Robbie Williams' new documentary celebrates 25 years of his solo career. Photo / Supplied
With a hit new Netflix doco and two sold-out NZ shows, the Robnaissance has begun, writes Karl Puschmann.
All Robbie Williams has ever wanted is to entertain you. Assuming, of course, you’d let him.
Musically, I wouldn’t. But the English pop star’s soap opera of a life has provided me decades of entertainment. If entertaining was his goal, then congratulations on a job well done. Even if only tangentially.
For proof of that, you only have to turn to Netflix which has just launched a new four-part documentary series about the singer. Simply titled Robbie Williams, and timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of Williams’ solo career, the doco promises a deep dive into his turbulent life and times.
Like last month’s revelatory doco Beckham, which showed people another side of Brit football legend David Beckham and revealed how the double whammy of his World Cup sending off and the subsequent venom from the public affected him, Robbie Williams is also going to dig into all the difficult bits of the star’s life.
Big revelations are expected. The trailer boasts it will be “raw” and “honest” and feature hundreds of hours of never-seen-before footage. Williams has been intimately involved and the trailer calls it a “culture-defining series”. Williams has never been shy of tooting his own horn.
Directed by the Emmy and Bafta-nominated director Joe Pearlman, who also made last year’s well-received doco Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now, the doco promises to “explore the real human being behind the salacious headlines”.
Even without access to his personal archives, there’s plenty to work with. Williams has lived a very public life. He’s never shied away from talking about his addictions, problems or proclivities. And on rare occasions when he has, a paparazzi has been nearby to document them anyway.
There were his belligerent final months in boy band Take That. His reinvention as a Brit-pop hanger on and lad about town. And his new role as an energetic, crowd-pleasing elder showman belting out the hits to tipsy mums and dads enjoying a big night out.
In his late ‘90s/early noughties heyday, Williams was everywhere. Radio and music TV unrelentingly pumped hits like She’s the One, Rock DJ and Let Me Entertain You. Angels, his arm-round-your-mates sing-along, was a pop ballad juggernaut. And as 1999 ticked down to 2000, you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing his James Bond-sampling hit Millennium.
Williams was more than a pop star. He was a phenomenon. Even down here in little old Aotearoa. And even more so when our small country took an unlikely starring role in the Robbie Williams circus. Which it did on more than one occasion.
It was a cultural tattoo that first saw him pull New Zealand onto the world stage. In 1998 he had his left shoulder inked with a Māori-designed tattoo by the respected and acclaimed Māori tattooist Te Rangitu Amohau Netana in Amsterdam.
He was one of the first superstars to embrace Māori culture in this way. It sparked mass debate and left many within Māoridom unimpressed.
“I have taken a lot of flak for doing that tattoo from my people,” Netana told regional UK newspaper The Argus. “In a way, Robbie has raised the profile of Māori culture. For me, my culture is everything.”
Two years later, in 2000, Williams became a household name here after turning his hotel room in Auckland’s then-swanky Metropolis building into a steamy love shack.
“Famous Musician Has Consensual Fling With Woman” is not much of a headline. But it became front-page news around the world when Hamilton model Robin Reynolds sold all the juicy details of their non-stop, two-day love romp to global gossip mongers The News of the World.
Memorably, it included the sordid tidbit: “We hardly had time for food. At one point I was so hungry I grabbed one of his plums.”
In his homeland, Williams was never far away from the front page. But it would take another 15 years before he’d again hit our headlines.
But hit them he did after inviting local music reviewer Simon Sweetman to “kiss my f*****g ass” during a gig at Spark Arena in 2015. The outburst was prompted by Sweetman’s poor review of his Wellington show a few days earlier.
Nevertheless, Williams has emerged from each controversy or own goal with a beaming grin and reputation as pop’s “cheeky chappie” intact.
But how? To find out I asked a couple of die-hard local fans. One couldn’t remember any scandals off-hand, and the other didn’t know what I was talking about. In the UK he’s tabloid fodder. In New Zealand, Robbie Williams fans are all about the music.
This will no doubt enrage Alan McGee. He’s the man who discovered Oasis in a pub and immediately signed them to his label, Creation Records. He published a tantrum in The Guardian titled “Why I Hate Robbie Williams”. In his frothing rant, he labelled the singer, “a crime against music”, and ridiculously claimed that Williams made “music for people who don’t feel”.
But, as it turns out, people are fans of Williams precisely because of how his music makes them feel. It’s why he sold out Napier’s 25,000-capacity Mission Estate Winery in record time. And why the hastily added second show has fewer than 150 tickets remaining.
“His songs are absolute rippers,” Sam, an Auckland software engineer, tells me. “They’re outrageously catchy. There’s heaps of variety and he’s super clear when he sings. It’s really easy to absorb the lyrics by osmosis.”
“He has a phenomenal voice and I’ve always loved how generous he is with his talent,” author and uber-Robbie fan Elouise Quigan said when I asked what endeared Williams to her. “I can’t imagine being the guy who had the funeral song tied up for decades with Angels.”
Both became fans during Williams’ glory years. This began in the UK shortly after he departed Take That in 1995, but took a little longer to filter down here.
His debut solo record, Life Through A Lens didn’t get a look in, failing to crack our top 20, despite housing two of his signature tunes; Angels and Let Me Entertain You.
But even they didn’t have much impact here either, peaking at 23 and 33 respectively in our charts.
“I was too young for his time in Take That, but Let Me Entertain You was impossible to ignore,” Quigan says.
Quigan remembers Let Me Entertain You as “a massive hit”. As do I. But the strange, confusing, fact of the matter is that the song only just squeaked into the top 40. It fell out of the charts completely after only two weeks.
So why do we all remember it as so ubiquitous? How is there such a disconnect between collective memory and cold hard numbers?
The answer lies with his third record, The Ego Has Landed, which was released in 1999 and finally made Williams a bonafide star here. It was a compilation album, comprised of the best songs from his first two records, Life Through A Lens and 1998′s I’ve Been Expecting You. These included Angels, Let Me Entertain You, She’s the One and Millenium.
The album rocketed to our No.1 spot and hung around the charts for well over a year. This is when his songs became hits and why radio began cranking singles that only a year or two earlier had sunk.
“Robbie was always on the front of some gossip rag when I was getting my hair cut,” Sam says. “He was hard to miss. He was everywhere.”
The following year he scored again with the No.1 album Sing When You’re Winning. Lead single Kids, a duet with Kylie Minogue, hit No.5, and Rock DJ, gave Williams his very first New Zealand No.1 single.
“I was 12 when Rock DJ came out and there was such a fuss at school, rumours flew around that the video was banned because he danced so hard that he took his skin off,” Sam laughs.
Completing Williams’ golden run was 2001′s Swing When You’re Winning. It was a maverick move that saw Williams swap the footy shirt for the pressed suit of a smooth crooner to cover a bunch of swing classics. It also saw him sharing the mic with wildcard choices like Ab Fab’s Jane Horrocks and comic actor Jon Lovitz.
The album swung into No.1 here. As did its lead single, a duet with Academy Award-winning actress Nicole Kidman on the old standard Somethin’ Stupid.
Since that hat trick of No.1s, Williams’ star has dimmed. Of his 12 albums since, only six cracked our Top 10. Last year’s XXV failed to make the Top 20.
His singles have also failed to connect in the same way as those early hits. Of the nine released, only two, Feel and Something Beautiful, have crept into the top 10. The majority have languished in the lower reaches of the mid-20s.
None of which will matter at all when Williams takes to the stage on Saturday and Sunday.
“Robbie is nostalgia. A key part of my youth,” Sam says. “Seeing him live last time was so much fun with everyone going hard and singing along. He was so into it he looked like he forgot the words a couple of times.”
“I have huge respect for his honesty about his depression and struggles,” Quigan says. “It’s easy for people to punch down on things women love. With Robbie Williams, it was the first time that was really obvious to me. But he has broader appeal than people like to admit. His tunes still fill the floor at an elder millennial event.”
Forget the floor. Tonight his tunes will fill acres. People will travel from all over Aotearoa to see pop’s cheeky chappie belt out his catalogue of crowd-pleasing hits with a smile on his face and a glint in his eye.
The crowd will cheer and dance and sway and sing along. They will let him entertain them and Robbie Williams will sing. Because despite his many detractors and personal demons, he is still winning.
Robbie Williams, the four-part documentary series, is available on Netflix from Wednesday, November 8 and 9pm NZT. He will play Napier’s Mission Estate Winery concert on Saturday, November 11 and Sunday, November 12
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