Review Summary: The root is bitter but the fruit is sweet. NOT FOR EVERYDAY LISTENING!

This is not what Mr. Williams was expected to release. Previously Robbie has shown us his soul in his songs together with excellent lyrics, sometimes soulful, sometimes hooligan music. But it is quite difficult to imagine Robbie Williams going so deep in electronic music. Not simply into electronic music. But into a sore, somewhere outdated and even ear-aggravating electronic music followed by rap and hip-hop soundings which are simply incoherent with music. What I'm trying to say is that it is a very heavy, eclectic album for a pop musician and thus, there is no doubt why the album was received negatively by many music critics. It’s far not what the public wants to hear. And what the public does not want to hear often receives a bad mark. This is not really good sometimes. In the same way Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” received appalling reviews from the critics when it was just published. In the similar way, “Rudebox” is extremely monotonic, “over-rap-ped”, heavy, and, in some places, is extremely annoying. But this is it what makes the CD worth listening.

At first, the CD sounds like being over-americanized with hip-hop, rap and electronic music dominating the album. The first set starts with the single “Rudebox”, followed by a cowboy-styled “Viva Life on Mars”, which is in turn substituted by a single “Lovelight”, a cover on “Bongo Bong” and retro-type “She’s Madonna” and it finishes with “Keep On” and “Good Doctor”. These songs have one thing in common: absolutely nonsense lyrics (“She’s Madonna” may be an exception). If the first three songs are at least listenable, other four are simply unlistenable even though Williams reads rap far not bad. These four, starting from "Bongo Bong" and finishing with "Good Doctor" can be called as completely chaotic and unstructured, being backed by aggravatingly monophonic music. After that a simple question may come up to the head: two what Robbie Williams has fallen?

However, the second part of the CD shows us that he hasn’t even. Here, step-by-step, the songs become more and more meaningful, understandable and structured. Moreover, music appears to be significantly juicier, however, the upper section being still like a super-heavy metal element from the Mendeleev’s Periodic Table. Nevertheless, such a feeling goes away after Robbie reluctantly declares “good bye to the normals” in “Burslem Normals” song with the “normals” representing this annoying old-fashioned monotonicity. Furthermore, here Robbie Williams sings warmer and more honestly than the cold and monophonic Robbie Williams in the first part.

The album, finally, finishes with much lighter compositions which are the cover “Kiss Me”, “The 80s”, “The 90s” and, finally, “Summertime” which depicts the lyrical hero of Robbie finally out of his infinite shell of depression and despair.

So, what have we experienced? First, we felt arrogance, boredom and complete uncertainty about the future, the latter being swayed off by the following songs what makes us believe in something happier again. Robbie Williams, in this album, invited us to stand in his shoes, to feel his depression, mental chaos and his mood changes. That is why, maybe, the album is called “Rudebox”. It is rude; its music is in a box of non-originality and over-monotonicity. At the same time, we may feel how the lyrical hero was trapped in this rudebox and how he got out of it in the end. The album may look fancy and cheap by its cover and the first single but in reality it is a very deep and psychological set of songs, which actually tests the listener whether he/she is capable of taking the role of a pop-rock star.

This is what I suppose makes this album exceptional. However, still, why 4? Why not 4.5 or even 5 if it is so good? The answer is quite easy: yes, it is outstanding but it is very unlikely that a random person will agree to be tortured a second time. It's just like reading Maxim Gorky's masterpiece "The Lower Depths". Read it and you will understand what I am writing about.

Robbie Williams - Rudebox (album review ) | Sputnikmusic

Cracked Actor: Robbie Williams’ Rudebox at 20

Robbie Williams’ hip hop pivot is widely seen as one of the most obnoxious failures in pop. Claire Biddles & Fergal Kinney deal with an LP which is experimental outlier, outsider art & baffling mess all at once

here’s a moment in 2016 captured in Chris Heath’s bestselling journalistic portrait of Robbie Williams where the singer is struggling with his infant child emotionally pushing his father away. “Maybe,” offers his wife Ayda Field-Williams, “she’s finally heard Rudebox.” 

The September 2006 release of the ‘Rudebox’ single remains the most controversial moment in Robbie Williams career, a turning point that decisively ended his imperial phase as Britain’s biggest pop star that he had sustained since the 1997 release of Life Thru A Lens. Where “Robbie” albums had been built on post-Britpop guitars and ballads, the ‘Rudebox’ single saw Williams rapping over an electronic Sly & Robbie loop, complete with a b-boy, Adidas tracksuit-wearing image overhaul.

The Sun newspaper branded it “the worst song EVER.” Public reaction was mixed. Then came October’s Rudebox album. It sold slowly, amassing about one third of the sales of its predecessor. NME, who had praised the album as “the best thing he ever put his name to”, reported a story that unsold copies of Rudebox were being shipped to China, broken up and used in road surfacing (though EMI chairman at the time Tony Wadsworth has publicly refuted this.) Robbie Williams entered rehab in 2007, and did not release another album until 2009.

Claire Biddles and Fergal Kinney are two Quietus journalists that have spent much of their lives thinking about Robbie Williams. On a September 2026 evening, they spoke on video call between Glasgow and London, to discuss Rudebox at 20.

Fergal Kinney: In the years leading up to Rudebox, Robbie Williams’ hugely successful songwriting partnership with Guy Chambers had broken. Some had expected that to be the end, but 2005’s Intensive Care had shown that he could have enormous success working with other songwriters. A lot of things about Rudebox can be explained as an artist accruing too much power in the aftermath of that. 

Claire Biddles: The album cover for Intensive Care was designed by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. Grant Morrison is one of my favourite writers, and the artwork is this image of Robbie with his finger up, and there’s a sigil on his finger – a spell-like symbol used in chaos magic. Grant designed it to make the album successful; similarly to their seminal 90s comic The Invisibles, which was intended as a super-charged hypersigil. Because Intensive Care was actually this huge success, it’s like: did the sigil work? 

But I often think about something Grant wrote in their newsletter a few years ago, when asked if they still spoke to Robbie Williams. They wrote that Robbie wanted to know everything about magic and about sigils. This is something that Grant has been doing for decades as a chaos magic practitioner, but Robbie wanted to become an instant expert. Grant had to explain that, and Robbie got annoyed. That seems to me to be quite revealing about who Robbie is, and connects with Rudebox. He decides that he’s going to do something and has to do it all right there and then. He got the idea for Rudebox while he’s touring Intensive Care, writes and records it on that tour, and then performs it on that tour. That’s the mindframe he was going into this with: I can do anything, I am unflappable, I’m too big to fail. 

FK: In the press materials for Rudebox at the time, he’s quite clear about wanting to channel this lineage which includes Ian Dury, Shaun Ryder and Mike Skinner. Whatever you might think about those individuals, what they achieved as lyricists and vocal performers was built on a huge amount of experience and craft. The single ‘Rudebox’ does just sound like someone trying to become an instant expert in all of that. It’s nowhere near as clever or accomplished as the things he’s trying to channel. 

CB: Listening to it today, it’s basically a novelty single isn’t it? I think it’s fun, and it was always going to be the song that people associate with the album. Had ‘Lovelight’ been the first single, would people’s impressions and the legacy of the album have been completely different? ‘Rudebox’ is this silly caricature of the various styles that he’s wanting to do on the album, taken to an extreme. There’s these playful, almost childlike rhymes and delivery, which can be cute, but overall they’re quite baffling. I love the weird references that feel very specifically him, like TK Maxx. There’s a bit of a reverse-engineered camp to having this Adidas tracksuit on, but it’s from TK Maxx and it’s maybe a weird colour. It’s important to mention the unfortunate reference to the Special Olympics, which is very jarring. 

FK: Even at the time, that, rightly, had consequences. The British Council of Disabled People accused him of “rank disablism”, and anger over the lyric at Radio One affected its airplay. For me, I began to find the single more endearing once I understood more about the production of it. Someone at that level of success plotting a hip hop pivot would ordinarily bring in people with some success in that field. But he brought in Candy Flip, the production duo from Robbie’s hometown Stoke-on-Trent best known for their acid house era update of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, as well as his touring bassist Jerry Meehan. They wrote this track ‘Dickhead’, which was basically just a sketch of Robbie freestyling, and just obsessively carried on working in that mould. But Rudebox is also quite a confusingly dual-natured album, split between these close friends and then big names.

CB: He works with Mark Ronson, who is quite up and coming and cool at that point and is just about to release the Version album. Then there’s Lily Allen on backing vocals, who has that year released her debut album Alright, Still. Along with Amy Winehouse, they are in this coterie of cool pop stars who are a lot like Robbie in the 90s: smoking fags, getting drunk, as edgy as you could be in that world. Take out the local Stoke blokes and you’ve got quite a cool coterie of people across the album. There’s William Orbit too, and Pet Shop Boys. 

I’ve grown to understand Rudebox more as a mixtape, which itself points almost accidentally towards the old school hip hop culture that he’s referencing. What makes it like a mixtape for me is how many covers there are on it. ‘We’re The Pet Shop Boys’ was originally written and recorded in 2002 by Howard Rigberg. The next year, it’s covered by Pet Shop Boys themselves, and then on Rudebox that version is covered by Robbie Williams almost doing karaoke over the top of it. Also, my favourite Robbie song is ‘No Regrets’, which Neil Tennant sang on. 

FK: They’re quite a weird pairing aren’t they? When Pet Shop Boys collaborate, it tends to be with divas, big female artists. It’s an unusually expedient move for them. There’s an interview with Pet Shop Boys and Robbie from that time and they don’t seem to have an obvious rapport with one another. At the start of the sessions, Robbie played them Kraftwerk as a reference, and then out of that you get ‘She’s Madonna’. That’s not only one of the best Robbie Williams songs, but one of the best Pet Shop Boys records of the 21st century.

CB: I get the impression that he’s almost trying to impress them as elder statesmen rather than collaborate with them. But ‘She’s Madonna’ is miraculous. Somehow, it’s a very equal collaboration, neither more a Robbie song nor a Pet Shop Boys song. It really foregrounds the way that both of them use pathos and humour to get a real emotional thwack. It was inspired by Robbie’s ex-girlfriend Tania Strecker, who used to go out with Guy Ritchie but was supposedly dumped for Madonna. It’s a love song from such a weird and specific position, like a superfan. It sounds more like a projection, someone dumping their partner for the idea of this superstar that’s not real. It’s just so strange. He writes a lot about celebrity, and about being a celebrity, but this song is looking into that world from the outside. 

FK: In fact, there’s all these images of celebrity all over the album, from Michael Jackson (“Jackson looks a mess”) on the ‘Rudebox’ single, and then ‘The Actor’, this quite icy electro track that was written on Oscars night in 2007. Rudebox is largely an LA album – and we can think about it in a Station To Station lineage of British artists going mad in Los Angeles – and no more so than on that track.

CB: ‘The Actor’ has all of these deadpan spoken lines that are very obviously phrases and clichés that would have been in acceptance speeches and press runs: I want my work to matter, I’m totally Strasberg, it’s not acting it’s re-acting. There’s the rap, which is like the ‘Vogue’ rap, which connects it back to ‘She’s Madonna’. It’s looking at a kind of fame that is on a level to his own, but is not his world. As far as I can remember, Robbie is one of the few big pop stars that never had an acting phase.

 

FK: It’s one of the most eccentric, and just funny, moments on the album where he raps this list of actors: Monroe, Barrymore, Mansfield, Dame Judie Dench, Madonna, Ritchie, Streep, Close, Hepburn, Burt Reynolds, Niven, Danson, Bundy, Bardot, and then Joaquin Phoenix and Hilary Swank. It’s so odd, but it does speak to this darkening relationship with fame that’s on the album. In the press biography for Rudebox, he’s referring to himself in the third person: “I saw the whole Robbie thing coming to a close.” This album is canonically the end of his imperial phase, but I now wonder how much of that was him already understanding that this was the end and going out on his own terms? I don’t think he believed that this album would take him to the next level, even if he was surprised at quite how much people recoiled from it. 

CB: Something interesting with Robbie is the tension between his star persona, his vulnerability, and then what he lets the audience see. He came out of Take That saying very clearly that “this is the real me”, and that the audience will grow up with him and he will show them what he’s thinking. But at the same time, he’s very aware and crafting his own persona. I think it’s very interesting to think about him as being more in control than people might think. 

Also, it’s such a long album for the time. From the perspective of this self-awareness that you’re referring to, you can interpret that as: I’m just going to shove all of this stuff on it because I know that I’m coming to the end of this imperial phase. It’s a time in his personal life when he’s addicted to prescription meds – which is explicitly written about on the track ‘Good Doctor’, or the Mandrax references in Rudebox. He’s faced addiction before, and Rudebox is almost this explosion before a period of rest. Think about your own experiences with burnout, where there’s usually a big period of activity and then nothing.

 

FK: Within months of Rudebox coming out, he checked into rehab on his 33rd birthday in February 2007. This is another part of the album not really succeeding: he isn’t around to promote a lot of it. After Rudebox, there’s a three year gap before he releases his next album, 2009’s Reality Killed The Video Star. This is so openly a Rudebox-detox project that in Chris Heath’s book Reveal, Williams refers to it as having the working title “Politebox.” Heath observes that once Robbie learns that Rudebox is a really good punchline, he starts joining in because he likes nothing more than a close-to-the-bone joke at his own expense, something that Heath finds psychologically interesting because Robbie also acknowledges it as his most personal album. 

And the really straightforwardly personal tracks on Rudebox are ‘The 80s’ and ‘The 90s’, two heavily autobiographical rap songs that are almost buried as tracks 14 and 15 on the album. If Rudebox is a house on fire, the thing that I would run in to save would be ‘The 80s’. For four or five minutes, an hour into an album that nobody is going to listen to, for a brief period every single thing he wanted to achieve with the Rudebox project comes true. He’s rapping all these fragmented memories from his upbringing in Stoke. In one line you might get the Falklands war, the death of a family member, some early sexual milestone and then him shouting out some chart hit from the time, and somehow it’s all really affecting and works. It explains the Rudebox project, he’s getting back to this prelapsarian period before his loss of innocence. It sounds so much warmer, after all these quite harsh sounds it’s orchestrated with chiming acoustic guitars and so on.

CB: Let’s acknowledge now, then, that Robbie Williams has always been a rapper. There’s the rap at the end of ‘Kids’, ‘Rock DJ’, ‘Tripping’. ‘Supreme’ has a very rap cadence to how he sings the verses. It feels quite natural for him, and ‘The 80s’ is the Rudebox song where it feels less like a gimmick. It’s a classic failure album, and it’s a classic failure position to bury the song that shows you know what you’re doing right at the end.

Listening again to the album made me think how much Rudebox is like a Baxter Dury album: the girl backing singers, the rapping, this mishmash of English musical forms. You can particularly hear it on ‘Keep On’, which is by far the weirdest song on the album, alternating between sounding like a Berlin era Bowie song and a baggy track. 

FK: I had not thought about Baxter Dury but, connected, is that Robbie Williams really likes Sleaford Mods. There’s a great video of him on lockdown rapping their track ‘Kebab Spider’. It’s like he was willing this thing into being – rapping done by a white English guy over the age of 30 – but obviously by the time it comes into the culture he can’t participate because he’s Robbie Williams. 

It’s worth mentioning too that this album happens just as Take That launched their enormous comeback, suddenly selling out stadiums and releasing the kind of sad lad anthems that Robbie has just abandoned. And there’s Robbie, going back to this pre-Take That version of himself. At the time, he spoke about wanting to go back to this early memory of obsessively watching tapes of Prince’s Alphabet St tour, Public Enemy at Brixton Academy and Happy Mondays at G Mex. Though listening to the album, would a listener struggle to recognise that?

CB: A lot of outsider art is references to cultural forms transformed through the personal experience of that person, so it becomes this strange, kaleidoscopic thing. Maybe that’s why he felt that he needed to do these long album notes in the first place. Everything about Rudebox is quite maximalist: loads of words, explaining, songs. It’s like he had to explain what had gone into this because people might not be able to hear it. 

Going back to ‘The 80s’ and ‘The 90s’, the latter song feels like a prediction of where Robbie is now in the culture. Heritage act Robbie is 90s Robbie, not just in his tours – where he acts out the stadium hits show as memoir – but his latest album Britpop, and his biopic Better Man, which is set in this very specific 1990s. The Adidas tracksuit from his Glastonbury 1995 appearance becomes this lodebearing symbol, in this new, spangly version that he wears on stage, which is like what a turn would wear in Blackpool. But it’s the tracksuit of 1995, rather than the tracksuit of Rudebox, which is never mentioned in all this re-enactment of the past. Rudebox is this don’t-mention-it moment of his career, but the shadows of it are still there. 

Cracked Actor: Robbie Williams' Rudebox at 20 | The Quietus

Edited Friday at 10:181 day by Sydney11

Cannot believe it is 20 years since Rudebox and all the kerfuffle that accompanied it! 😆

It is still my favourite album although now it is my joint favourite with UTR 1 🙌

The 80s & 90s - beautiful, amazing songs.....