There may have been no reference to his ill-fated ‘Rudebox’, but we do get a live cover of Blur’s ‘Parklife’ with Danny Dyer
You don’t come to a Robbie Williams gig for understatement. The singer kicks off his Hyde Park gig with a video sequence, in which he sits reading a newspaper bearing a headline that asks: “Is Robbie Williams the greatest living entertainer?” He then strides around the backstage area, carrying a tiny cardboard cut out of Noel Gallagher and flanked (for reasons that will later become slightly clearer) by Danny Dyer as his de facto bodyguard, before emerging onto the stage like a jack in the box to the opening chords of “Let Me Entertain You”.
It’s equal parts bonkers, self-aggrandising and charming, much like Williams himself. The 50-year-old is dressed all in white (plus a massive chain necklace embellished with the words “f**k off” – remember what I said about understatement?) and taking us back through his 30-plus years in the music industry. “Thank f**k we won,” he says of the same night’s match between England and Switzerland, which a significant proportion of the crowd had been watching on phones beforehand. Most of his best songs have something of the terrace chant about them, with their big choruses and easy rhymes: in “Strong”, the lyrics are projected onto the screen, not that anyone here needs them.
Since he left Take That in 1995 – or, as he tells the story tonight, since Jason Orange politely told him he’d been kicked out after he went on a massive Glastonbury bender – Robbie’s music has worked its way into the fabric of our everyday lives. He’s had almost as many eras as Taylor Swift. The post boyband rebellion. The early Noughties imperial phase, which culminated in him being suspended in mid-air in front of hundreds of thousands of people at his Knebworth mega-gig. The easy-listening Big Band album. The ill-fated experiments in electro-rap. His current status as a national treasure slash wild card.
Almost all of these periods get a nod here (although the closest he gets to acknowledging “Rudebox” is when he later dons a sparkly tracksuit top). His back catalogue mixes laddy, “let’s ‘ave it” bravado with bracing vulnerability, and it’s a blend that makes him easy to root for. Yes, he might prance around the stage – part court jester, part posturing king – during the bombast of “Supreme” and the Bond theme shimmer of “Millennium”. But the more self-reflective, even self-loathing Williams is never far off in songs like the still lacerating “Come Undone”, his reckoning with addiction and fame.
Twenty years or so on from writing that song, Williams is, he reminds us, in a much better place: he’s sober, married and a dad to four young children, who are watching him from one of the VIP platforms (he dedicates “Love My Life”, a big silly grin of a song, to them). He’s “the happiest [he’s] ever been” – and that means he can look back at some of those trickier past moments and have fun with them.
That lost weekend at Glastonbury, for example, becomes an excuse for a whistle-stop tour through the Nineties. After a soaring cover of “Don’t Look Back in Anger” that puts both Gallagher brothers to shame, he brings out Supergrass singer Gaz Coombes to whizz through “Alright”. Then, like a fever dream come to life, Danny Dyer marches onto the stage with the Coldstream Guards infantry, to duet on Blur’s “Parklife” (Dyer, naturally, is tasked with tackling the Phil Daniels spoken-word bits). In between songs, Williams tells meandering stories like a bloke you might meet in the smoking area, and singles out audience members to engage in loose cannon banter.
After the swaggering double whammy of “Kids” and “Rock DJ”, Williams shifts into ballad mode for the encore, with “No Regrets” and “She’s the One”. They feel like a warm-up for the inevitable, though. “Angels”, now practically a secular hymn, prompts phones to light up, arms to go around shoulders and mascara to become blotchy. Is Robbie Williams the greatest living entertainer? At this point surely we can admit that he has to be up there.