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Two weeks ago Robbie Williams had sex with two women he’d never met before. No big deal, he explains, it happens every weekend in Stoke-on Trent or Worksop. They were ordinary civilians he’d met in Los Angeles bars on two separate nights, consenting adults, and they both ended up at his place. He’s 29 and single; and there’s no law against it…
“I’m careful,” he says Coitus interruptus. Works every time…” He smiles that heavily dimpled smile.” I used to be a little terror where sex is concerned, ya know? That’s subsided over the last couple of years because along with soul-less sex comes self-hatred. In LA I’m in Babe Heaven and I think, I could have a lot of sex here. But there’s no wife, which is what I want. And with an awful lot of girls they think they’ll be moving in after a couple of weeks. I mean, look around. It’s a good steal, isn’t it?”
I’m sitting in a chair in the back garden of Williams’ Beverly Hills home. A 360-degree swivel confirms that, yes, a new girlfriend might make herself at home here. Especially if she likes dogs. And wolves. Poolside at his beige, turreted house, Williams’ collection of hounds wander about, idly looking for a nuzzle. His pet wolf Sid should be home soon. He’s at the vet having his testicles removed because he keeps getting into trouble with bitches and around here it’s “sue city”.
So, yes the lifestyle screams eligibility. And he’s good looking too: a tanned, toned stomach advertised by box fresh Calvin Klein pants, the puppy face made somehow more serious by punky hair. He maintains that he won’t have casual sex again. He wants a wife and family, and lapsing into old, dark appetites is not the way to go about it. For over two years now he has been drink and drug free. Bad sex is just another dimension of the addiction edifice.
“People are going to think I’m crazy for saying this but … if I suddenly think, Mmmm, five grammes of coke seems like a really good idea right now, I know it’s a full moon. I’m serious. That drug does not suit me, man. Nor drink or soulless sex.”
This private estate off Mulholland Drive is base camp for Williams’ assault on the American charts, his refuge from the scourge of European tabloid press and paparazzi. Inside the house some English friends are tracing tattoo designs in Williams’ office. They say they are the “Exmouth posse”, who do his security. Williams says they’re mates of mates he’s flown over to tattoo two swallows onto his stomach. Later they decide to set up the 12-foot wide home cinema screen. Today’s matinee: A Fistful Of Dollars. Only the formal staff – a cook hunched purposefully over lean cuts of meat in the kitchen and another man on a ladder probing a wall – don’t smile or turn their heads when I walk through the house.
Half an hour from the bars of west Hollywood, this could be Tuscany: wooded hills, pretty groves. Only the Armed Response signs and video surveillance cameras tell you this rural idyll is in America. It’s his third Los Angeles home since moving out here early in 2002. He started out in the Sunset Marquis Hotel, then rented Dan Aykroyd’s old home in west Hollywood, but still the paparazzi followed him. Finally he bout a place in Mulholland Estate, a gated community. Credentials required at the security checkpoint, status. The next door but one house is Brian Wilson’s home. He ex-Beach Boy put a note through Williams’ door recently asking him if he’d like to record something together (“Lump in the throat time,” says Williams. “But then he’s on so much medication he probably doesn’t know who I am.”)
Tom Jones is a few doors down. “The covers are on the cars so he must be away.”
Multi-tasking basketball star Shaquille O’Neal has a place on the estate too.
Even Williams has taken time to adjust to this stellar glare. Yesterday he sat next to Joni Mitchell and Warren Beatty at the deli up the road. This morning his manager took a call from De Niro’s people requesting that Williams sing at a function.
“I’m star-struck, I am. I think that makes me normal. As soon as I have kids I’m going to get them out of here. Beverly Hills kids are all fucked up. They’re 10 years old and they’ve seen it all. And you never see kids playing out on bikes – they don’t learn to socialise. I want two kids. The first one’s going to be called Sunny whether it’s a boy or a girl and then I’ll get them to England, get a country pile like Jay Kay, ya know?”
The Stoke accent is still there. The only concession to California is that “ya know?” It’s at the end of every sentence as a rising cadence reaching out to you, wanting to be your friend.
Last week, Williams had a mate round to watch a video. It was an ordinary night. He pauses and smiles and starts again. OK, last week he had the actress Daryl Hannah round to watch a film projected onto his cinema screen in his living room. Hannah was in the video for Williams’ single Feel and they’re good friends.
“I’d love a girlfriend. Daryl knows my mate Daniel and she came to hang out with us. We watched The Tonight Show and we just giggled all night and took the piss. I think she’s got a boyfriend but I was thinking. This is what it’s like having a girlfriend who’s a mate. It is possible. I like this. I want this. I’m not saying we’re going to go out cos we’re not. She’s fucking cool man, the eternal teenager…..
I’d love a girlfriend because I’m ready. I don’t think I was up for it before. You just wouldn’t have gone out with me. I chose women I could leave. But I’m close now to my ideal of what a man should be in a relationship, ie honest. Obviously the passion and love side would be immense and great but the most important thing is honesty. You can fucking lie forever and I don’t want that. But I can wait. I believe in Karma. It’ll happen.
Today, as on most days, Williams got up early and took his collection of dogs for a walk in Runyon Canyon. The hounds would seem the main beneficiaries of his good fortune: this week he has ordered a new car because they find the Cadillac Escalade too hot. And when he takes a stroll in the garden he points to a piece of land he’s bought down the hill. Architects have been summoned, plans drawn up. Williams is going to build another house there.
“For the dogs,” he says, “They need a bigger garden. I just want them to have a really good life … the best.”
On a normal day, after the walk, Williams comes home and the cook has breakfast waiting for him. Then he takes the lift upstairs to his gym where he runs for an hour. Williams takes a shower while staff cater to his whims. Mike places a virgin pack of cigarettes and a new lighter at the head of the poolside dining table where Williams will sit. His assistant, Josie immortalised in the documentary Nobody Someday as the buffer between Williams and ordinary life choices (there she is booking the dentist, choosing him a sofa) emerges.
“Would you like your food now?” she asks today.
“Yes, I’d like my food,” says Williams raising an open palm, like the head of a crime family. But he’s not entirely oblivious to this degree of pampering. He knows this cosseted world is unreal. “I don’t know if it’s laziness but whether it’s songwriting or getting my toothbrush … if I can get someone else to do it I will. Always have…”
At least he does the workout himself. While on the treadmill this morning he watched a video biography of Sammy Davis Jr. on the gym’s screen. “He used to like having people around him. He used to drink and smoke himself to sleep. And he kept a bowl of cocaine on the bar I could put myself in that picture but then I remember I can fucking break out of handcuffs on that stuff. It’s not for me.”
The fitness regime is in preparation for his European tour. He’s training out of fear. It all comes down to the responsibility of these huge shows. He doesn’t like to think of the numbers, the deals riding on him getting it right.
Really he’d prefer to stay in Los Angeles for the summer. This home is serene and tranquil. He can function normally here, in the deli, at the bar, because people don’t know who he is. “Anonymous in LA,” he smiles through cigarette smoke. “As you know, that wasn’t in the script.”
According to accepted tabloid lore, when Williams signed a new £80 million record deal last November it was inextricably linked to EMI’s gung-ho invasion plans. Upon it’s release his last album, Escapology, sold six million copies in the world outside the US. In preparation for the American release in April it was rumoured EMI had shipped four million copies of the album into US record shops in preparation for the expected capitulation.
At the time of writing it had slipped off the Billboard chart and sold 71,000 copies. The TV shows out here love him but the public isn’t interested. Williams is still frustrated that his American adventure is being widely lampooned back home.
“I read something the other day: Robbie Attacks Britain. All I said was that I’m a guy who’s come to the States to peddle my wares whether it happens or doesn’t – ya know? I couldn’t understand the malicious nature of people really wanting it not to work. They love it. Ooh, ITS NOT WORKING IN THE STATES! So I asked people to get behind me a bit more or just chill the fuck out.”
So the £80 million deal puts no pressure on you to deliver American success?
“My deal does not include in any way, shape or form America. Not at all. It’s a question of simple mathematics. I’ve sold 30 million albums now. And if the figure was 80 million then EMI have already made that. And anyway, who would you rather had the money? David Beckham or the managing director of Man United Plc? I’m just the guy … sorry.”
It was £80 million then?
“I dunno. I mean I do know. But I’m from a place where if a Ferrari came down the road people would throw cans at it or spit at it and they’d think. Who the fuck do you think you are? I wouldn’t be party to it but I’d be around it so I understand how that way of thinking works. For me to put a price on my head would be crazy.
For what it’s worth, his explanation seems utterly credible. He doesn’t need the money. And he certainly never intends to work as hard as he has – an album a year since 1997 – if he can help it.
“I plan on being kind to myself and I’m in the position to do it. Until my first divorce comes I’m not going to work as hard as I have ever again.” He says he’s very, very happy. And this is certainly progress from the Nobody Someday documentary, which showed him frightened, vulnerable and ready to give up. He hated his songs. As the title suggested, he looked forward to finding anonymity.
“I have totally changed my mind on that,” he says. “I just totally believed my own press. I hated who this tabloid Robbie Williams was. But that’s not me. I’m Robbie Williams from Tunstall, Stoke-On-Trent and I have the best job in the world. I’m in a really good place, ya know?”
“Do you wanna hear some new stuff?” asks Williams, sliding away his grilled chicken. We’ve talked for an hour or so and he fancies a break. From most other artists playing some new tunes might be a standard courtesy. For Williams this represents moving from a grunting crouch to standing upright in his media evolution. He and songwriting partner Guy Chambers have parted company (“He seemed to think I shouldn’t write with other people,” Williams says. “We’ll get back together, but it won’t be the same”) and he has started collaborating with other people: Robin Thicke, who has penned tracks for Christina Aguilera, and Dan Wilson from Semisonic (although Williams refers to the band as Subsonic). But, also he is writing on his own.
He is stung by snipes that he won’t survive without Chambers and shocked that people think he has so little to do with his own music.
“I saw on the Internet someone said that I’m the reason punk rock was invented,” he says clutching his chest. “That really went through me. I think people will be really surprised that I still sound like Robbie Williams without Guy Chambers.”
When Williams emerges from the house with a guitar he’s singing Songbird, Liam Gallagher’s love song to Nicole Appleton, Williams’ old flame. By curious symmetry Williams’ lyrics on Escapology’s Sexed Up are his bitter farewell to the same woman. “When I feel let down, then music is my way of expressing that,” he says. He agrees that Songbird is lovely – except for the line “She spreads her wings”.
“That’s just bad”, he says. “That’s a bad line.”
And so, by the pool, Williams gives me a little show. The voice is loose, dynamic but sometimes tainted with theatrical ooze and a quacking mid-Atlantic accent. He says he knows some people hate the affected American twang. His next album will feature more of his own songs and he’ll sing them in a Stoke accent.
He starts with Songbird but fumbles the chords a few seconds in and can’t remember how it goes. Still, he says songs are pouring out of him now. “Two chords and you’ve got a song,” he enthuses humming away. “It’s simple.”
Oddly for a man soon to play three nights at Knebworth, he seems a nervous performer. Later he admits that when he was addicted to cocaine he oozed confidence and once forced George Michael and Bono into a toilet at a party where he sang a medley from his Life Thru A Lens album.
But it’s harder being yourself. Finally, after stringing a few chords together from the work-in-progress, the tentative humming becomes words: “I may not be The Beatles or Wings / but I’ve done some bigger and better things.”
So many of his songs are self-referential dealing with the tabloid Robbie.
“I get a lot of stick for writing about myself. But that’s my life and my music and that’s how I like it. Sorry.”
And when he puts the guitar down he underlines the seriousness of the new songwriting venture like this: “I’ve put a guitar in every room in this house now so that when I go in there I think, Oh, a guitar, I’ll learn a new chord. Otherwise I’d just forget.”
The Whisky Bar is on Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood. It’s for tourists and narcissists: a little bit of self-consciously hip Los Angeles. Williams, though teetotal, still likes to trawl the bars occasionally, looking for chat, and until recently, sex. In spring 2002 he had someone drive him down to the whisky Bar where he got talking to some English people. They were giggly and twitchy.
“I said to them, Are you coming up on E? I already knew they were cos Ive done loads of it myself,” he says. Williams was tempted: he had forsaken drugs and alcohol for a year but was still feeling depressed. It was a turning point. “I had a choice. Throw away everything I had achieved over that year. Or go home.”
He went home. And for a few days afterwards he coped. Eventually, though he asked Josie to get him a doctor and he was prescribed the antidepressant Effexor, an alternative to the SSRI family, which includes Prozac. The side-effects can range from drowsiness to nausea. He has been on them ever since. Despite his progress in other areas of his life Williams says he needs them. They block out the scalding internal voices.
Why don’t you try coming off them?
“(Incredulous) Why?”
Well, you’ve done without cocaine and booze – maybe you don’t need antidepressants either. You say you’re happy now.
“But (a long pause and then an incredulous laugh) I think I’m happy because of the pills.”
What would make you unhappy?
“My depression isn’t about stuff. I don’t think anyone truly understands it. My dad sat where you are last week and said to me, Rob, next time you feel depressed take a look at this (he motions to the view over Los Angeles). It runs in the family. It’s like being stabbed in the leg and having a five-inch gouge in it and someone saying, That shouldn’t hurt cos you’ve got this pool and a great view. It’s not about the pressures of this or the pressures of that. I used to think it was. But when they went away, it was just about being physically and mentally ill.”
So what would you be like without the pills?
“If I didn’t take them, the Shitty Committee would be up an hour before me planning how they were going to fuck me up. What I was going to hate about myself that day. It would be, Good morning, you are shit! You are a wanker, you are a charlatan and they already know you are a charlatan. Oh, and you know why you haven’t got a girlfriend? Because you’re social inept. And that’s before I brush my teeth.”
Williams missed an Effexor pill last week and the withdrawal was horrible, “like coming off smack”. He won’t skip one again, but clearly the medication doesn’t solve all his problems. About a month ago Williams woke up in his house alone one Sunday morning. It was the first time he can remember waking up alone in his new home.
“I woke up and realised I was by myself. I couldn’t handle it. I must not be alone. I went to the movies to see The Matrix: Reloaded and that didn’t help. So I came home, took a sleeping pill and went to bed. I was alright after that.”
Williams tosses me these details airily: it isn’t clear if he knows how sad they sound. Even his fitness regime seems tied to these revelations.
“Those antidepressants have screwed up my metabolism,” he says. “It’s slowed right down. I run miles on the machine or walk miles and the weight just won’t come off.”
And so you are left with a series of contradictory impressions. The man on medication who’s happy with himself. The star who has sold nearly 30 million records trying to remember to learn the guitar. The celebrity in his gated compound who no one in the US recognises. The millionaire who gets anxious when his staff go home.
He suggests that he employs so many people to do things for him not out of laziness but dependency. The quest for intimacy is everywhere: the traffic of houseguests, the strangers in the bar. He talks with tenderness and love about his grandfather. And to keep him close, he’s had his name – Jack Farrell – tattooed across his wrists. “I know this might not be the healthiest way to live,” he says. “But fuck it, I’m at my peak. Probably about to dip. And right now I’d like people around me.”
The neediness is mingled with a touching kindness. “Hang out for a while,” he says. Do I want the cook to make me some food? I settle for a coffee. We chat some more, tour the garden and admire the view. Finally he asks if I’ve ever written any songs. I haven’t, so the chat lapses. As we part, he says he was nervous before I came. He wasn’t sure if he’d be able defend himself, but he thinks our talk has been Ok.
His final thoughts are these: “Whatever brand I am, I’m the only one who can do what I do. Nobody can take that away from me. After Take That I was supposed to be the Andrew Ridgeley, remember? I think I’ve proved I’m not.”
On the way to the front door there is a final gesture of goodwill, albeit a rather odd one. Out of nowhere he asks: “Do you want some sleeping pills … to help you on the flight?” and he’s off upstairs, chopping out a dosage which he gives me in a bottle marked Tylenol, an off-the-shelf American painkiller. (I look at the pills at the airport: they’re not Tylenol. I’m not sure what they are, and put them away.)
Out by the four-car garage, on a comedy doormat which reads Beware The Unstable Dog, I say goodbye. Williams bends to pet the circling hounds and reveals a tattoo all the ay across his lower back: a stave and some musical notes. Below it are the words, “All you need is love”.
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22/05/03 Abercrombie and Fitch Interview
THE ESCAPE ARTIST He harrasses the paparazzi instead of the other way around, he has an allergic reaction to drugs and he drops his pants at seemingly every opportunity. Hardly the behavior you'd expect from a bona fide pop superstar, but maybe that's why we love Robbie Williams so damn much. Arguably the biggest musician in the UK, this former boy-band bad boy is ready to take his third album, Escapology, to the American masses, Herein A&F's Savas Abadsidis takes some life lessons from the world's foremost licensed escapologist.
I heard you were so hilarious at the Ozbournes's New Years's Eve party that MTV executives offered you your own reality show
The truth is l have bouts of shyness, and that evening was a chronically shy evening. They had this espesso machine outside, however it was like liquid cocaine. So l had about 12 of them. I can't remember much of that evening, actually, which is funny because l havn't drunk for over two years. All l can remember is talking shit to loads of people.
Apparently they are prepared to offer you lots of money to do it
No, man. l can only be charismatic for about half an hour at a time. And then l save my charismatic half-an-hours for the tour. Most of my down time is spent being tremendously uncharismatic, you must understand.
When do you start the tour?
I've got a tour over the Summer on the other side of the world that sold about 80,000 tickets in , like, 7 hours. l am shitting myself about that. l get scared, l really do. l have this mechanism l turn round before l go onstage when l feel chronically shy. l just say, "One, two, three-rock'n'roll star!" and then l go on. But l get scared that one day that mechanism will fail.
Has it gotten worse as time goes on?
It's got fucking so bad. When l was growing up, l was like a fucking sad bastard - attention deficit disorder, seasonal adjustment depression, alcoholism, drug addiction and sex addiction- fancy having that! But the good thing is Americans gave words to these things- without Americans we wouldn't have a fucking clue what they are, and we still don't in England. There you just go, "I feel bad." But it's good man, because it sort of forces you to act eratically and be creative. My stage performances are powered by my fear, and l think that that's what makes them so brilliant
Do you ever take antidepressants?
Yeah. All of them. l wake up in the morning, and i've got a whole array of medication. We were doing a promotional tour and my manager was like, "What do you want to be today?" And l was like, "Handsome charismatic." The next day it was "Mysterious charming guy," and the next, "Comedian" l've got these pills that do all these things. l am like Elvis, without the massive colon.
What was it that made you stop drinking?
I was absolutely hopeless at it. Terrible. l have allergic reaction to it; l can't even put after shave on, because my skin comes up and l look like the elephant man. And when l drink, it comes right back up. l can't take cocaine, because l get this amazing twitch. The time has come, the turtle said, to not do declasse drugs.
But it didn't start out like that, right?
No, it was fucking brilliant, it was. l said unreservedly that my best experience was on ecstacy. My first ecstasy was in a gay club in Madrid-everyone was so nice. Ecstacy stopped hooliganism in England, which was amazing. But with the methamphetaminesms, you've got to watch your mates.
Do you eevr watch cops? The funniest are the ones with the white-trash meth addicts- the guy is guy is getting beat by ten cops and he just isn't feling it.
The thing about the cops program in America is everybody has got their fucking top off. So l am just going to keep my top on, and the cops will never bother me. l sometimes get worried when l am swimming.
What was the whole thing about you wearing masks while you were out in public.?
England is a very celebrity-obsessed society, and it has gotten worse over the past 15 years. l bought this beautiful house but unfortunately l didn't think far enough ahead-l walk out the door and it's public. There are always a least a couple of paparazzi waiting in cars. Anyway, l did this video where l did a bank robbery, and l had masks made of my face. So, to get back at the paprazzi, for two months l wore the same clothes with the same hat and the same jacket and the same mask eevry time l walked out of my house-they couldn't sell the picture again. So fuck you outside my house. it wasn't like any Michael Jackson thing, but it did make a few people think was going a bit weird.
You recorded most of the album naked?
Yeah, l recorded a lot of it naked. it sort of started out as a joke. We started to record one of the songs and my light in the vocal booth was off. So l took my trousers off and started singing the song and thought, "l fucking like this" They kept the light off for ages. Then after about five or six takes they turned the light on and everybody laghed. And then l just stayed naked. l think it made a few people a bit uneasy, but it was good and l liked it.
Have you any crazy, obsessed fans?
There are loads of stuff l've forgotten. Stuff l wouldn't like to mention just because they will be like, "He noticed me again, he still loves me, he talks about me!" Mainly Italians. l remember once two girls from Finland came to my house and knocked on the door-i didn't want anything to do with them. And at about 1 o' clock in the morning, l heard a car screech. I looked out the window and these two girls walked up the driveway, squatted, took down their pants and pissed in the driveway.
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