Robbie Williams didn’t need Britpop

The singer’s new album is a tribute to the “golden era of music” – in which he never really belonged

Photo by John Nacion/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures

After leaving Take That in the mid-1990s, Robbie Williams was sucked into the orbit of Britpop. He emerged from a culture free from irony – boybands – and started to flirt with a genre defined by it. His debut solo album, Life Thru a Lens, was released at the height of Cool Britannia, but at a time when the music itself was already on the turn. It always seemed as though he and his songwriter Guy Chambers were uniquely placed to stand outside the movement. “Millennium” – his first number one, with its James Bond strings – is a fitting text for sociology students; the only true fin de siècle pop song. While Prince foresaw one big party at the end of his song, “1999”, Williams wrote, “When we come, we always come too late/I often think that we were born to hate”.

He performed it on Top of the Pops in a crocheted dress. Looking back, it’s nice to think he was ahead of the game, toasting Jarvis Cocker, Damon Albarn and Liam Gallagher on their sinking ship from his own little lifeboat. But his new album, Britpop, is a tribute to this “golden era of music”, he says. Perhaps his songs embodied a painful sense of being left out of the club.

The artwork for Britpop is a vast portrait of Williams in a gallery, with bleached hair and a missing tooth in 1995, as pink paint is thrown at him by a group of Just Stop Oil-style activists – in this case, sporting T-shirts reading “just stop pop”. It is quite YBA. The album is burst after three-minute burst of songs that sound very Robbie Williams. But there isn’t much Britpop as most of us have come to think of it.

Ever since “Let Me Entertain You”, Williams, with his velvety flicker of a voice, has made music like a late-1970s glam rocker. While many Britpop bands drew on glam influences, Williams embraces a driving, punky bassline just as much as a plod. I listened to half of the opening throbber, “Rocket” – which features the guitar great Tony Iommi, now 77 – before making a cup of tea, and was already whistling it as the kettle boiled.

“Spies” – about late-1990s paranoia – has a Gallagher-style middle eight, while “All My Life” starts out as a Williams song before morphing into an Oasis one. In both, there is more happening melodically than in the music of Liam and Noel, even if it sometimes leads to curious swerves of style. The rather pompous autobiographical opening of “All My Life” led me to assume it was the track co-written with Gary Barlow; in fact, that song is “Morrissey” (“Come here, let me hold you for the rest of your life!”) – an apparently satirical number that could easily be taken literally by someone not paying close attention.

The main value of “Morrissey” is that it offers a kind of unedited access to the mind of Williams – a man once straitjacketed by the industry who is now settling into his own strangeness. “Human”, featuring the Mexican duo Jesse & Joy, is a dreamlike song about AI – or death – taking the themes of his mega-hit “Angels” into an eerier space: “I like what you’ve done with the place, God / Grandma? Great finishes. Wonderful lighting!” “It’s Okay Until the Drugs Stop Working” initially seems to flash back to the Verve, but sonically it evokes Phil Spector, with a soaring 1960s-style string section and the feel of the West Coast.

All this is to say that most of the songs on Britpop could have been written at any point in the last 50 years, and the title tells us more about Robbie Williams than it does about the music he has made here. What does it mean? Was he a victim of Britpop? Is that the point? In retrospect, he was a maverick solo rockstar in an era when solo rockstars had little place – when bands, and one dominant sound, ruled the waves.