18 MusicWeek 14.09.12 INTERVIEWROBBIEWILLIAMS
Take The Crown is a very confident sounding album. It’s not ambiguous in any way; it’s a big, brash pop record. Are you actually feeling as confident as it sounds? Yes, this is the template for how I should carry on in the future – unless I decide to fuck things up again by being ‘interesting’. Basically, now it’s appeared, and we’ve had some reaction, it’s like, ‘Oh fuck, yeah, this is what I should have been shooting for.’ As I’ve said before, Life Thru A Lens came out and it all fucking took off and you’re at the top of the pile, which is fucking lovely, but also people point out exactly how shit you are, in minute detail, and you take it onboard, and your confidence crumples and you think, ‘Fuck, I’m shit, and therefore I should try and not do anything I’ve done before, I should do something ‘different’.
So have you, at times, deliberately sabotaged your own career? I didn’t know I was, but yes.
Was it a question of thinking, ‘Oh God, I’m too popular, I can’t cope, I don’t feel worthy, I’m going to do something a bit different and shake some of these fans off ’? I didn’t know that I was doing but I think that’s what I did. On a conscious level I thought, ‘This is a whole heap of fun, everything I do works, they’ll fucking love this’. [Makes sound of car crashing] Oh, okay, not so much…
And was that because you sometimes didn’t feel worthy of your success? Yeah, of course, yeah.
That’s quite a contrast with the man who can stand in front of literally hundreds of thousands of people and hold them in the palm of his hand. Yeah, but that’s mistaking Ian Beale for Adam Woodyatt. I’m sure when Adam Woodyatt came back to Eastenders with his long beard, as a tramp, I’m sure he hadn’t become a tramp in real life. I created a persona because I didn’t think my voice was gonna do it by itself: Look at me! Look at me! Don’t look at me! Listen to me! Listen to me! Don’t listen to me! I’m out
“I created a persona because I didn’t think my voice was gonna do it by itself: look at me! Listen to me! Watch me dance! That was all built out of necessity, because I was scared”
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of key! Watch this instead! Watch me dance! That was all built out of necessity, because I was scared.
Were you trying to please people who you were never going to please anyway, or whose approval you now know you didn’t need in the first place? I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know. I know I was properly scared of writing anything that sounded like a hit, or a bit poppy. I went down a track I wasn’t qualified to go down. I didn’t have an aim, I didn’t have a vision. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. I was just trying to be ‘interesting’.
(Now, it should be pointed out that I didn’t write the intro to this piece retrospectively; I tapped it into an iPhone in the Langham lobby. Which means that about 10 minutes after I’d been wringing as much meaning and mileage out of the word ‘interesting’, Williams himself has twice played with it, put his own quote marks round it, toyed with the meaning of it and questioned the value of it. Now, I don’t know if that’s interesting or “interesting” – but it’s certainly pretty spooky. And more than you’d perhaps expect from, say, Ronan Keating...)
Do you think you succeeded – in being ‘interesting’, I mean?
Umm… I don’t listen to any of my old albums, but I did listen to the last one (Reality Killed The Video Star), and I like it. But, that said, this album has arrived and said ‘This is what
you should have been doing, you fucking idiot. Now do a couple more’.
Where did that voice come from? What fell into place for you? I had an injection of youth from two Australian guys called Tim and Flynn [Metcalfe and Francis, Williams’ main co-writers on the album].
Which was quite serendipitous in itself, wasn’t it? It was fucking mental. My brother-in-law, who is like a feral child, is in a rap combo called The Connects and he happened to meet these Australian lads in a bar. He took them to the studio and his songs instantly got miles better, so I very casually said ‘Bring them up to the house one day, let’s try writing something’. They came and we wrote the album in 10 days.
“It did feel right, it felt really fucking right, but I didn’t know whether to trust it or not. And God help anyone who came near the house. Is that the dustman? Get him up here: ‘Okay, what do you think of this?’” ROBBIE ON WRITING TAKE THE CROWN
Wow. I guess it hasn’t flowed like that for quite a while? It hasn’t flowed like that since Life Thru A Lens, with Guy. That took a week to write.
Do you feel when it’s not just ‘right’, but ‘special’. Not really, because I’ve been wrong before. I’ve thought that how much fun I was having in the studio would translate to record sales – and it didn’t with Rude Box, at all.
I completely got that fucking wrong, especially with the first single, Rude Box itself. I thought I’d written the electronic dance equivalent of Angels. Turns out I hadn’t… So, I guess what I’m saying is that it did feel
right, it felt really fucking right, but I didn’t know whether to trust it or not. And God help anyone who came near the house. Is that the dustman? Get him up here: ‘Okay, what do you think of this?’
Would you normally do that? Or were you so confident you were onto something that you wanted people to hear it as soon as possible? No, I was unconfident and I needed people’s opinions, because never in my career has so much hinged on one album. I get this wrong and I’m fucked; I get this wrong and it all goes in another direction.
When you say you’re ‘fucked’, though, you’ll still be one of the most successful UK pop artists of all time, one who’s broken live records and sold tens of millions of albums around the world. Sixty-something million.
Right, well, exactly, so what do you mean when you say ‘fucked’? Well, success feels good, when it goes away, it doesn’t feel so good. I’d like to be successful and I’d like to feel good for a bit longer. I don’t know how many times I’m gonna go to radio and they say, ‘Yep, you’re still young enough
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