Facts: Robbie Williams
Born in 1974.
Family: Married to actor Ayda Field. They have four children.
He has sold over 80 million albums. Counting his time in Take That, 17 of his albums have topped the album chart, making him the third most successful Briton in that category.
Current with the album “XXV”, released on September 9, and a documentary series on Netflix that premieres in 2023.
All the 25 old hit songs on the new disc are newly recorded. The disc has been recorded with Jules Buckley, Guy Chambers, Steve Sidwell and the Dutch orchestra Metropole Orkest.
“Let me entertain you” Robbie Williams sang to a Stockholm audience in the early 2000s. But the audience did not allow themselves to be entertained. The world star didn’t get them going at all. Wherever he went in the world at that time, there was “uproar,” as he puts it today, an electric atmosphere that he needed to do his job.
But not in Stockholm.
— I was absolutely terrified. It’s scary and lonely up there on stage, says Robbie Williams to TT.
Later, at a concert in Copenhagen, he apologized to the audience before visiting Sweden again. “I should stay here.”
The Danes cheered. But the statement didn’t quite fit then either, he remembers. In Gothenburg it was completely different, there he had the audience with him.
— A gig in Gothenburg is completely different from one in Stockholm, I was absolutely sure of that.
32-year career
Briton Robbie Williams became a world celebrity as a 16-year-old in the boy band Take That. After a few years of successful career with them, he left the band in 1995 to pursue a solo career.
It was the right move, he quickly realized. In 1997 he released his first solo album. “Life thru a lens” went to number one in the UK charts and featured the hit songs “Let me entertain you” and “Angels”. Since then he has had 14 singles and been awarded 18 Brit Awards, more than any other artist ever. But there was also a lot of alcohol and drugs in the early years, reckless behavior that he sings about in the new single “Lost”.
Today, that behavior has been replaced by another.
— My reckless behavior no longer risks killing me instantly or putting me on a freight train to hell, listening to little birds as the sun rises in the background. Today, my reckless behavior is about screen time and food, he says.
He eats takeout during the interview.
TT: What is your screen time?
— Every day, all the time. I’ve become obsessed with art, so that’s what I’d like to think makes up my screen time. But at the same time, I seem to have lost the ability to force myself to do it. And then, when the creative disappears, YouTube appears, he says, listing the categories he usually gets stuck in: UFOs, football and conspiracy theories.
But not all time goes to the screen. He has also managed to record a total of 29 songs for the new album “XXV”. Four newly written songs and 25 remakes of old hits to celebrate the number of years since the 48-year-old released his first solo album.
— The energy is different now. What these songs mean to me is different. Having to record 29 songs in a row is a hell of a pain but I never get tired of it.
Gothenburg no better than Stockholm
He won’t say exactly when, because he doesn’t want to reveal the location, but says the realization that he was wrong about different cities’ audiences came fairly recently. Long after he decided that Gothenburg is better than Stockholm.
— I sat and thought when I was on my way from a concert that I had really been looking forward to that “this wasn’t so much fun”. It was then that I realized that I might have been completely wrong about countries, people and everything. I’ve had a great gig in Stockholm too, says Robbie Williams.