Robbie Williams still wishes he was Britpop

A few years ago, it felt as if Robbie Williams had entered his light entertainment dotage. He was a judge in 2018 on The X Factor; he started making Christmas albums and releasing reworked compilations of his old hits. He lived in LA, where the burden of his fame was somewhat lesser than in the UK.

He had clearly done some work on himself: his redemption arc – from Take That bad boy via Knebworth-filling household name to sober, well-adjusted father of four – was complete. The only thing he didn’t have was a podcast wryly interviewing fellow slebs about their supplements regime.

But fame clearly remains one of the harder habits to kick. Of late, Williams’s story has been revisited first in Netflix documentary form, then as a self-narrated biopic in which the singer was rendered as a CGI monkey alongside human actors.

Ludicrous as it was, Better Man (2024) was a statement. The film’s visuals were nuts: audacious musical set pieces and a violent Planet of the Apes-style battle involving Williams and his personal demons at his 2003 Knebworth performance. Unflinchingly grim drug-taking filled the screen. Scenes in which Williams’s former girlfriend Nicole Appleton is persuaded to have an abortion were genuinely harrowing.

Better Man baffled Americans and younger people, who remain largely unacquainted with Williams’s work, but received critical acclaim. It lost money in cinemas before becoming something of a sleeper hit on streaming services.

Last year, Williams announced a new album, tendentiously titled Britpop, and went on tour in anticipation of it. Tracks such as Rocket found him impersonating Billy Idol while Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi added squiggly guitar – a tourist board accountant’s idea of British guitar music. Then came Spies, a nostalgic Oasis pastiche.

Williams pulled Britpop from the schedules last October so it didn’t clash with Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl. Described as the album Williams might have made when he left Take That, Britpop fulfils that billing in all sorts of stunningly predictable ways, then throws in some curveballs (not just the Gary Barlow and Chris Martin credits).

Anyone hoping for a new Oasis album – one that sounds like they used to sound like – may find a surprising amount to enjoy here. A self-hating boyband member, Williams worshipped Oasis, and Liam Gallagher in particular, becoming a puppyish hanger-on at Glastonbury in 1995, the summer in which he left Take That.

You could read Williams’s ape alter ego in Better Man as evolving from a cheeky monkey into an animal, before becoming an actual human; but really, it’s the simian roll of the younger Gallagher (or the Stone Roses’s Ian Brown, AKA “King Monkey”) that Williams is claiming as his own. How tremendously Robbie Williams it is to ride on the coattails of the Oasis reunion for his own comeback.

The guitar-strewn Britpop bears the influence of their glam rock anthemics. From the swagger of Cocky to Williams’s pronunciation of “yeeeew” on Pretty Face and the Beatles-by-way-of-Noel surge of All My Life – these would have been Williams’s audition tapes had Liam been kidnapped by aliens in 1995.

The most interesting moments come when Britpop deviates from its script. Whatever possessed Williams, abetted by Barlow, to pen a song called Morrissey, and to make it about parasocial fan behaviour? And then to swerve the Smiths pastiche in favour of an on-the-nose Pet Shop Boys homage instead? (“Morrissey is talking to me, talking to me in code,” it goes.)

Curiouser and curiouser: It’s OK Until the Drugs Stop Working is full of strings and 1960s references, the kind of thing Pulp and Blur sometimes gravitated towards. Bite Your Tongue is redolent of Blur punk. The buzzsaw You starts rather like Connection by Elastica – quite the niche reference nowadays. Sadly, the album ends without a love letter to Suede, one band short of full Britpop homage.

It’s hard to fault Williams for relitigating the 90s: everyone else is, after all. But whether or not Britpop, an act of wish fulfilment, lands as well as the Oasis tour, or the Blur and Pulp reunion albums, is by no means certain.

Williams’s own solo success was not particularly rooted in independent rock music, but in soaring songs of solo male transcendence: Angels, Let Me Entertain You. There is little of that on Britpop – this singer looks back not in anger, but in unresolved envy.

Photograph by Jason Hetherington