4 minutes ago, Fred1607 said:

Talking about Britpop. Does anyone knows who is the new girl who took Jerry's place at Graham Norton Show with Tom? At the beggining she's with Tom playing but never seen her before. Great choice btw 😁

Yes, we noticed. Wondered who she was as well ☺️

Source Rob's Instagram

28 minutes ago, Sydney11 said:

Music video or tour/ Glasto announcement? What are we betting on? 👀😁

I think music video

There's no Glastonbury next year so I'm guessing a more extended tour. 😊

Sources in latin america say he's still in negotiations. So maybe it's an extension of UK, or dates in Australia and New Zeland as he mentioned back on June.

Edited November 6, 2025Nov 6 by Fred1607

He should bring the release of his album forward to 12th December for the Christmas market and to contend for Christmas number 1

Less than a month until release now... finally!

On 14/01/2026 at 10:32, WhoOdyssey said:

Less than a month until release now... finally!

Or less that a day... It's out now!

Awesome surprise! I wonder if the release was part of the plan or it was a last minute decision per say... 🤔

Wow !

Robbie Williams review, Britpop: An unabashed joyride from one of our most charismatic pop stars

Former Take That singer is on top form for his first proper album in a decade, throwing in a Gary Barlow reunion just for the hell of it

Roisin O'Connor

Friday 16 January 2026 05:00 GMT

Williams’s voice is on top form here, rich and sonorous with the grit that added some much-needed danger to Take That’s otherwise squeaky-clean sound (Jason Hetherington)

Robbie Williams has been having a very public reckoning with his past, of late. There was Better Man, the Oscar-nominated 2024 film that depicted the former Take That member as a CGI chimp (inspired by his view of himself as a performing monkey). Then came a moving four-part Netflix documentary, in which he reflected on his early taste of fame, aged 16, in one of the world’s biggest boybands, and how that led him down a dark path of drug addiction and depression. Narrated largely from the cosy safety of a goose-down duvet, Williams offered a poignant look at the bloke behind all the bravado. Yet even as he reminded us of why we fell in love with him in the first place – bellowed “Angel” choruses and all – there was an album he felt he never got to make, one he would like to have released in the immediate aftermath of his Take That departure in pursuit of solo stardom.

So, right off the back of 2025’s euphoric Oasis reunion – reminding us all of the unifying power of a bloody brilliant rock band – the irrepressible scamp comes out with Britpop, his first non-Christmas album in a decade. It’s an unabashed joyride, full to the brim of hook-laden tracks with soaring riffs and anthemic choruses. Is it the highest calibre of songwriting? Hardly, there are a few rhymes that’ll definitely make you wince. But if anyone can pull off a cheesy line with aplomb, it’s Robbie, and this record does contain some of his best tracks in aeons. There’s even a reunion with his ex-bandmate Gary Barlow, with whom he seems to have buried the hatchet over all that past hurt.

His voice is on top form here, rich and sonorous with the grit that added some much-needed danger to Take That’s otherwise squeaky-clean sound. Britpop happens to land two weeks ahead of the release of a new Netflix documentary about the Nineties boyband sensations, in which he appears only through archive footage. “All My Life” finds him at his most defiant, going down with his ship amid a rousing crash of percussion and chugging electric guitar riffs: “Masochistic but I’m always entertaining/ And I know I’ll die but I’ll never leave the stage.”

Williams teams up with Barlow on “Morrissey”, written from the perspective of a stalker infatuated with the controversial Smiths frontman. It’s an odd prospect, particularly given Morrissey’s seemingly endless string of unsavoury outbursts on everything from politics to immigration. But the obsessed fan sees past all of that. To him, Mozza is just a singer who’s “a bit eccentric… lost and lonely…” who needs “love just like you”. Williams’s suggestion, over subtly twinkling Eighties synths, that Morrissey is a man in need of a hug is surprisingly endearing. Indeed, you wish it were that simple.

Artwork for Robbie Williams’s album ‘Britpop’ (Julian Broad/Kate Oleska/Mick Hutson)

“Cocky” is just so: heavily referencing Oasis with its jangly “Lyla” concoction of stomping drums, plonky pianos and shimmering tambourines. The equally obstinate “Bite Your Tongue” sounds something like Wet Leg’s “Chaise Longue” thanks to its peppy rhythm, buzzy guitar riff and bloopy synth line. Anyone searching for deep political meaning won’t find it here; the song’s punkish mood is deployed to his insistence that “I don’t condone bad things, I condone what’s nice/ And if it’s really really good then I’m condoning it twice”. Williams is at his balladeering best on “Spies”, which is Hoobastank’s “The Reason” meets his own 1997 hit “Angels”, with just a sprinkling of Elton John. “It’s OK Until the Drugs Stop Working”, meanwhile, actually riffs on “Angels” with a lyrical reference (“she offers me protection”) while reflecting on his hedonistic heyday with orchestral pomp.

Closing song “Pocket Rocket” is a nod back to the rip-roaring opener (“I just wanna be your rocket”), intended to demonstrate the growth of one of UK pop’s biggest personalities, now happy, settled and in love with his wife of 15 years, Ayda Field, with whom he shares four children. Far from that initial bolshiness, it glides in on elegant violins and Williams singing in a warm murmur. It’s a bit too tasteful – the arrangement reminds me of Netflix series Bridgerton and its incessant string quartet covers of pop hits, while the line “what a time to be alive”, tongue-in-cheek or not, grates. A record like this should go out with a bang. Instead, it’s a bit of a limp finish to an otherwise fun record from one of our most charismatic pop stars.

Source Robbie Williams review, Britpop: An unabashed joyride from one of our most charismatic pop stars | The Independent

Robbie Williams: Britpop review – a wayward yet winning time-machine trip back to the 90s

(Columbia)
Framed as the music Williams wanted to make post-Take That, Britpop surpasses pastiche and swerves unpredictably. Homoerotic paean to Morrissey, anyone?

Alexis Petridis

Fri 16 Jan 2026 01.01 CET

The arrival of Robbie Williams’s 13th album has been a complicated business. It was announced in May 2025 and was supposed to come out in October, when its title would have chimed with the 90s nostalgia sparked by the Oasis reunion. Williams spent the summer engaging in promotion, unveiling fake Britpop-themed blue plaques around London and staging a press conference at the Groucho Club. There was a launch gig at storied Camden venue Dingwalls, at which he performed not just his new album in full, but his 1997 solo debut Life Thru a Lens.

The artwork for Britpop

It was a bold choice, given that Life Thru a Lens initially threatened to derail his solo career: at the time, the now nakedly obvious supernova hits Angels and Let Me Entertain You were overlooked while people criticised Williams’s muddled attempts to fit in with, well, Britpop. On stage at Dingwalls, he made the surprise announcement that the album now wasn’t coming out until mid-February, admitting with winning candour that he didn’t want to compete with Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl. Now it’s suddenly appeared, without explanation, two weeks into January: presumably because Williams will have fewer competitors in the albums chart this week, giving him a greater chance at breaking the record he currently jointly holds with the Beatles for the most UK No 1 albums ever.

It is all a little strange, but then the Britpop album itself feels peculiar. Williams has trailed it as “the album I wanted to make when I left Take That” and a celebration of “a golden age for British music”. Yet you wonder why he would want to revisit the mid-90s, a time when he was lost, in the grip of addiction, subject to a lot of pretty unpleasant public mockery, completely unaware that he was about to become the biggest British artist of his era. You could suggest it’s an act of closure, but you might reasonably have thought Williams got closure when he released Angels: one of the most-played songs on UK radio over the next year; a song so ubiquitous that it “evicted Wonderwall from the national psyche”, as John Harris put it in his Britpop history The Last Party, its success suggestive of a distinct sea change in popular tastes away from the at least putatively alternative to the unashamedly mainstream. Certainly, there were substantially more takers for Williams’s subsequent solo work than for the artists the music press predicted would rule 1998: Symposium, Ultrasound, Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s old band theaudience, and the Warm Jets.

So what is going on here? Initially, you get the impression that Williams thinks he has unfinished business with the sound he initially pursued as a confused ex-boyband member, returning to it with the confidence of a man who has sold 75m records and can call upon Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi for opener Rocket. It doesn’t always work – the ungainly glam of Cocky sounds like Oasis, but alas Oasis circa Heathen Chemistry rather than Definitely Maybe – but when it does, Britpop makes Williams’ plan seem a good idea. There’s no mistaking who influenced the vocal intonation of All My Life, with its vowels drawled into multiple syllables, or the wall of distorted guitars on Spies. Like Liam Gallagher’s 2019 solo tracks Once and One of Us, Spies casts a ruefully nostalgic eye over mid-90s hedonism: “We used to stay up all night, thinking we were all spies, praying that tomorrow won’t come.” But there’s a swagger and sparkle to the melodies that shift these songs past the realm of pastiche, and the results are hugely enjoyable.

Just as you think you’ve got the general idea of the album, it unravels. There is Morrissey, a jokey, faintly homoerotic synth-pop paean to the former Smiths frontman co-authored by Gary Barlow, which, if nothing else, wins points for sheer improbability. There is It’s OK Until the Drugs Stop Working, a track that, melodically, at least, sounds remarkably like the British bubblegum pop that briefly flourished in the charts between the end of the 60s and the rise of glam: the province of White Plains, Christie and Butterscotch, not artists anyone writing an album review in 2026 might reasonably have expected to invoke. And there is Human, a beautiful, lambent electronic ballad about AI, featuring Mexican pop duo Jesse & Joy (Williams is famously a very big deal in Mexico, where 2005’s Intensive Care remains the eighth biggest-selling album of all time) as well as Coldplay’s Chris Martin on guitar and keys. It might be the best song here, but what it has to do with the Britpop concept is anyone’s guess, lambent synth-pop songs about AI having been pretty thin on the ground in the mid-90s.

Still, conceptually sound or not, Britpop is never less than engaging. The one thing it doesn’t have is a track that might conceivably have the same impact as Angels or Let Me Entertain You, which leaves it in an odd position. It may well be the album Robbie Williams wanted to make when he left Take That. Equally, he must be incredibly glad that he didn’t.

Source https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/jan/16/robbie-williams-britpop-review

Edited January 16Jan 16 by Sydney11

4/5 stars

Full article can be read in Link below

Robbie Williams delivers an irrepressibly enjoyable album with Britpop — and sets the nation a task

❤️

BRITPOP ℗ 2025 Robert Williams / Farrell Music Ltd, under exclusive license to Sony Music Entertainment UK Limited Released on: 2026-01-16

Vocal, Associated Performer: Robbie Williams

Lyricist, Background Vocal, Composer: Gary Barlow

Producer, Percussion, Background Vocal, Drums: Karl Brazil

Background Vocal, Guitar: Gary Nuttall

Background Vocal: Sara-Jane Skeete

Producer, Vocoder, Background Vocal, Mixing Engineer: Martin Terefe

Recording Engineer, Programmer, Background Vocal, Keyboards, Mixing Engineer: Oskar Winberg

Programmer, Keyboards, Recording Engineer: Claes Björklund

Lyricist, Composer: Robert Williams

Recording Engineer: George Murphy

Mastering Engineer: Matt Colton

Source https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3Nho5FPo__hIFbg_UlaCgA

Britpop is Robbie Williams at his best, an irreverent, splurging Valentine to 1990s guitar rock

Robbie Williams is finally channelling his love of Oasis into his music with this enjoyably superficial tribute album

Ed Power

Britpop

4/5 stars

Artist:Robbie Williams

Label:Columbia

Ever the cheeky monkey, Robbie Williams has followed up Better Man, his chimpanzee-themed biopic from 2024, in which he was portrayed by a CGI ape, with the surprise release of his first collection of original material in a decade.

Unleashed three weeks ahead of schedule, Britpop is Williams at his best: irreverent, solipsistic and a romping ringmaster across an LP that serves as a big, splurging Valentine to 1990s guitar rock.

The title wasn’t chosen at random. In his dying days with Take That, Williams had embarked on a secondary career as clown prince of Britpop and bantering best pal of Liam Gallagher. It’s hard to overstate just how big a turn-up this was: in the 1990s, rockers and pop stars inhabited completely different universes, and the idea of Williams spending an entire Glastonbury hanging out with Oasis, as he did in 1995, was hard to get your head around.

Williams wasn’t just a lairy ligger. He genuinely adored Oasis and would constantly badger Take That’s spiritual leader, Gary Barlow, to put more guitar music on their albums. Barlow’s refusal to do so contributed to the tension between the two, and to Williams’s ultimate departure from Take That.

Three decades later, Williams is finally channelling that time and those experiences into his music with an enjoyably superficial tribute record that argues civilisation peaked the weekend Oasis released their album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? – which it may have if you were foolhardy enough to pay through the nose to see the re-formed Gallaghers bring their nostalgia dog-and-pony show to Croke Park in the summer of 2025.

For those who decided the money was better off in their pockets, Britpop is a more than acceptable alternative to the Gallagher tour. There are moments when Williams sounds thoroughly Williamsesque – the album’s closing track, Pocket Rocket, is a spiritual successor to Angels – but elsewhere he unashamedly imitates Gallagher’s star-crossed drawl and Richard Ashcroft’s man-of-the-people whine (on It’s OK Until the Drugs Stop Working, which brazenly lifts its title from Ashcroft’s The Drugs Don’t Work).

There’s no substance here, and it’s an open question whether anyone will care about this album at the end of the weekend, much less six months hence. But its sense of fun is infectious, as Williams demonstrates out of the blocks when he kicks off with the anthemic Rocket, featuring a blistering solo from Tommy Iommi of Black Sabbath.

Britpop was never just about Oasis, of course: there’s an argument that the B-list Britpoppers were much more musically interesting. Williams would appear to share this view, at least judging by the Elastica pastiche Pretty Face, which lifts its guitar line from their 1994 hit Connection (which in turn owes a lot to Wire’s Three Girl Rhumba).

Robbie’s batty Britpop bacchanal reaches peak bonkers on Morrissey, a duet between Williams and his old Take That mucker Barlow, where they express concern for the spiritual wellbeing of the former Smiths curmudgeon Steven Patrick Morrissey against a Pet Shop Boys-style Euro-disco groove.

It’s completely out to lunch – possibly dinner and supper too – and a reminder that, whatever else he may be guilty of, nobody could ever accuse Robbie Williams of being boring.

Britpop is Robbie Williams at his best, an irreverent, splurging Valentine to 1990s guitar rock – The Irish Times

Robbie Williams – ‘Britpop’ review: a love letter to the ’90s and bid to live forever

Nostalgia offers the pop icon protection on this daft but deft celebration of the ‘Angels’ hitmaker's journey so far

ByAndrew Trendell

16th January 2026

The man who once told you “I hope I’m old before I die” now finds himself 51 and wrapped up in legacy. In the decade since Robbie Williams’ last album, 2016’s ‘The Heavy Entertainment Show’, we’ve seen a tell-all Netflix doc (so intimate he’s rarely out of his bed or underwear) and divisive biopic Better Man (in which you got to see him on smack and getting wanked off as a monkey). The latter, he once told NME, was a watershed moment to kickstart the “third act” of his career. That too, will begin with Williams looking back.

“I set out to create the album that I wanted to write and release after I left Take That in 1995,” he said in a statement announcing 13th album ‘Britpop’. In the place of the indie-driven arena pop of his 1997 debut ‘Life Thru Lens’ – that birthed partystarter ‘Let Me Entertain You’ and Oasis-indebted wedding basic ‘Angels’ – we are to imagine that this takes us back to a halcyon era and analogue days of Cool Britannia.

Black Sabbath icon Tony Iommi joins in on the scuzzy pub rock belter opener ‘Rocket’, a daft but deft earworm that captures the album’s mantra of looking to the past but living for now: “What a time to be alive”. Then, ‘Spies’ is a Robbie-by-numbers lighters up pre-encore ballad, in the lineage of ‘Strong’ and ‘Come Undone’ but with a lot more guitar oomph.

The album’s pretty equally split between bravado and ballads. ‘Pretty Face’ bursts open with Elastica and Republica energy before a simple but oh-so-Robbie everyman chorus. If you thought he’d finished rapping with the career cringe torpedo of ‘Rudebox’, look away. Man’s spitting bars for better or worse on ‘Bite Your Tongue’ and ‘You’: two old-school Kasabian nonsense spitfires that bid you to “make Jared Leto out of Lego” and deploy Super Hans politics (“Wham bam, ain’t it a scam: Afghanistan and Vietnam”).

Supergrass legend Gaz Coombes lends a hand on ‘Cocky’, pumped by the glam-rock stomp of ‘Blockbuster’ by Sweet, while the Disneyfied orchestral sweep of ‘It’s OK Until The Drugs Stop Working’ is a ballsy Tony Christie meets Blur sing-along delivered with a little cheek and a self-knowing wink: “I have to smile when she offers me protection”.

Among the slower numbers, ‘All My Life’ trudges like a latter day Oasis or Liam G solo cut albeit with words by David Brent (“My life is based on a true story: one of dreams, chaos and audacity”), ‘Human’ is a countrified ode to letting it be, and ‘Morrissey’ (co-written by and featuring former Take That pal Gary Barlow) is a thoroughly silly electropop 2025 rework of ‘Stan’ told by the stalker of The Smiths misanthrope. Heaven knows it’s more fun than it sounds.

Closing with the bookend of the tender reprise ‘Pocket Rocket’, ‘Britpop’ ends with a little resolve: “I just wanna be your rock, yeah”. He’s standing firm. Rather than neck a BuzzBall on a Lime Bike and do his take on ‘Brat’, Robbie knows his game and has done a record for himself. An album to be remembered for? Probably not, but it’s bold, it’s a laugh, and he’s done it his way. That’s what makes him Robbie. For that alone, he’ll live forever.

Robbie Williams – ‘Britpop’ review: a love letter to the '90s and bid to live forever

I'm surprised the album's getting such glowing reviews. To me, it's really not his best work. His debut album sounded more "britpop" than this one, and he seems to have lost his lyrical edge a bit too which is a shame. I still can't get over how cringe the 'Pretty Face' lyrics are. At least 'Spies' is a great song though!