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[Laura130262]

Sunday Times interview

The Interview: Robbie Williams on his depression, freezing his sperm and sleep-eating

Connecting Robbie Williams’s hotel suite and the room next door is a rail with a white sheet thrown over it. It looks like the kind of thing a painter might erect.

“For privacy,” a member of his entourage informs me. Even here in Norway, where Williams is due to perform in front of a stadium crowd the following night, he is a huge star.

I wait for him in the adjoining room. He pads in, barefoot, wearing a vest and long shorts. At 43, he is still handsome, if slightly puffier than his current press shots might suggest. He is with his father, Pete, a former publican and comedian, and his mutt, a giant bernese mountain dog called Mr Showbiz OBE. Introductions over, Williams leads me behind the sheet and into his suite. It is the size of a hamlet.

“I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been so bored,” he declares. “Shall I show you what I’ve done today?”

He proceeds to give me a walk-through of his day so far. It begins over by a west-facing window. “I got up and came over here to have a cigarette,” he explains. “Then I thought I saw a flash from over there.” He gestures at the apartment block opposite. “And I got paranoid there was someone taking pictures of me. So” — he walks the length of his suite to another window, this one covered with a net curtain — “I spent the rest of the day down here, trying to catch them.” He lies prostrate on the floor, demonstrating how he spent the subsequent hours stealing occasional glances under the curtain. It is now 5pm. Did he ever spot his phantom paparazzo? “No,” he admits. “It was probably just someone turning on a coffee machine.”




Still, you make your own fun when you are on the road for the second month of a European tour and trapped inside your own head.

“I am agoraphobic,” he announces. “I haven’t left my room on the whole tour.” What does he do? “I watch a lot of podcasts on YouTube. There’s a guy called the True Geordie, who I’ve been consumed with. Before that it was George Galloway, the politician, and Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Russell Brand. I spent a long time contemplating atheism and religion — not that I’ve come up with anything.”

What’s so bad about the outside world? “I am a chronic people-pleaser, which leads to a sort of exasperation with everybody wanting a picture and me wanting to protect myself from having to do that all the time. I hate saying no because I don’t want them to think I’m an awful person. And I don’t like saying yes, because I’m socially awkward and every single moment I have meeting a stranger feels like trauma to me.”

Really? It’s hard to marry that description with the cheeky teen who broke a million hearts in Take That in the early 1990s. The cocksure bad boy who jumped ship, bleached his hair and romped around Glastonbury on a ton of drugs with Oasis during the Britpop years. The international star who spent the turn of the century effortlessly knocking out hit after solo hit (Angels, Rock DJ, Let Me Entertain You …) before signing what was then the biggest recording deal in British music history (£80m, to EMI in 2002). It doesn’t tally with the Robbie Williams I’ve just met either. The one who hasn’t stopped talking. You don’t seem very socially awkward, I say.

“I’m a show person,” he shrugs. “I fill a space with something — and that space is like everybody’s Facebook page, a snapshot of the best bits of their lives. That’s what I try to project. For a long time, I pulled the wool over my — and everybody else’s — eyes into believing I was the shit. I thought I was Zeus. But it’s not real.”

If you want to know how unreal the projection is, take a look at his new biography, Reveal. Written by his long-term journalistic collaborator, Chris Heath, it is their follow-up to the 2004 book, Feel, which first revealed that, for Williams, being a monumentally rich and famous pop star might not be all it’s cracked up to be. The latest book cuts back and forth over a 10-year period, from 2006 — when he was living in self-imposed exile in LA, depressed, creatively bereft and temporarily retired, following the biggest tour of his career — to his current set-up as a middle-aged family man, elder statesman and raging mass of ego, insecurity and recovering addictions. It is tremendously well-observed, capturing not just Williams’s demons — his self-absorption, anxiety and often paralysing self-hatred — but also the things that have kept him in the game for so long: his bulletproof wit and unexpected self-awareness.

It is also shocking, full of his masochistic desire for self-exposure. One story from a decade ago sees him lying alone in a pool of blood on his bathroom floor, thinking “I’m dying and I’m not bothered” after mixing cocaine with an anti-psychotic used to treat schizophrenia. Another — a seedy sexual encounter with a horny, toothless cleaning maid who comes to service his room at a country estate — will haunt me for ever.

He describes oversharing as one of the foundations of his career — a defence mechanism he learnt early on. A way of revealing his darkest secrets before anyone had a chance to use them against him.

“I want to be competitive with everything, and if that person’s going to hate me, I’m going to f****** beat them at my own self-hatred,” he tells me.

For all the sex and drugs, the stories I found most stomach-churning were the descriptions of his vulnerability. “The more cocky and arrogant I look onstage, the more terrified I am,” he says of the trauma that is performing in front of thousands every night.

He is obsessive about reading everything anyone posts about him on the internet: “And it crushes the soul. If there’s 10 good comments and one shit one, I concentrate on the shit one. I’m addicted to stuff that makes me feel, full stop.” Then there is the constant self-laceration that finds him comparing himself with everyone else in the public eye and finding himself wanting. He nods. “It’s dark, the whole thing’s dark. That’s what I was left with after reading the book, just how difficult it is up here, between the ears. I want that to change. If I’m lucky to be alive for a third book, I want me to be a bit brighter about my outlook about me and the world.”

His depression, he believes, is genetic. “It sprints through my family.” But, equally, “I don’t know if I’d be this mentally ill without fame. I don’t think it would be as gross or as powerful if it hadn’t have been for fame. You get a magnifying glass in the shape of the world’s attention and your defects will obviously magnify too. I’m not moaning about it. I would still have signed up. I’m just saying, when ‘a’ happens, it does ‘b’ to me.”

“This job,” he says later, “is really bad for my health. It’s going to kill me. Unless I view it in a different way.”

He sits opposite me, looking and sounding a lot like a man clinging on to reality by his fingertips. Equal parts late-period Garbo, Howard Hughes and Marlow, from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, his piercing blue eyes, once twinkly, now seem haunted, while his voice cracks with a shaky vibrato. The 50-odd cigarettes a day he smokes probably don’t help.

Yet, he is also tremendously funny: the consummate entertainer. Along with debilitating agoraphobia and self-doubt, the book reveals another oft-overlooked peril of fame: he can no longer wash his hands after using the toilet in a public place. “Because I’m always going to shake somebody’s hand when I leave the toilet, so I never want my hands to be wet, because that’s awful.”

Robbie’s is a street-smart wit, learnt growing up on the rougher edges of Stoke-on-Trent, where he spent a childhood pacifying and side-stepping a colourful range of psychopaths. He was always a performer, singing in front of the jukebox as a toddler in the pub where he grew up. Aged three, he went missing on holiday in Torremolinos. He was eventually found by a swimming pool collecting money in a hat, having entered himself — and won — a talent contest singing Summer Nights from Grease. The writer Malcolm Gladwell posited that exceptional achievement is only possible after at least 10,000 hours of practice; Williams admits that his younger self — dyslexic, dyspraxic, suffering from ADHD and destined to leave school without any GCSEs — dedicated his 10,000 hours to “showing off”.

His biggest influence was his father, whom he would watch performing as they travelled around holiday camps. Pete was in thrall to old-time stars such as Frank Sinatra, Matt Monro and Laurence Olivier. “He’d talk about these people like they were gods on earth. And in some way that went into my DNA and impressed upon me … ‘Oh my God, how magical to be those people.’ ”

Williams was always too boy-next-door to be a god on earth — but in an inverse way, it has been those relatable, everyman charms that have been his secret weapon. He combines the meticulous old-school craft and showmanship of his father’s generation of crooners with a charisma that can’t be learnt. Goofy, impulsive and self-deprecating, he never had the unpiercable armour of today’s media-groomed stars. Even when he became insufferably rich and famous, the joke was always on him — the smug smirk that became his trademark was both cocky and knowing, as if to say: “No, I can’t believe it, either.” His fanbase is enormous. In 2005 he broke the world record for the number of concert tickets sold in one day — 1.6m. Last year he released his 12th UK No 1 solo album, level-pegging with Madonna, making him the most successful British solo act in history.

Of course, looking back, his pain was always hiding in plain sight. It is what gave even his most braggadocio performances their depth and a song like Angels its emotional resonance, elevating the piano ballad — co-written by Ray Heffernan and Williams’s long-term writing partner, Guy Chambers — into a universal anthem of love and loss.

For all his charisma, though, it is not Williams, the protagonist, who steals the book, but his wife, Ayda Field. He married the American actress — now a presenter on ITV’s lunchtime verbal-incontinence show Loose Women — in 2010. They have two children: a five-year-old daughter, Teddy, and a two-year-old son, Charlie.

They were initially set up by mutual friends. It was 2007 and Williams was in LA, at his most cynical and messy. He prepared for their first date by inviting around his drug dealer — whom he also happened to be sleeping with. “She’d given me all these pills — morphine, Adderall, Vicodin, a few more things. So I’d slept with the dealer, taken a bunch of pills.” He and Ayda went to a party where he got nervous, took more drugs and ended up in his underpants in a Jacuzzi, clucking like a chicken.

Somehow, she agreed to stick with it — even though he was horrid to her over the next year, continually ditching her whenever his feelings got strong, due to a strange set of rules he’d previously written for himself pledging that he wasn’t going to get into a relationship, get married or have children. It wasn’t until he found himself at the Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood one evening in June 2008, chewing Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore’s ears off about how brilliant this woman he’d just chucked for the third time was, that he realised how stupid he was being.

And thank God — because if anyone’s going to save Williams, it’s Ayda. The woman is a hero. She has the same razor-sharp wit and compulsion for outrageous self-exposure as her husband (see her willing participation in his decision to live-vlog the birth of their son on Instagram), combined with a magnificent ability to keep cool in the face of Williams’s madness.

“She’s always got the corporation’s best interests at heart,” he says. “She has the smarts to know how to not sink the ship, and I just want to sink the ship to see what it looks like.”

She is even chilled about his rich sexual history — another area where he is not renowned for his discretion. “I’m very fortunate to have been in Take That and four out of five of the Spice Girls,” used to be one of his favourite jokes to tell onstage.

This, meanwhile, is one of Ayda’s: “Every time we turn on the television, I kid you not, he has slept with someone on TV — whether it’s a commercial for anti-HIV medication, or it’s a crime-scene show, or something from the 1990s …”

During one scene in the book, they turn on Celebrity Big Brother, where the contestant Darren Day is talking about his previous relationship with Anna Friel. This time, for once, it seems as if Robbie is guilty only by association. “Oh my God, you’ve kind of slept with Darren Day because you’ve slept with Anna Friel …” says Ayda.

Robbie goes quiet. Embarrassment? Remorse? No, Ayda has just been looking at the wrong part of the screen. “Babe,” he says. “Danniella Westbrook.”

He knows there is only one reason he can get away with it. “We wouldn’t be able to have the open relationship we do — where I can point at the television and she’ll know that I mean I’ve slept with her — if I ruin that by straying outside of my marriage for sex. But you don’t get a medal or an award — and I should,” he laughs, “because I am subjected to more than my fair share of adoration. I go out and look at a stadium full of people who are incredibly fond of me and quite a few of them are incredibly good-looking. I should get some sort of f****** award for not f******. A quadruple-platinum disc.”

Are the women he encounters still as predatory as he describes them in his book? (The toothless maid, by the way, turned out to be a resourceful fan.)

“They are in the audience. But I don’t put my head in the lion’s mouth. I’m never in that set of circumstances.”

Because you don’t trust yourself?

“If I stay in a pub too long, I’m going to have a drink. If I go to a barbershop long enough, I’m going to have a haircut. So do I trust myself to not drink? Do I trust myself if there was a pile of coke out there? I’d snort it at some point. So no, I don’t trust myself. But history has taught me I’m quite good at not doing it. And so it is with women. When I’m not on tour it’s a lot easier.”

“I would like to create something worthy. Although my albums are successful, they are not deemed worthy

He has a very low testosterone level, so has had his sperm cryogenically frozen in LA. “We want — and wanted — kids and if I take testosterone, it knocks the swimmers out. If I don’t take testosterone, I feel dreadful. So we had to bank some,” he explains. At which point, most people would stop the story, but not Williams. “A lady takes you back to these three rooms. There’s the first room which is soft porn and slightly erotic, then it grades up from room to room. There’s no animal stuff or anything,” he laughs. “But there’s a moment when you’re stood with a lady and you have to pick the room to go in. You sort of want to go into three. One’s just not going to do it for you. So, being a people-pleaser, I went into room two. It was hard work.”

Is porn another addiction of his? “I think porn’s helped our relationship. I don’t think I’m addicted to porn, but I do think it’s been a necessary tool to help me not f*** my relationship up.”

And, um, left to his own devices, which number room would he normally home in on?

“It would be a two,” he decides. “Considered three in various households, but not mine. There’s nothing to worry about, put it that way. It would just be slightly interesting. It would be like ‘Oh! Oedipus!’ ” he cackles.

So does the frozen sperm mean they are planning on having more children?

“I don’t want another one, but I have to weigh up crushing her hopes. I have to weigh up whether my not wanting to have one is worth her heart breaking every time a pram goes past the car when we’re parked at a red light. On a good day, in a tender moment, I would like to see another bom-bom running about.”

Despite his battles with alcohol and drug addictions, it is worth pointing out that Williams has spent the majority of his life sober. He started drinking at 16, realised he had a problem by 18 and has tried to be sober, for the most part successfully, since he was 19. Similar thing with drugs. Despite some very public trips to rehab — and not the luxury, celebrity clinics, but the gritty, prison-like ones with plastic bedsheets and bars on windows, where he had to share a room with five others — he has, for the most part, fought temptation valiantly.

These days, along with the cigarettes, his other unresolved addiction is sugar. “I have a sleep-walking and eating problem that’s happening — every night. You see when you walked in and there were the rails with the white sheet over them? It’s only there because I get up naked and walk into the other room and ask them to order me things from room service. I’m totally and utterly asleep. This can happen three or four times a night. Last night I ate everything that’s in the mini-bar. Nuts, mainly, and a quarter pack of Pringles.”

Food and body image are a constant source of shame and anxiety. He was delighted when a doctor once diagnosed him as dysmorphic rather than overweight. “I’m what? I’ve got a mental disorder that thinks I’m fat and ugly? Brilliant! Thanks!”

Today, he describes himself as looking like “an out-of-shape doorman”. “I love food and I want to eat, so whenever I look slightly good or my shirt’s fitting in my trousers, it’s a horrendous time for me because I’m thinking about food all day. I’m either thin and depressed or fat and ashamed. There’s no middle ground.”

It has, he says, been “a shit year”, both mentally and physically. He gets arthritis in his back, so decided to get in shape for his current tour with some gentle yoga and Pilates, and immediately popped a disc. He was in agony and unable “to get insurance for a pre-existing condition” for his imminent tour. “It led to stressful months. [Mentally], I scooted down very, very quickly. Then I got the first few gigs out of the way and it would appear that even without any exercise and with a bad back I can do this thing. And so I’m now on an upward curve, because I know we’ll get to keep the houses.”

Ah, the houses. In 2013, Williams bought a £17.5m mansion in Kensington that had belonged to Michael Winner, but has spent most of the subsequent years locked in battle with his new next-door neighbour, Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, over building works. Remarkably, Williams won’t be drawn on it — legal reasons, I am later informed. But anyway, £17.5m mansions don’t pay for themselves, which is why Williams is still touring. “I live a very luxurious life,” he says. “And it’s sort of my weaponry that protects me against the world. It shields me, but it’s a flimsy shield. I get up and look at the gardeners and think, ‘How the f*** am I paying for them? I’m from generations of navvies, bricklayers and people that worked down the pit — I don’t live like them. I’m the idiot this has happened to.’ It’s wonderful, but if you have a proclivity to worry, then money’s as good as anything to worry about.”

He did try to retire at the end of 2006 — a period when he “sat on the sofa, ate potato chips and chocolate, got fat, grew a beard. Looked like a serial killer.” When his clothes got too tight, he took to wearing cashmere kaftans like Obi-Wan Kenobi. Three years later, he was back. “I got incredibly bored — like Lily Allen found out when she was just going to wander off and be a mum. I found the boredom overwhelming and this [the touring] was preferable to that, but I haven’t been myself performing since I came back.”

In what sense? “Before, it was natural, it was just a force that happened. The insecurities didn’t overwhelm the showmanship. When I came back, I’d had too much time to think and the insecurities slipped through the mask. I have found public performances overwhelming — like the New Year’s Eve gig that I did this year on the BBC, where I just thought about everybody who hates me. There’s a conclusion to this that I need to learn from — because the definition of insanity is to repeat the same thing over and over and expect to get a different response.”

So what is he going to do differently? He clears his throat and his voice sounds shakier than ever. “It may involve my wife, because I enjoy her company and I want to show her off and I want her to have an opportunity to shine because when we came together I sort of stopped her career. I’m very excited to do something together. Obviously there are shades of Linda McCartney, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Paul McCartney needed that safety and so do I.” Williams regularly crops up on Loose Women to wind Ayda up. There must be plenty of people knocking down their door to do their own chat show…

“Yeah, there is,” he smiles. “I would like to create something worthy. Because although my albums are successful, they’re not deemed worthy.”

The last three or four weeks on tour, he says, have been better for his mental health. What’s changed?

“Positive mental thinking — and getting my medications right. I’m sort of a human test project — a fader goes up on anxiety and one goes down on depression and then they come back into focus. My life is like that.” He catches himself slipping into despondency. “Another time, if I hadn’t been in my room for six weeks and you’d come to interview me in my house with a nice view, I’d have a sunnier disposition.”

Still, he is hopeful. “I have definitely thought my way into this mess. I’m doing my best to think my way out of it,” he nods. “The force is strong in me. If I can just learn to generate that power in a different direction, the rest of my life could be a good place to live in.” He smiles — not quite the trademark Robbie Williams smirk he turns on for the cameras, but a good effort nonetheless.

Reveal by Chris Heath (Blink Publishing £20) is published on September 21

This post has been edited by Laura130262: 4th September 2017, 05:50 AM