By the way Robbie Williams opens his show at London’s O2 Arena, you would think he has something to prove. A national treasure and one of the best-selling artists of all time, Williams has been reflecting British culture back at itself in a hurricane of hair gel and bravado since joining Take That in 1990. Equally, he’s had a life of stark ups and downs – adoration and derision, addiction and recovery – that has made him something of an underdog. Tonight, you hear him before you see him. That familiar, eternally boyish voice checking the mic – “two, one two” – giving the occasion a fly-by-the-seat of one’s pants vibe. Next, you see his silhouette. He emerges behind the band frozen in an Elvis pose; crouched over, mic in hand, flared trousers and all. They start Let Me Entertain You and Robbie struts to centre stage, revealing a gold glitter waistcoat, a greying French crop mullet and box-fresh white trainers. “Now SCREAM!” he demands. And they do.
Williams is a performer who, much like Liam Gallagher or Alex Turner, is able to tap into a kind of British masculinity that is loud of mouth and soft of eye: ballads for lads who are constantly one gulp of Carling away from bursting into tears over an afternoon with their grandad 24 years ago. As he bowls around the stage singing lyrics like “my bed’s full of takeaways, of fantasies of easy lays” and “I don’t wanna die, but I ain’t keen on living either” to an all-ages audience, you get the sense of these songs being timeless because they were written from a precipice. Whether he’s proclaiming “I’m a star but I’ll fade” or lamenting that “youth is wasted on the young”, the threat of loss hangs over every high.
The tour is in support of Williams’s latest album, XXV, which sees 25 years of hits and fan favourites re-recorded and orchestrated with the Metropole Orkest. From Take That’s The Flood to Rock DJ to Kylie Minogue duet Kids, it’s essentially a personalised tour of his career, from boyband heartthrob through the cocaine years to his current station as a family man whose kids think he’s lost his looks. The set is peppered with anecdotes about going on holiday with Geri Horner when he was first getting sober, and doing cocaine with Oasis at Glastonbury before hammering out a cover of Don’t Look Back in Anger so resonant it should legitimately annoy the Gallagher brothers into burying the hatchet.
Given the framework of the tour, it’s no surprise that it feels almost like a swan song. He talks about 1990 – the year Thatcher resigned, the Berlin wall fell (November 1989 to be exact), and, more importantly, Take That formed. He does live commentary on the video for Everything Changes: explaining why there is jelly bouncing off his bare body and how Gary Barlow got all the lead parts. He reminisces about reading NME in the 90s and getting “big ideas” about writing his own songs. He makes dedications to his family and says he has found happiness. At one point a camera sweeps past the barrier and lingers on an older male fan holding a handmade sign that says “hardcore since ’74” (the year Robbie was born).
To counter, there’s plenty of the man that gave us Rudebox (which he graciously does not play). He points into the crowd and grabs his crotch and he bends over and roars “this is my bum, this is my arse” followed by something about ageing. Within the first five minutes he’s down among the crowd screaming “come on you fuckers”. For a sweeping encore of No Regrets and She’s the One, he dons a customised wrestling robe and holds his arms outstretched while the orchestra blows the songs up to operatic proportions.
Like his father Peter, the Sinatra of working men’s clubs, Williams is a showman from start to finish. While waxing lyrical about entertainment, he tells us that the number one rule is “love your audience”, and that love clearly goes both ways. Before finally bringing things to a close with Angels, he nods to Knebworth 2003: “When I asked you to grow old with me at Knebworth you did, didn’t you?”
Now approaching 50, Williams doesn’t just write songs about living fast and being young. He performs with the joy of what can come after. His parting message for anyone who’s followed his journey from the start – and, I suspect, himself: “Turns out there is a happy ending.”
