Within three years of your birth in working class U.K. enclave Stoke-On-Trent, you're opening the family pub each morning. Hardly ten years go by before you've dropped out of school and found yourself breaking hearts and sales records as one-fifth of teen sensation Take That. Five years on and you've been sacked from Take That amidst a flurry of controversy. Your solo debut remains effectively stillborn for six months. You could pack it in and give up. Or you could be Robbie Williams.
Assuming the latter, you might realize that you've accumulated an inordinate amount of baggage for your tender age. And as the naivete of teen stardom gives way to wisdom beyond your years, you develop a sense of things best left by the wayside. "I'm finally being me," Robbie affirms.
"Years ago, I was conforming to be a member of a group. That taught me a big lesson: You're headed for trouble if you have an identity of your own and you attempt to conform to another's way of thinking. In the end, it's just not going to work. I'm living proof of that."
"I'd been cocooned for so long that when I was finally released I didn't have a clue as to what I was doing. I was very young and very stupid. It was inevitable that I would fall on the wrong side of the tracks. If you must know, I'm a wealth of insecurity."
OK, enough with the first-person role-playing: Young Mr. "Wealth of Insecurity" entreated the world to let him entertain them on 1997's Life Thru A Lens--a plea that fell on deaf ears for the better part of a year. He persevered, however, busting his arse (if you will) until not one but three of the album's singles, "Angels," "Let Me Entertain You" and "Old Before I Die," had cracked the upper reaches of the British charts. A year later. Life... had gone six times platinum in the UK and those who would initially written Robbie off were writing cover stories for NME, Melody Maker and the like. If that weren't sufficiently sweet revenge, Robbie's performance at the 1998 Glastonbury Festival drew an all-time record crowd. And as the performance climaxed with a 100,000 strong chorus of "Angels," Robbie offered up a quote that summarized the events of that same year more succinctly than any magazine or TV interview: "I'm shitting meself!"
Two Brit Award nominations, a televised duet with hero Tom Jones, and a Mercury Music award nod later, Robbie Williams offered his second solo album, I've Been Expecting You.
For the UK lead-off single, Williams and musical accomplice/producer Guy Chambers employed the lush strings of John Barry's "You Only Live Twice" score in crafting "Millennium," a sublime pop portend that simultaneously gives voice to and soothes global Y2K anxieties. "It was the album's most enjoyable song to write," Williams recalls. "I just love the strings in the John Barry score and how we connected them to a hip hop beat. And the lyrics came quickly. It's about how in the greater scheme of things we're all quite irrelevant. And with all this talk about the millennium, it just made perfect sense. The line 'We all enjoy the madness/Because we're all gonna fade away' is my way of saying 'Go on, go out and get off your head!"
Another of the album's standouts, the melancholic and reflective "No Regrets," found Williams collaborating with Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy and Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys. A genius combination in both theory and reality, it yielded "I've Been Expecting You" a second UK hit. By the close of 1998, Robbie appeared on a year-end cover of The Face as their "Man Of The Year: No Contest," MTV Europe had handed over the Best Male Performer statuette, and the Brit Awards proffered a record six nominations in four categories. (For the record, Robbie took home three of those Brits this month: Best Male Artist, Best Single ("Angels") and Best Video ("Millennium").)
Where to go from here, you ask? Well, the time has come for Robbie Williams' primary U.S. offensive, so to speak. His stateside debut, The Ego Has Landed, is a compendium of selections from Life Thru A Lens and I've Been Expecting You. As such, it features all of the aforementioned highlights and more. Yes, the international hits that have propelled Williams' two LPs beyond 4.8 million cumulative worldwide sales are indisputable gems, but The Ego Has Landed is more than a simple singles collection. From the irresistible languor of "Lazy Days" to the anthem of self-deprecation that is "Strong" to the all- out rawk stomp of "Karma Killer" and "Man Machine" (as featured in the UK hit film Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, coming soon to a U.S. theater near you), Ego... is a work of staggering depth and promise. Not a bad career overview for an artist who readily admits to initial doubts as to his worth as a solo performer.
"I love the fact that my best songs are on one album," says Williams. "What's most interesting is how all the songs work together. I was very angry when I made the first album. Lyrically, I wasn't aware. I didn't think I could sing. Coming out of Take That, I had no self-esteem. I thought I was shit. All this changed when 'Angels' came out in England. After that, I did a lot of growing up. So, for my second album, I was less angry, and definitely not as twisted and bitter."
Robbie Williams' fans always knew that he would rise once more to the occasion, as it were. As the most interesting member of Take That--to fans and tabloids alike--he would assert on numerous occasions that he had it in him to be a world class artist. Of course, he just needed the rest of the world to catch up with him. "I'm an old-fashioned entertainer," he muses. "There's nobody else around like me. And I'm serious when I sing 'Let Me Entertain You.' I'm not joking. Let me do it; I guarantee you a fantastic time."
Biography Provided By the Offical Robbie Williams Website
