In the tiny, 600-capacity Dingwalls, at the side of Camden Market, Britain’s most decorated pop star is having a moment. “It’s 1997 again, and normally the Robbie that plays gigs throws shapes and does all the bravado, but I’d just like to sing my album to you. I wanna perform as Robert this evening.”
The Robbie that plays gigs is, of course, Robbie Williams, and the gigs that he normally plays are roughly a hundred times the size of tonight’s. He’s here, with the 10.45pm stage time of a fittingly younger man, because at midnight, Williams was meant to be releasing his 16th album Britpop.
But, as he later tells the crowd, Taylor Swift put paid to those plans. “Here’s the truth, I want 16 Number One albums but then Taylor decided to put hers out the same week as me so we thought, for f***s sake, let’s do it in February when no one’s got an album out,” he admits. “I’m being selfish, but how many times in your life do you get to have the most number one albums the UK’s ever had?”
A rhetorical question, if ever there was one. But also one that turns tonight’s spectacle — a two-hour show comprising Williams’ debut Life Thru A Lens in full, and then the unreleased Britpop — into something of a fever dream. Already a global name from Take That before he released a note of solo music, Williams has never really been Robert: jobbing musician, cutting his teeth.
But tonight, playing half a set of new material, he comes about as close as he’s ever likely to get. Dingwalls might not often see a slew of homemade fan signs in the front row, but even with the most receptive audience in the world (and, having won the golden ticket from 70,000 applicants, these are they), the premise is still sort of the same as any artist testing the water — to varying degrees of success.
First, we go back to the beginning. Wearing the red Adidas tracksuit top he famously sported at Glastonbury ‘95, we’re transported to a time before the whistles, bangs and literal rockets of his recent stadium tour, to when Robbie Williams was a man on the cusp of fucking it all up. Life Thru A Lens famously bombed on release until it was — poetically — saved by Angels, but tonight goes some way to giving the record some long-deserved justice.
Cheeky and cocky in that particularly Nineties way, songs like Ego Agogo and Old Before I Die still stand up, while Williams’ voice is undeniable. Without his usual bombastic accoutrements, you’re left only with the same turbo-charismatic entertainer that won the world over. Then he plays Let Me Entertain You and Angels, and Camden gets truly surreal.
The pairing of his first album and his 16th, released a full 29 years apart, is obviously a pointed one. Back then, Robbie wanted to be in Oasis; now, judging from the new songs he returns to play for the second half, that still remains — not least during Spies, after which he starts singing the chorus of Champagne Supernova. “Yes, totally fucking different,” he jokes of their very audible similarities before addressing the Gallaghers: “Don’t sue me, all the fucking things you’ve nicked…”
He’s also been trying on various other guises for size. Bite Your Tongue and You suggest that Williams also wouldn’t mind being in IDLES, their spat out verses working well within the confines of a club show, however just-released new song Pretty Face’s by-numbers devotion (“She’s such a pretty face / She’s everything I love about this world”) is a lyrical snoozefest. There’s an equally iffy song about AI (Human), one that sounds remarkably like The Sweet’s 1973 stomp Block Buster (Cocky), and a genuinely great musing on fame (All My Life); solid moments interspersed with confused or confusing ones.
And then we get to Morrissey: a Pet Shop Boys-style song, written, Williams tells us, with his old mucker Gary Barlow, about the troublesome former Smiths frontman. “Morrissey is talking to me in code,” goes its poppy chorus; presumably, the code did not translate to ‘This is probably a questionable premise’.
Britpop, then, is a mixed bag. Tonight’s show — part of the Long 90’s tour — draws to its conclusion after two albums and an endless array of chat at 1am: appropriately way far past its natural end point. There were highs, there were lows, but what do you get the pop star who has everything? Turns out, maybe it’s the chance to go back to the hustle.
