Ever the cheeky monkey, Robbie Williams has followed up Better Man, his chimpanzee-themed biopic from 2024, in which he was portrayed by a CGI ape, with the surprise release of his first collection of original material in a decade.
Unleashed three weeks ahead of schedule, Britpop is Williams at his best: irreverent, solipsistic and a romping ringmaster across an LP that serves as a big, splurging Valentine to 1990s guitar rock.
The title wasn’t chosen at random. In his dying days with Take That, Williams had embarked on a secondary career as clown prince of Britpop and bantering best pal of Liam Gallagher. It’s hard to overstate just how big a turn-up this was: in the 1990s, rockers and pop stars inhabited completely different universes, and the idea of Williams spending an entire Glastonbury hanging out with Oasis, as he did in 1995, was hard to get your head around.
Williams wasn’t just a lairy ligger. He genuinely adored Oasis and would constantly badger Take That’s spiritual leader, Gary Barlow, to put more guitar music on their albums. Barlow’s refusal to do so contributed to the tension between the two, and to Williams’s ultimate departure from Take That.
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Three decades later, Williams is finally channelling that time and those experiences into his music with an enjoyably superficial tribute record that argues civilisation peaked the weekend Oasis released their album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? – which it may have if you were foolhardy enough to pay through the nose to see the re-formed Gallaghers bring their nostalgia dog-and-pony show to Croke Park in the summer of 2025.
For those who decided the money was better off in their pockets, Britpop is a more than acceptable alternative to the Gallagher tour. There are moments when Williams sounds thoroughly Williamsesque – the album’s closing track, Pocket Rocket, is a spiritual successor to Angels – but elsewhere he unashamedly imitates Gallagher’s star-crossed drawl and Richard Ashcroft’s man-of-the-people whine (on It’s OK Until the Drugs Stop Working, which brazenly lifts its title from Ashcroft’s The Drugs Don’t Work).
There’s no substance here, and it’s an open question whether anyone will care about this album at the end of the weekend, much less six months hence. But its sense of fun is infectious, as Williams demonstrates out of the blocks when he kicks off with the anthemic Rocket, featuring a blistering solo from Tommy Iommi of Black Sabbath.
Britpop was never just about Oasis, of course: there’s an argument that the B-list Britpoppers were much more musically interesting. Williams would appear to share this view, at least judging by the Elastica pastiche Pretty Face, which lifts its guitar line from their 1994 hit Connection (which in turn owes a lot to Wire’s Three Girl Rhumba).
Robbie’s batty Britpop bacchanal reaches peak bonkers on Morrissey, a duet between Williams and his old Take That mucker Barlow, where they express concern for the spiritual wellbeing of the former Smiths curmudgeon Steven Patrick Morrissey against a Pet Shop Boys-style Euro-disco groove.
It’s completely out to lunch – possibly dinner and supper too – and a reminder that, whatever else he may be guilty of, nobody could ever accuse Robbie Williams of being boring.
