Something strange is happening in the pop cosmos when a star who is loved equally by 80 and 18-year-olds can tempt 80,000 punters to the grounds of Slane Castle while receiving little of the critical derision such mainstream appeal normally attracts. But this is Robbie Williams, the man who put the popular back into pop music and got everybody's blessing along the way.
Williams is the ultimate come-back-kid. Four years after Take That broke up - it was a split that caused help lines to be set up for hysterical fans - it is he and not, as any pop pundit worth their salt would have predicted, lead singer Gary Barlow who is carving out a successful solo career. It's akin to Boyzone breaking up and Ronan disappearing into musical oblivion while Keith fills Wembley Stadium on his own. Unthinkable. Or so we imagined.
In the same way Williams is responsible for his current success - this unconditional adoration has come after just two solo albums - he almost blew it after he left the band in 1995 amid accusations that he had gone completely off the rails.
"I was a pathetic, pitiful creature," he admitted recently. "The first thing I would do in the morning would be to empty the bottle of wine that I had fallen asleep over two hours earlier. I'd have taken a line of coke because I couldn't get up without it." He moaned in interviews constantly about how he hated Take That, their music, the regimented lifestyle of a professional boy-band and Gary Barlow - "his music makes mine sound like Johann Sebastian Bach" was typical. He went partying with Oasis, put on weight (a bigger crime than his drug and drink habit, the tabloid headlines seemed to suggest) and did everything five years in a clean-living pop band that sold 15 million records and produced a string of hits had denied him. He was a 21-year-old millionaire happily punching the button marked self-destruct.
Three cheers for therapy. It was his mate Elton John who introduced him to a psychiatrist to the stars and the rehabilitation process that started him on the road to recovery. His first album Life Thru a Lens seemed to be going nowhere until the single Angels was released and the soaraway pop anthem received the kind of accolades that got him to Slane today.
His second album, I've Been Expecting You, is better - ironic, tongue-in-cheek and very catchy. From the James Bond inspired Millennium to the moody No Regrets to the thumping Let Me Entertain You, they appeal to indie-lover and pop fan alike. His persona is in constant flux; he can be macho or androgynous, a bad boy or the teacher's pet and it is this diversity that forms an integral part of his appeal.
Since he was a boy, Williams has craved attention and his live-wire personality and capacity to surround himself with extremely talented people is a formula which gets him as much as he can handle.
He grew up in Stoke-on-Trent, his parents divorced when he was two, and he developed a yen for fame, watching his Dad, a stand-up comedian, in action. At school he was good at sports but weak academically. He learned he had won a place in Take That on the day his exam results came through. He was 16 and had failed all his GCSEs.
At his lowest post-Take That point, about Christmas 1996, he came to Dublin and struck up a brief friendship with someone who was to have a lasting impact on his career. Ray Heffernan
was in The Globe bar when Williams came in, they struck up a conversation and soon the pop-star and the budding song-writer were working on new material. The result of evenings spent in Heffernan's home in Glasnevin with Williams, then at the end of his year of self-destruction and in tears much of the time, was Angels, the song which was to turn his career around.
While some have tried to make out that Williams stole the song from the Dubliner, Heffernan says this is "not true at all" but that he was part of the origin of a song that was then professionally tweaked into the hit it became. He has mixed memories of the "intense" few months he spent hanging around with the star.
"If you were to invite any five people in the world to a dinner party, Robbie would have to be one of them. He is the most charming bloke ever, he is quick-witted with a million stories to tell and one-liners that have people melting with laughter," he said.
Heffernan also saw his darker side. "He was under a lot of pressure, he needed to talk and he did, a lot . . . he felt that everyone had let him down." Williams writes poetry and is passionate about most music, enjoying everything from Ella Fitzgerald to the Beatles to hardcore hip-hop. After a string of high-profile relationships, he is currently dating a computer executive he lives a few doors from in London. He is a brilliant soccer player and did trials for Manchester City. Brought up a Catholic, there is a spiritual dimension to him, said an acquaintance, "he has a strong sense of God".
There is nothing remotely Christian about the way he speaks about his ex-Take That manager Nigel Martin-Smith, which suggests some deeper reason for the venom that comes to the surface every time Williams talks about the relationship - this year he went to court to fight Martin-Smith for £90,000 worth of unpaid commission and spent four times that in legal fees in the process.
The story of Take That, the way Robert Peter Williams tells it, reads like a form of child-abuse that made millionaires of its victims.
In his most recent interview, he expressed the view that Take That was spawned by Satan. "If someone planted the fear of God in me then it was our manager. Sometimes I still shake with fear when I think of him," he said.
Asked about the song Karma Killer, in which Williams laments the fact that Martin Smith is not yet dead, he told the interviewer: "That bastard ruined me emotionally. He knows there are young people that will do anything to become famous . . . it was very easy to manipulate me when I was 16." Even Williams, an addictive personality prone to extremes, can't be that angry about not being allowed by his management to do drugs, have girl friends or drink full strength (the non-diet variety) Cola for the few teenage years it took to push the band to the top. It's as though the full Robbie Williams story, the bits before the beautiful girlfriends, (All Saints' Nicole Appleton, Andrea Corr, actress Anna Friel, to name a few) the bitter rows and the bingeing, has not yet been told and so is not yet fully resolved.
Until it is, he may well continue to be all things to all pop fans, but it will be difficult to sing about having no regrets.
Fortunately for the crowds at Slane, his fraught passage from boy-band bimbo to pop phenomenon only seems to have made him more eager to entertain.