Let me entertain you

By rights, we shouldn't be talking to Robbie Williams like this. He was the one least likely to succeed, the Take That-er who did a bit of dancing and a lot of clowning. He was the boy who walked out of the most successful pop act in Britain after an almighty bender with those Oasis lads and proceeded to eat all the pies he could lay his hands on. He should be washed up by now, a 24-year-old has-been touring with Robbie William's Take That around such rock'n'roll hotspots as The Swan in High Wycombe. Gary Barlow, Mark Owen, Jason Orange and Howard Donald, meanwhile, should be celebrating yet another in a long line of solo chart hits.

That's the thing about pop music: it doesn't always turn out the way it should and that's why we keep coming back, week in, week out. You think Ronan Keating is going to be the next Michael Bolton? Put some money on Shane Lynch doing a Pras from the Fugees and you could get a better return. While Gary Barlow has headed for the middle of the road, chucking both credibility and audience into the ditch, Robbie Williams has simply soared. No wonder he chuckles away like there's no tomorrow as he sits in another plush hotel room and prepares to tell yet another journalist how he took on the world and won.

"It is a very good time to be Robbie Williams," he says, smiling. "I am in the middle of being the creature that I was meant to be, to quote a Pet Shop Boys song: I'm there. It's very nice. No, that's not right, it's fucking great, it really is.

"But I've only achieved one part of it. In Europe, people still ask questions like `do you expect to be taken seriously?'. I step out of Ireland and Britain and people still think I'm Robbie Williams from Take That."

Yet Indie-Robbie bears no grudge against Pop-Robbie because he knows he wouldn't be in this glorious position if it wasn't for the famous fivesome. "Then, interviews were fun because anything I had to say was basically a lie. People might read that and think I'm being disrespectful to the others and to my past and blah blah blah but I'm very pleased that it has given me what I've got now and enabled me to go on and do this.

"In Take That, I was the one who'd sit back and take the piss out of the others or the situation. I wouldn't say anything serious, I wasn't expected to say anything serious. Now, this is my job."

He's best placed to dissect the continuing appeal of the boy-band machine, an apparatus which shows little signs of depreciation. "There's this thing in Britain - and probably in Ireland as well - where we'll watch a programme like Blind Date or Gladiators because it's crap and we'll watch them all the way through saying `how crap is this' and we'll be entertained by how crap they are. That's what boy bands and girl bands give us. They serve two purposes - one is the crap factor and the other one is that teenage girls are falling in love for the first time and they're never gonna be let down and it's their introduction to pop music."

For Robbie, that's the past and he has a new bag of tricks to show us now. "What I do is rock cabaret, nobody else is doing it," he claims. "You've got pop which is entertainment and you've got the rock stuff which takes itself more seriously and then you have me going `right, I'm doing me music and I'm taking that seriously but when I'm going to portray it, I'm gonna take the piss out of myself and the music and I just want you to be entertained and have a good time'. I'm a big fan of Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis jnr, Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, those great entertainers. Would I like to do Las Vegas? Yeah, I would, maybe not a residency but a one-off show where I could do a few songs, tell a few stories, do a few jokes."

That's Robbie in a nutshell. The tens of thousands who've made his new single Millennium an instant No 1 are only too happy to let him entertain them because it's what he does best. "In the past, I said I was addicted to fame and I've only recently figured it out. I want to be the best at what I do and what I do is showing off. I want to be the best show-off that there's ever been. If I was an athlete and showing off was an Olympic event, I'd get gold, no question about it. It's not a competitive thing, it's more to do with the fact that I do this well. I can't be a labourer or I can't work behind a desk, all I can do is show off - so I might as well be the best at it."

But there's also another Robbie hiding behind the clown. The showing off masks the music and, as his second album, I've Been Expecting You, will prove next month, this is something which has really evolved for the pop kid who launched his solo career with a forgettable version of Wham's Freedom. The Millennium single is a taster for a full set of crackers which will take our favourite pop larker into a whole new galaxy. Yet Robbie is slightly unsure and even strangely unconfident when you praise tracks such as Karma Killer and Grace.

"When I set off from Take That," he explains, "I felt I wasn't allowed to go `I'm a singer-songwriter now'. People would have said `oh no, you're not'. In many ways, I've downplayed the music side of things because I was quite scared to go `I'm fucking great at that as well'. I want the music to creep up on people and hit them over the head. Yeah, the material on the new album is stronger than the first album. I know that because I'm my own worst critic. I have written and recorded a great album. All I need to do now is be fit and together and be able to do the interviews and be able to perform and the rest will take care of itself."

But the promotional whirlwind can tire the best intentions even of the best show-off in the world. "I've done five days solid this week of interviews. Each one takes half an hour, 12 interviews a day and my head is gone a bit twisted. When you do interviews, you start off thinking `right, I have to do this, I'm into this, and ooh this is good and ooh this is good' and then after a while you get to a stage where you've so talked so much that you're really unconfident. All you do is talk about yourself to the point that you don't know what you're saying anymore. It's weird, I'm actually quite nervous doing this now because loads and loads of the stuff that I've talked about for the last five days is running around inside my head."

There are also additional pressures from a high-profile, on-off relationship with All Saint Nicole Appleton and resulting close attention from the British tabloid press. And Robbie has already begun to think about the backlash from the music press. "They can't say I'm gonna be great forever, can they?" he says, and sighs. "Go on, name someone that they haven't done that to. Go on, you can't, can you?"

This writer mentions perennial indie losers The Fall and Robbie smiles. "Nah, The Fall don't count, mate. It happens to everyone. The third Oasis album was a cracker. Stand By Me, All Around The World, My Big Mouth, Girl In A Dirty Shirt, all fantastic songs. But no-one has a good word to say about Oasis because it's their turn to have the backlash. That's a scary thing."

Yet, as he lights up another cigarette, Robbie gives a good impression of someone who's not really bothered that much by it. Life is good for Indie-Robbie, the man who has spent the past eight years of his life very much in the public gaze. "I'm really loving it, I love the reaction, I love the feeling that I've been taken onboard as one of the lads which is all that I wanted in the past. It's a far cry from under-16s discotheques in Hull, a far cry from all of that." Robbie Williams is here to entertain you, so sit back and enjoy the experience. The show is about to begin.

The album I've Been Expecting You will be released next month.