Reveal: Robbie Williams by Chris Heath

Author:Chris Heath [Heath, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911600268
Publisher: Blink Publishing
Published: 2017-09-20T22:00:00+00:00

July 2011

Post on Robbie Williams’ blog, in which he is answering questions and responding to requests that have been sent in by his fans:

I BELIEVE THERE WAS A LADY THAT WAS LOOKING FOR INTELLECT AND NOT FLUFF …

I AM MADE OF FLUFF.

MAY I SUGGEST ANOTHER POPSTAR FOR YOU. I THINK YOU MAY FIND WHAT YOU’RE AFTER HERE.

He embeds a link to http://leonardcohen.com/community.html, a Leonard Cohen discussion group.

HAPPY HUNTING …

February 2013

For Rob’s thirty-ninth birthday, Guy sent him a book, John Niven’s Kill Your Friends, a tale of horror and homicide set in the 1990s British music industry and packed with gleeful and sordid insider knowledge. Rob read the first 50 or 60 pages, but he was struggling with the narrator.

‘I was finding it difficult because there’s absolutely nothing to like about him. And then there were coke moments that took me back exactly to the nineties where I was, “God, that feels bad.” Then there was a bit about me. He wasn’t even that rude. But he obviously saw me at the Brits doing … obviously what he saw me doing. Which was being sober. And I was “ohhh…” because he was spot on.’

This is what he’d read:

As we drink and gossip and bitch I look over at the recently clean and sober Robbie Williams, who is sitting at a table a few feet away. He’s fiddling with the label on a bottle of mineral water, smoking two-handed, and nodding while some guy I don’t know – some manager, some lawyer – explains something to him. Williams periodically turns away to stare hard – a hard stare I know well – at the glittering rump of some boiler standing near him. Poor bastard, I guess that’s all he’s got now, isn’t it? The pumping. Can you imagine it? You’re not even thirty and you can’t do anything any more. No nose-up, no pills, no frosty beers, no warming shots of Jack or Remy. You’re just sitting there, completely sober, in your fuck-off mansion, dressed head to foot in all the finery you spent the morning trawling New Bond Street with some stylist for, you’ve just given up trying to read some book for the umpteenth time, because it’s too hard, you’re turning on Sky Sports again, or forcing some underling to drink fruit juice and play cards with you, and you’re thinking – another forty years of this? You’re just some stage kid, some poor song-anddance spastic with a cheeky grin who fate threw a whole bunch of sevens. And now you’re staring down the wrong end of four decades with just your own thoughts for company when you don’t really have two fucking thoughts to rub together. Nasty.

Rob decided he didn’t want to read any further.

‘Cheers, Guy,’ he laughs.

It’s actually a fairly savage portrait of who that Robbie Williams might have been, but even if some of Niven’s guesses and suppositions are close to the bone, the real Robbie Williams has worked hard to transcend the bleak version of his future Niven saw.

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