It is a Tuesday evening, and in the suitably 1990s environs of Soho’s Groucho Club, Robbie Williams, resplendent in pair of dungarees, is in the process of launching his new album. It’s called Britpop, features some songs co-written with Gaz Coombes of Supergrass, and is, he attests, “the album that I wanted to write and release after I left Take That in 1995”. This was the brief period where he attempted to establish himself as an adjunct to the mid-90s wave of hugely successful UK alt-rock, releasing a string of audibly Oasis-influenced solo singles, palling around Glastonbury with the Gallaghers and temporarily employing one of the band’s inner circle, Creation Records’ former managing director Tim Abbot, as his manager. “I’ve been musically aimless for a little while,” Williams said to the assembled press. “I’ve just spent the last 15 years looking backwards. I think with this album, if I am gonna look backwards, I might as well just clear the decks and go back to the start and head off from there.”
His determination to revisit the Britpop era feels slightly odd. His Oasis-influenced singles met with declining public interest, nearly scuppering his solo career before Angels and Let Me Entertain You came to the rescue. His relationship with Abbot ended with each suing the other in a dispute over Abbot’s contract (they settled out of court), he later said Oasis were “gigantic bullies” (Liam Gallagher replied that he’d “never bullied anyone in my life”) and when he talked about the period when I interviewed him in 2016, it was in terms of trauma: “There was an indie fundamentalist mentality … I was looked down on when I was in conversation with a lot of people … [it] starts to make you feel agoraphobic and second-guess everything you do”. But his appearance at the Groucho is the latest in a series of 90s-themed publicity stunts by Williams – he’s also unveiled fake blue plaques in Camden, proclaiming it “the home of Britpop”, and Soho’s Berwick Street, where the photograph on the cover of Oasis’s (What’s the Story?) Morning Glory was taken.
