Robbie Williams / Interviews over the years

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Robbie Williams / Interviews over the years

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Sydney11 View member profile	Aug 19 2017, 06:43 AM Post #1
BuzzJack Platinum Member Joined: 6 April 2016 Posts: 11,587 User: 23,135	NOVEMBER 16' rS_jK6BYzW8


Laura130262 View member profile	Aug 19 2017, 10:47 AM Post #2
BuzzJack Platinum Member Joined: 21 December 2009 Posts: 8,177 User: 10,265	https://youtu.be/cuagSJT7eEY This Parkinson interview was iconic for me. I was a growing fan in 2001 and he was just so beautiful on this. It kind of sealed my fate Also it's when my mum became a fan. She rang me and said " I didn't know he could sing like that".


Laura130262 View member profile	Aug 19 2017, 11:18 AM Post #3
BuzzJack Platinum Member Joined: 21 December 2009 Posts: 8,177 User: 10,265	Watching both those again- he's such good value as a guest. You always know there'll be lots of laughter, lots of stories and lots of chaos.


Sydney11 View member profile	Aug 20 2017, 08:47 AM Post #4
BuzzJack Platinum Member Joined: 6 April 2016 Posts: 11,587 User: 23,135	Mine was sitting in a pub & Knebworth came on tv & the people in the pub were glued to to tv screen , it was such a great event I do not think he will ever beat Knebworth , everything went just right that weekend, you could not ask for better Such energy Here's a little reminder Vlj9ywD9UGU This post has been edited by Sydney11: Aug 20 2017, 08:50 AM


Laura130262 View member profile	Aug 20 2017, 10:22 PM Post #5
BuzzJack Platinum Member Joined: 21 December 2009 Posts: 8,177 User: 10,265	No he won't beat Knebworth but he knew that himself at the time didn't he? A moment in pop history. That record will be broken one day - maybe by Ed Sheeran but for now it's 14 years old and still in place.


Sydney11 View member profile	Aug 21 2017, 05:33 AM Post #6
BuzzJack Platinum Member Joined: 6 April 2016 Posts: 11,587 User: 23,135	QUOTE(Laura130262 @ Aug 19 2017, 11:47 AM) https://youtu.be/cuagSJT7eEY This Parkinson interview was iconic for me. I was a growing fan in 2001 and he was just so beautiful on this. It kind of sealed my fate Also it's when my mum became a fan. She rang me and said " I didn't know he could sing like that". 2001 , how time flies by I love that song cuagSJT7eEY


Sydney11 View member profile	Sep 4 2017, 06:57 PM Post #7
BuzzJack Platinum Member Joined: 6 April 2016 Posts: 11,587 User: 23,135	Wu8wZE_Nq9s He's tough u4KqE79yPmM He's demanding


Sydney11 View member profile	Sep 12 2017, 05:52 AM Post #8
BuzzJack Platinum Member Joined: 6 April 2016 Posts: 11,587 User: 23,135	That the English superstar is in a state of grace can be seen at a glance: in full casual-chic black, during the long chat organized by TIM music does not lose the smile even when he trusts the mood that sometimes torments him yet. Robbie looks like a 43-year-old boy, who is certainly not the most successful British artist in history - all his 12 albums, including the " last, The Heavy Entertainment Show (Columbia), won first place in the UK rankings. Record that in February conferred on him the Brits Global Icon Award, the award awarded to artists who had an exceptional impact on the country's culture, and is the third one to deserve it after the two legends Elton John and David Bowie. "I had already won 17 Brit Awards and this was the icing on the cake. I consider it a great honor, but I do not like to brag, indeed. Do you know what I thought when they gave me the news? "Lowering the quality of the winners, no doubt." And immediately afterwards, "It's absurd that Paul McCartney has received ten awards less than me," recounts the pop king of nearly 80 million records sold, which in July went from Italy for three stages of the tour (the 14th in Verona , 15 in Lucca and 17 in Barolo, at the Collision Festival). Piece taken from an interview in Italian magazine www.Grazia.it Does he ever accept praise for what he has achieved in hus career This post has been edited by Sydney11: Sep 12 2017, 05:53 AM


Laura130262 View member profile	Sep 12 2017, 10:57 PM Post #9
BuzzJack Platinum Member Joined: 21 December 2009 Posts: 8,177 User: 10,265	QUOTE(Sydney11 @ Sep 12 2017, 06:52 AM) Does he ever accept praise for what he has achieved in hus career No - unfortunately.


Sydney11 View member profile	Sep 13 2017, 06:11 AM Post #10
BuzzJack Platinum Member Joined: 6 April 2016 Posts: 11,587 User: 23,135	I love this interview ...cannot take my eyes off the house & the surrounding grounds OFWqmU_KhTM


Sydney11 View member profile	Sep 15 2017, 05:57 AM Post #11
BuzzJack Platinum Member Joined: 6 April 2016 Posts: 11,587 User: 23,135	Lone star The country's most extravagant entertainer is back, wowing fans at his shows and gadding around London with celebrity friends like David Walliams. But beyond the razzmatazz - as he tells Paul Flynn in an exclusive interview - the real Robbie Williams remains a mixed-up boy from Stoke-on-Trent who has never known love 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 f*ing love socks, me. Great, aren't they? Good socks.' He shows me his own socks. They are lovely: ribbed navy with a pink trim around the ankle. 'Don't go with me trainers though, do they? Paul Smith, I think. Yeah, I fing love socks.' Somehow this reminds him that he has given up cane sugar - 'five days off it,' he says, as if I have been counting. He gives the impression that he is lighting a cigarette every time he speaks - sucking in air like a Dyson - and he speaks all the time. There is a rhythm that you must adjust to around Robbie Williams to get the best out of him 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. Physically, there are similar contradictions: he has outsized everything - his thighs are enormous. It is only his having that luckiest of male attributes - sexiness - that stops him from being ever so slightly grotesque. The first time I met him was in his London home: a penthouse, one floor below Michael Caine's, in a gated harbour community in Chelsea. It was just under a year ago. Because I love Robbie Williams as a pop performer and because I like his type, 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 central London hotel suite. He is in town for seven weeks - his longest spell since moving to Beverly Hills, California two years ago. (The mansion that he keeps is one of three British residences pointed out on the Starline bus tour of celebrity homes. The others - appropriately in his context - belong to Simon Cowell and Elizabeth Taylor.) This trip is necessary to promote his new album, Intensive Care, a process that involves just this one press interview but also a couple of TV appearances and an intimate show at the Astoria. This and two gigs in Paris and Amsterdam are warm-ups for a huge show in Berlin that will be televised around Europe - the sort of promotional gambit that few other stars can carry off, but then he has sold 40 million albums and won eight Brit awards. He is bored of the 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. Certainly 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 and whom Williams effortlessly outshone at Live8. Every pop singer launched on a major label since 'Angels' became a national anthem has attempted to touch the cloth of his frayed hem by some weird form of proxy. Since their partnership collapsed, 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 Bryan McFadden to Charlotte Church in an attempt to signify their maturation from cuddly compliance to edgy adulthood. Will Young attributes the entire styling of his first album campaign to Robbie, from whom he liberally borrowed the look. 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 the canny pop provocatrice, got the fact that it might be Williams himself who was at the heart of his own staggering success, and invited him to write for her on the eve of her own creative renaissance half a decade ago. Williams still openly smarts at the fact that Minogue's record company would not release the exemplary Euro club anthem that he and Chambers fashioned for her, 'Your Disco Needs You', as a single, on the grounds of it being too gay: 'Too gay! For Kylie? Imagine!' Robbie Williams himself has a ready-made answer to the question of what's made him famous: 'Look, what makes it work for me is really very simple. There are three things that go together to make up my success. I do something on TV performances that you don't get from other pop stars. There's the live thing, which people seem to really like. And then there's radio, which has been really, really fing kind to me.' Robbie imagines that one day Independent Local Radio won't be so kind to him - 'there'll be a new boss at Capital and they'll decide it's time to shed the old and I'll be off' - but because his popularity has endured for over a decade now, and because the tabloids will remain obsessed with him until he attains peace of mind, there is little that can be done to erase the piece of patchwork that he has stitched into the cultural fabric. While not exactly dismissive of his immediate peers - he is nothing if not demonically competitive - he has stopped talking about the latest industry fad when placing himself in his own story; he will casually drop names such as Cliff Richard and Elton John into his conversation without them sounding odd. He is now easing quite safely, against some startling initial odds, into being a British institution. The only thing he himself thinks could halt his progress towards that now is 'a Michael Jackson case or a John Leslie case. And no, there isn't one of those waiting anywhere in the wings.' But no one ever said that our national institutions have to be normal; invariably, it's quite the contrary, and Robbie Williams is steeped in contradictions and insecurities. Despite the fame and beyond the charisma, he's a very singular man, with a bent for the confessional. But he is still Europe's biggest pop star. Is what you do still pop music? Yeah. I'm still looking for the rules of what is and isn't pop music. I'm pop. I mean, of course I am. What isn't pop? There should be a pop amnesty where everyone reclaims it. It's just that now pop is seen as quite a dirty industry. Why? Because the pop industry discourages personality - living in fear of scaring its audience, it produces characterless people, like Rachel Stevens There is still snobbery. Anything that is considered throwaway is considered invalid. Whereas a group such as the Arcade Fire are considered more noble - because they're ugly people singing songs about death? Yeah. But I can never not be pop. Because of Take That? Because of who I am. I would say this new album is a pop album myself. Yes. It's pop. Can pop still be great? Yeah. I mean, when I first saw Oasis I recognised a thing - I don't even know what you'd call it, just a thing - that was greatness. It's outside of pop in the way it's meant now but it's pop brilliance to me. I thought I saw it again with the Strokes, but I might've been wrong. And then I think people have seen that thing in the Libertines and Pete Doherty. But you know that thing? I got the same feeling watching the Spice Girls. When Geri came down the stairs in the dress ... it was so fing powerful seeing those girls together. Are you aware of yourself being 'that thing'?* I've never thought about it in those terms before. But the evidence that's staring me in the face is that I must be 'that thing' to the people that are coming to see me. Because there's an awful lot of them now. So I must have done 'that thing' at some point. Is 'that thing' simply a question of popularity? Plenty of people will go and cheer bands like McFly, or a singer like David Gray, but to me at least it's clear that none of them have it Yeah, but I've never been there to witness it. Come on! I can't say that. Would you like to be able to go and see yourself as a fan? f*, yeah! know all the words, for a start. No, I really would. There was a time when I would've given the tickets away if I had the chance. But now? Yeah, I'd love to be able to go and see Robbie Williams live. He is a sort I know well: born in 1974 in Stoke-on-Trent and raised in the shadow of the Manchester fringes; came of age just after the warped chemical nirvana of acid house had turned the north-west of England into a reckless party zone; funniest bloke in the pub; ceaseless attention seeker; smokes too much; fit; super-bright but shockingly failed by the education system; naturally compulsive; and very, very good at appearing as if he lives in some sort of outer-sexual hinterland where anyone is game, so long as they adore him. Like his current London sparring partner David Walliams, he could give the glad eye to a table leg. He is what my nana - his too, probably - would have called a show-off. It is not something that is lost on the performer himself. 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 recreational drugs. Success with Take That had curdled in him- he had the fame but not the happiness and so he sought solace in the rock star lifestyle, turning pally with Oasis, before upsetting every prediction and revisiting the charts with a sequence of huge hits. This is the story that everyone knows, and the path that every kid auditioning for The X-Factor would like to follow. Like many of his generation, his relationship with drink and drugs changed, and hedonism switched to nihilism. Since getting clean, he has had to find alternative outlets for his outlandish compulsions. They manifest themselves in some and curious character tics that he freely offloads. He is currently in thrall to the paranormal and Egyptology and for this afternoon at least, believes there are some serious career options available to him in these fields. At one point, with all seriousness, he says: '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.) It is this side of him that is more evident on subsequent meetings after the initial wow. But he is fascinating on the subject of addiction - and has plenty to add to the media debate about Pete Doherty. 'I believe that if you're fed up - and I'm still fed up, but just not on drugs - then 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. The lift doesn't stop all the time and I think Pete's probably just missed a floor. He's had an opportunity to get out and just missed his floor. But the lift will stop again. 'Addiction is different with Pete Doherty. He's different and we live in very different times. It isn't the Sixties any more. People don't have to die because of their addictions: they get clean. It's quite simple. It's not the same as it was for Janis Joplin or Jim Morrison or even Kurt Cobain. And it's not as if people haven't reached out to Pete. There is still some evidence that there's a romance to that rock'n'roll myth that hasn't died with addiction changing. And I'm not being funny, but there's a sense of his addiction being quite pretty. You know? He stays up all night off his head and then the next day at midday he goes down to the beach with a supermodel wearing a silver ballgown to shoot tin cans off a wall. It's appealing. 'My addiction did not look like that. I'd end up with any old idiot who'd talk shit with me till the early hours. That wasn't pretty.' Since leaving Take That, Williams has released eight albums. Judging by the audience reaction to his new material at the Astoria show, the ninth will satisfy his vast constituency of fans, but it also represents a maturation of his talents just as he looks backwards. With Stephen Duffy, formerly of the Lilac Time, he has fashioned a poppier update of the sound of his great heroes the Smiths. The echoes of Morrissey are all over the songs 'The Trouble With Me' and 'Your Gay Friend' and the shadows of drizzly bus shelters in the north west in the 1980s haunt the record - at times, you can actually sing Smiths songs over the top of the tunes ('Girlfriend in a Coma' fits perfectly with 'Spread Your Wings'). It feels like a record grounded in Williams's upbringing, despite a coat of stadium sheen that has been applied to the record by rock producer Bob Clearmountain - something pointedly played down in the bumph accompanying the album while Duffy's involvement is cheerleadingly celebrated. Like 'Radio', the single that trailed his multi-million selling greatest hits package last year, the lead single from Intensive Care, 'Tripping', is defiantly weird, its cod ska rumble and falsetto chorus a departure from the more traditional fare that Williams fashioned with Guy Chambers. But the highlight might be 'Make Me Pure' which, like all Williams's best songs, is concerned with a fear of death and not wanting to die, but being absolutely rubbish at life. In this respect, he has nailed an unspoken modern condition. It is churlish for critics who dislike Robbie Williams not to point this out, but there is still a school of thought that Chambers was the 'talent' in their partnership, a mantle that will be happily handed over to Duffy now in some quarters. It is a lie that haunts Williams. The night before our agreeable afternoon in the hotel suite, Williams has invited five broadsheet journalists to a recording studio in Chiswick, west London, to hear Intensive Care for the first time. To the writers' surprise, the first four songs are to be introduced by the singer himself and then we will be left with Stephen Duffy to talk us through the rest. Duffy - looking rabbit-in-the-headlights startled by the upturn in his commercial fortunes since meeting Williams - is a classically underachieving member of Robbie's coterie, a fact that invites numerous psychological readings, not all of them favourable. But it is Robbie's grand misfire that really sabotages the sense of event. By way of introduction, as he sits down, Williams produces a sheath of computer printouts and begins reading some of the journalists' criticism of him back at them. The conceit - here's one that I Googled earlier! - goes down like a lead balloon. It is the beginning of the end of any existing goodwill in the room and the whole thing descends quickly into farce, awkward exchanges batted back and forth, punctuated mostly by the horrifying sensation of being in a room full of nervous laughter. No one escapes the room with their dignity fully intact. I remain deafeningly silent throughout and am clearly wearing every aspect of my embarrassment like a novelty headpiece. By the third track, 'Make Me Pure', Robbie turns around to me and mouths the words 'Are you alright, love?' I manage to raise a thumb, stiffly, and drink my way, speedily, through the rest of it. I do like the man. But the phrase 'own worst enemy' could quite possibly have been coined at the poor lad's christening. Of the many things that astounded me about the evening, the one I cannot rid myself of is that Williams had bothered to arrive dressed as Robbie the Pop Star for the occasion: top to toe YSL, a look lifted straight from next season's catwalk, the same ensemble he would sport the following week for a GQ magazine awards ceremony. He really cared. Yet even in full costume, he was palpably nervous. He knows anyway that what happened was a disaster. 'What'd happened, right,' he says the next day, attempting to explain away the whole scenario, 'was that I'd had three triple espressos and my waistcoat was too tight. In the car going over there I tried to breathe and couldn't get my breath. I was short of breath and that triggered me not being able to get it together. I got anxiety.' What he is describing sounds suspiciously like a panic attack. He pauses for a while, unsatisfied with this response. 'And ... I was nervous because there were five journalists there and they can all argue a point really well. But it's like, you know, I was probably anxious to get my point across and I was nervous looking for the words.' I tell him, politely, that it was an extraordinary thing to sit through. He reads 'extraordinary', correctly, as 'excruciating'. 'OK, here's what last night was about. What happens is I speak to people outside of my circle of friends and they have already formed an opinion of me based on the things that people have written. That is the effect of journalism on my life and sometimes it isn't very pleasant. What happened last night? I'm just not in the fing place for this shit to drop off me. I'm not Buddha. I'm fing 31, still human, you know? 'I was chatting to this mate of a mate the other day who had that thing. I call it the 'indie rules'. There's a code that everyone agrees on, it's a club and everyone joins in. We were having a fag and he said [adopts bedraggled rock'n'roll cockney accent]: "You know the other week, right, I had nothing to do, right, so I went and watched Live8." Nothing to do! Is this guy real? He's finding it so hard to do but I can feel him struggling to give me a compliment. So he says, "I been there all fing day and you were coming on and I was thinking, 'Here he comes, the Redcoat'" - which is very indie rules - and I could hear it coming and he says, "But you were fing brilliant." 'It pained him to say it. He was in pain. Redcoat entertainment, end of the pier, holiday camps. That is what the indie rules say about Robbie Williams. If I wasn't so sensitive I'd be able to deal with it. But still there's a human side that still goes "ow" when something hurts.' Why do people do it to you? Because they know it'll hurt or they think you're thick-skinned? 'A bit of both, I think. I mean, they're right. It is a bit of both.' If intellectuals could only stop getting in a tizz about the modern obsession with celebrity and its meaning and start understanding that it is just a new, British, working class, get-out-of-jail-free card, Robbie Williams's personal narrative would be more clearly revealed as emblematic. It is about both the triumph of escaping suburban ennui and the hideous fallout when you come to the startling and inevitable realisation that you have gone so far that you just want to get back to the mental place you thought you were trying to escape from in the first place. It is also about another very modern condition: the disillusionment of fulfilling your dreams; thinking that fame can somehow work you out and solve your problems. There are stories that Robbie Williams hasn't told before, such as that of his Auntie Clare, who used to sit him by the fire with a Sunday roast, a Berkeley cigarette and a can of cheap lager when he'd fallen out with his mum - a single parent with the most gregarious son on the block - as an early teen. He conjures up such a sweet tableau - almost Alan Bennett-esque in his reproduction of detail - that you forget you are having to cut through a thick mist of romantic nostalgia to get to it. 'Yeah, fing loved that,' he says, as he finishes the verbal portrait. There is however a heartbreaking detail of his upbringing to counterbalance every one of his Hovis-glow memories of happier days of old. He relates the details of a murderer three generations back in the family, which sounds like it may be apocryphal. 'But I really, really want it to be true.' Also, his grandad, whose name Williams has tattooed on the insides of his wrists, would make his mother walk 10 paces in front of him on the streets of Stoke, such was his embarrassment after she divorced. 'Families pretend that things don't happen,' he says, with a poignancy that is impossible to resist. 'They turn everything into anecdotes.' In a similar manner to the artist Tracey Emin, Robbie Williams 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. One of the loneliest conceits surrounding Robbie Williams is that of him, pop star, confessing all to anyone who will really listen, as he would to a wife, seeking approval and looking for love and affection in all the wrong beds. Over that peculiarly fast small talk that he excels in, before the tape is switched back on, I mention a favourite hotel in New York. Robbie nods in agreement. 'Yeah, it's amazing. I always stay there. It'd be lovely to be able to share that thing with someone. Just waking up in it with the person you love.' Robbie Williams, probably one of the most eligible bachelors in the world, has been single for six years. How's the search for your wife going?* It's sort of ground to a halt. I'm not spiritually bankrupt this year but I know that there's something missing. I've got a few things to sort out before I'm ready to go into relationships again. 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. Out of a relationship? No, five years sober. Six years out of a relationship. That's a long time, Robbie. I know. It's the sort of time that if you were a woman of your age you'd really start panicking and thinking you were a bit unlovable and that you'll never have children. I suppose it is. To be honest with you, that sort of stuff is creeping in. And then it doesn't. Because, you know, I need to get everything in my life from A to B in order to get to C. 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 that I can't talk about. 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. When was the last time you had a date? I've had three this week. I've had f*ing loads in the States. Well, loads for me, anyway. Who was it this week? No one anyone knows. Which is best. Is she nice? She's lovely. Like, really, really fing lovely. But it must be a scientific fact that the penis rules the brain. Which is such a cruel trick. As much as we can laugh about it and dismiss it, whatever the thing was that had attracted me to her, it is now a scientific fact that I am not interested. Because you got what you wanted?* Yeah. And I really, really don't know how that phone call's going to go. We sealed the deal and now the deal's off. Has anyone got wind of this in the press? No. Like I say, it's no one famous. And because it was all conducted within the confines of my flat, no one knows about it. How tough is dating under public scrutiny? Well, it isn't under public scrutiny in the States. I was going out with someone for five months or so. Not as boyfriend and girlfriend, in a very noncommittal way. We both knew it wasn't going anywhere, really. Like, she never called me her boyfriend and I never called her my girlfriend. But we went out together and did stuff. Did she have expectations? Hmmm. Did you have expectations? I didn't, no. When was the last time you were in love, Robbie? I haven't been. Ever? No. I've had a "want to be". I've had a giant expectation. But that giant expectation was when I was 16 and it was with a girl who was hounded by the press last year. Intensive Care is really Williams at his most intensely autobiographical. Yet a song that he has written addressed to his former girlfriend, 'Ghosts', is underpinned with some sad contradictions. The opening line that also ushers in the album - 'Here I stand/ Victorious/ The only man to make you come' - is as bold as any you'll hear this year. As with Williams's other records, however, there is an 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. I mention that the girl's presence is heavily felt on the record. Yeah. And that was the first and last time I had something that was ... No, I'm wrong. I mean, of course I've had f*ing expectations. I wake up every morning with fing expectations. But I've never had a love in the sense that other people have experienced it. No one's ever - and I don't think it's anybody's fault, other than my own - fallen in love with me in that way. Do you ever feel that you've made a mental trade-off somewhere: that by giving yourself over to this startling career, you have forsaken a kind of personal happiness that might otherwise have happened? Not really. Would I have had it if I hadn't had this career? Probably not. I mean, other people have had this level of success and they've also managed to juggle that with being married and having kids. I just think, God, at least they tried out marriage. Even Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley! Even fing Elton John's tried that one. You know? Ronan's married with kids. Justin Timberlake will be married to Cameron Diaz soon and they'll have it: the brilliant careers and the brilliant marriage. They are deeply in love. On the other hand, of course, there is a sense in which I want to pat myself on the back and say, "Well, fing hell, you got through your twenties without getting divorced, there's no single mothers running around with your babies and you have no lifetime attachments to people that you hate." Like the Gallagher brothers from Oasis?* Like many, many people. If it takes me until I'm 40, which I don't want it to, but you can see the argument that I might not be grown up enough until I hit my forties to handle anything like that, then it does. There's a very present feeling on the album of someone being 16 years old, standing at a bus stop in Piccadilly Gardens, smoking a cigarette butt and secretly thinking you're the king of the world when, actually, you know you come from nothing, really. It's probably trying my best to let go, subconsciously, of a time before Take That, when I was still a school kid. It's actually letting go of my romantic expectations of what growing older would be. When you're 13, 14, 15 and you've got your Walkman on and you're walking through Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester or you're at the bus station in Stoke and it's raining, then the possibility of being exactly who you want to be is at its strongest. 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 ... It is would be easy not to look beyond the vaudeville aspect of Robbie Williams, the high-octane showman, and there seems little doubt that his reign will continue. But I tell him what he says is really quite heartbreaking. Yes, because you know the punchline to it. Because you know that the reality of all that stuff is not quite so beautiful. It's messy and addictive and f*ed up. Killing the expectation - or maybe just letting it go gently - is the best thing that I can do with it. Don't you want to keep a little bit of that feeling back? Don't you still want to be thrilled by a first kiss or a pop song on the radio? Yes, I still want to be astounded by life. I still can be. I think. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2005/oct/16/popandrock2 Such a lot has happened since that interview This post has been edited by Sydney11**: Sep 15 2017, 06:04 AM


Laura130262 View member profile	Sep 15 2017, 11:46 PM Post #12
BuzzJack Platinum Member Joined: 21 December 2009 Posts: 8,177 User: 10,265	That article makes fascinating reading with hindsight. I remember when he took the newspapers on. It took years for them to forgive him. They made him pay for that.


elisabeth1974 View member profile	Sep 16 2017, 05:16 AM Post #13
BuzzJack Enthusiast Joined: 8 February 2017 Posts: 1,005 User: 25,575	this was one of the first longer articles I read about Robbie and the one about the event you mentioned Laura. I wonder why he did that? He was aware about the power of the media. Was he that disgusted? Did he think he would be untouchable? Anyway. He has come a long way since then. He has still the revolutionary unadapted child in him.


Sydney11 View member profile	Sep 16 2017, 10:09 AM Post #14
BuzzJack Platinum Member Joined: 6 April 2016 Posts: 11,587 User: 23,135	It is only his having that luckiest of male attributes - sexiness - that stops him from being ever so slightly grotesque Sexy - Definitely Grotesque - he has fabulous facial expression which is what makes him great onstage , some folk might consider it grotesque - not me


Sydney11 View member profile	Sep 16 2017, 06:01 PM Post #15
BuzzJack Platinum Member Joined: 6 April 2016 Posts: 11,587 User: 23,135	Since their partnership collapsed, 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 Bryan McFadden to Charlotte Church in an attempt to signify their maturation from cuddly compliance to edgy adulthood. Will Young attributes the entire styling of his first album campaign to Robbie, from whom he liberally borrowed the look. 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 the canny pop provocatrice, got the fact that it might be Williams himself who was at the heart of his own staggering success, and invited him to write for her on the eve of her own creative renaissance half a decade ago. Williams still openly smarts at the fact that Minogue's record company would not release the exemplary Euro club anthem that he and Chambers fashioned for her, 'Your Disco Needs You', as a single, on the grounds of it being too gay: 'Too gay! For Kylie? Imagine!'


Laura130262 View member profile	Sep 16 2017, 11:24 PM Post #16
BuzzJack Platinum Member Joined: 21 December 2009 Posts: 8,177 User: 10,265	QUOTE(Sydney11 @ Sep 16 2017, 07:01 PM) Only Kylie Minogue, ever the canny pop provocatrice, got the fact that it might be Williams himself who was at the heart of his own staggering success, Which of course he is. RW went on to have three more number one albums after the split with Guy. IMO he's better with Guy but he doesn't need anyone else for his success other than himself.


Sydney11 View member profile	Sep 17 2017, 06:39 AM Post #17
BuzzJack Platinum Member Joined: 6 April 2016 Posts: 11,587 User: 23,135	QUOTE(elisabeth1974 @ Sep 16 2017, 06:16 AM) this was one of the first longer articles I read about Robbie and the one about the event you mentioned Laura. I wonder why he did that? He was aware about the power of the media. Was he that disgusted? Did he think he would be untouchable? Anyway. He has come a long way since then. He has still the revolutionary unadapted child in him. It was just that I think Robbie felt he had to say something at the time to support Kate Moss who was headlining over the drug issue & at some press conference he kinda threatened some of the press core with exposing those in the press who themselves were taking drugs & they did not like that & may him pay for it for a long time . Robbie has learnt a lot since then , he has always been open about his own drug issues so they cannot get him on that point but they tried to damage him career wise He is still around though so that speaks for itself , so he must be doing something right


Sydney11 View member profile	Sep 17 2017, 06:42 AM Post #18
BuzzJack Platinum Member Joined: 6 April 2016 Posts: 11,587 User: 23,135	No one ever said that our national institutions have to be normal; invariably, it's quite the contrary, and Robbie Williams is steeped in contradictions and insecurities. Despite the fame and beyond the charisma, he's a very singular man, with a bent for the confessional. But he is still Europe's biggest pop star. I would have to agree with that , even today


Laura130262 View member profile	Sep 17 2017, 09:44 AM Post #19
BuzzJack Platinum Member Joined: 21 December 2009 Posts: 8,177 User: 10,265	QUOTE(Sydney11 @ Sep 17 2017, 07:42 AM) No one ever said that our national institutions have to be normal; invariably, it's quite the contrary, and Robbie Williams is steeped in contradictions and insecurities. Despite the fame and beyond the charisma, he's a very singular man, with a bent for the confessional. But he is still Europe's biggest pop star. I would have to agree with that , even today Well I'm guessing Ed Sheeran is now Europe's biggest pop star or Justin Bieber maybe, but with his 2017 stadium tours he's still at the top somewhere.


Sydney11 View member profile	Sep 22 2017, 04:53 PM Post #20
BuzzJack Platinum Member Joined: 6 April 2016 Posts: 11,587 User: 23,135	Wait until you see the two naked guys & I love Robbie's hair like that zeDWo_YRyG0