Robbie Williams is in the best shape of his life at the age of 52. Yet the pop star is still always on alert to cast himself in the best light possible.
Wearing a bespoke “Neighbours Ramsay St” T-shirt for his interview with Stellar to launch his Australian stadium tour this November, he springs up from his relaxed recline on a sofa in a London hotel suite to ask if the chat is being recorded as just audio, or for TV, too.
“Shit, then I’d better stick my chin out and not have a double chin,” he says.
Williams is certainly not alone in wanting to show off his best side, and he’s shocked to learn that some of the world’s biggest performers no longer allow photographers in the pit at the front of the stage specifically to avoid “double chin” shots.
“I didn’t know you could do that. But yeah, I f***ing get it.
“It’s just highly unflattering, that angle,” he says of this new information, before adding: “There’s a face lift coming very soon. I won’t get filler or have my lips done – I’ll just look like me, but a better version of me.
“You should see how much those face lifts cost these days as well,” he continues.
Listen to a new episode of the Stellar podcast Something To Talk About featuring Melanie C:
“Do you know? Well, I’ll tell you because you’ll be appalled at the thought of a face lift, but you’ll be even more appalled at the cost: US $400,000. It’s shocking, isn’t it?”
Three decades since launching his solo career and 36 years after being cast in British boy band Take That, Williams remains that rare being: an unfiltered pop star, who can still shock even himself.
The singer’s 13th solo record, Britpop, was set to be released last October, but he candidly announced that he was delaying its launch after discovering it was due to drop the same day as Taylor Swift’s latest opus, The Life Of A Showgirl.
The decision was fuelled by his ambition to break one of the UK’s longest-standing chart records. Sure enough, when it landed on January 16, the album did the business – and he surpassed The Beatles to become the artist with the most number-one albums in UK chart history.
“That’s the thing about this career – you never really get to have a punch-the-air moment.
“All you get to do is exhale [with relief] that the bad thing didn’t happen,” he says of why the milestone was so significant.
“But with that one thing that week, I was like: OK, I’m going to take moments out of the day and experience what it feels like to have 16 number-one albums, just literal moments of sitting there going [nods with satisfaction].
“But the punch-the-air moment is the whole career, really … It’s how it feels to be able to come and perform in front of that many people still, at the ripe old age of 52.
“For people to still choose you.”
The Britpop cover art features a portrait of Williams sporting one of his most recognised outfits: the red tracksuit he wore to the Glastonbury music festival in 1995, when his hair was dyed platinum blond and he was photographed with Liam Gallagher looking a little worse for wear.
Back then, he was busy killing off the boy-band brand for bad-boy pop star, and was regular fodder for some sections of the British media that were hellbent on tearing him down.
But in more recent years, thanks to the raw exposition of his mental health battles in the 2023 Netflix documentary series Robbie Williams, the CGI monkey-led musical biopic Better Man in 2024 and frank posts about his life on Instagram, Williams says, “There are a lot of people who have got bored of hating me.”
Despite the toll on his mental health, Williams cares less about the haters now.
“There’s this saying that you can’t be a prophet in your own town,” he says.
“I’m not narcissistic enough to see myself as a prophet, but what that means is that you’re probably going to be hated where you come from.
“I would think that there are more people that hate me where I come from than like or love me.
“That being said, in countries like Australia, it feels like I get a giant hug.”
The calm in the chaos of his pop star life, Williams says, is his family: his wife of 16 years, US actor Ayda Field, and the couple’s four children, daughters Theodora (Teddy), 13, and Colette (Coco), 7, and sons Charlton (Charlie), 11, and Beau, 6.
As Williams recently discovered, his DNA runs strong in his children’s veins.
After the singer received an invitation from Sharon Osbourne to perform a musical tribute to her late husband, Black Sabbath rocker Ozzy Osbourne, at the recent Brit Awards, his daughter Coco’s reaction was “scary”.
Listen to a new episode of the Stellar podcast Something To Talk About featuring Melanie C:
“I came off a Zoom, and Coco came to me and said ‘What was that about, Daddy?’” he recalls.
“I said, ‘Well, a man that was really successful at singing, who’s an absolute legend, he went to heaven, darling.
“And his wife has asked me to sing a song at an award ceremony honouring him.
“Literally, she said, coldly, but with perfect comic timing: ‘Was no-one else available?’
“It was so cold it was actually kind of scary. Like, you’re seven, what do you understand of what you’ve just said to me? Because you’re not supposed to say that stuff and know what it means until you’re way into your late teens.”
With his next tour kicking off in Germany in June, Williams says he’s looking forward to rekindling his love affair with Australian audiences when he arrives on these shores in November, with one of his biggest stadium tours yet.
“It feels like coming home,” he adds of performing for his Aussie fans, adding that they always deliver the energy he needs to channel in order to put on a great show.
“Australia has never let me down.”
The Britpop tour starts in Adelaide on November 7, then tours nationally. Tickets go on sale on Thursday; visit frontiertouring.com/robbiewilliams
Read the full interview with Robbie Williams in today’s Stellar inside the Sunday papers. For more from Stellar, click here.