face. He’s incredibly tender around her, but says, “Daddy’s talking about serious things, darling. You’re too young to hear them yet.”
We decamp to his garden — half a football field in the middle of Kensington, which bears all the hallmarks of being tended by many, many staff. Williams has described Teddy as “having been born with jazz hands” and she has an obvious interest in his job: she’s already said she wants to work in entertainment. “But there’s no f***ing way I’m letting her anywhere near it until she’s an adult,” he says, fiercely.
We’ve already overrun our allotted interview time by an hour, and Williams’s wife, Ayda, appears in the garden and seems surprised to see her husband here.
“We’re hiding from the kids,” he says.
“Oh, that’s why I came out here too,” she says, before disappearing back inside again. For two people in a £17.5 million mansion, it’s a very relatable moment.
THE WEIRDEST THING ABOUT WATCHING ROBBIE WILLIAMS is revisiting a time — the late Nineties, the Noughties — that seems so recent but also, now, quite shocking. This is before the deaths of Amy Winehouse and Caroline Flack but concurrent with Britney Spears’s breakdown, and there is a jolt when faced with just how vituperative the media voice was when covering celebrities. None of them are Nazi war criminals or sex offenders; they’re just singers and entertainers who are treated as shameful, grotesque shadow-selves to the public consciousness — and the tone becomes more febrile and goading the more fragile they inevitably become.
“This is killing me,” Williams says in the documentary, reading his bad press,while his 2023 voiceover says, “There was a sense that it would be for the best if I just… passed away.”
But what’s odd, watching it, is the sense that in the future, no one will remember all this. It’s already fading — this notion that Williams is not cool; that he’s embarrassing; a f***-up; too eager to please. In 2023, recklessly candid, fourth-wall-breaking ADHD celebrities are just “normal” for Gen Z and Gen A.
Now that Williams is sober, bucolically happy with his wife and four children, and pursuing myriad side projects, his whole persona finally starts to makes more sense. To all those who found him “a bit too much” when he was a pop star — they were right. He actually needed far more than “just” stadium gigs and pop singles. He’s now acting — there’s a biopic, Better Man, coming out next year, whose central conceit Williams insists I can’t reveal but which is genuinely, brilliantly bananas. Williams is designing a hotel and a “sleep shop”, and makes pieces of art that sell for £40,000 a pop. His Instagram feed is like some Fast Show meme-generator of gags and silly joyfulness. And he plans to open “an entertainment university, where kids learn how to be the record company, be the agent, but there’s also a syllabus for comedy, make-up, content creation. When you have all these ideas as a British person,” he says, “there’s nowhere to implement them. In America, you just make a phone call. So I’m making those phone calls now. We herd ourselves into boxes in Britain. I want to, for want of a better phrase, Elon Musk it.”
And his mini-Musk-like wealth makes it possible: worth an estimated £230 million, Williams and his family now shuttle between houses in Los Angeles, London, France and Switzerland. “Me and the missus are flighty people. Wherever we are, we don’t want to be there. I think we exist better as a moving caravan, although a moving caravan doesn’t work so well when you’ve got kids that need to be schooled. I guess we’ll have to make a decision at some point. Also, to be a moving caravan is incredibly expensive.” He grimaces.
But returning to his plans for an entertainment university, Williams notes, “The most important bit, though, will be mental health. Because everyone arriving at that university will have a mental problem in some sort of way. They want to be loved, they want to be wanted, they want to be recognised, they want to be understood.”
Do you think that’s absolutely a pre-requisite for being creative, I ask. Is that why people do it? Because they have mental health problems?
He stares at me.
“Yeah. Of course. Full stop.”
He stares at me again.
“Of course. And if they don’t have them at the beginning, they do by the end. No one gets a free pass in the extreme fame game. No one comes out the other side well adjusted and happy and mentally well. Name me one.”
We spend the next ten minutes trying to think of someone — and fail abjectly. Two of the ones I confidently suggest are vetoed by Williams “because I know them. No.”
But as, for the next half-hour, Williams takes me around his house, shows me his art, hugs his children, kisses his wife and plans his “next phase” — “The documentary puts all the past to bed. I feel lucky now” — I think, maybe, despite the dyspraxia, dyslexia, ADHD, neurodiversity, body dysmorphia, hypervigilance, HSP, PTSD and type 2 self-loathing, you? Maybe you finallyhave come out the other side. Maybe you are the first happy megastar.
Robbie Williams is on Netflix
