Robbie Williams reveals he secretly retired as he brings LetMe Entertain You tour to Australia

SEX, drugs, rehab and fatherhood. Pop superstar Robbie Williams has been there and done it all. But what’s this brand new career he’s about to embark on?

EMBARGOED FOR SUNDAYS MAY 17: DO NOT USE! Robbie Williams announces Let Me Entertain You tour, PICTURE: Supplied/Chugg Entertainment

PREPARE yourself Australia — Robbie Williams is getting his hits out.

His Let Me Entertain You tour is the crowd-pleasing, wall-to-wall greatest hits set many of his contemporaries oddly shy away from.

“I go onto setlist.com and I look at how everybody else does it,” Williams admits. “All the greats that have gone before me and the ones that are still around. I try and understand how to do the perfect set. It’s still evolving, it always will be.”

Last year Williams took his Swings Both Ways jaunt around the world to reintroduce himself to audiences after a long break from the stage, via his swing guise. He played some of his hits and a lot of other people’s hits. This new tour is Pure Robbie.

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“I go to gigs, I know what I want as a punter,” Williams says. “I’ve sat at internationally famous people’s shows and they’ve done five songs in a row I don’t know and I’m bored and I want to go home.

“These big festivals, like Glastonbury, what people really want to hear, as much as they think they’re serious music heads, are hits they’ve heard on the radio. That’s what I want when I go to a show so that’s what I want to give people. I wish it was different, I’d love to play b-sides and things off (his fan club album) Under the Radar, but I’m in charge of tens of thousands of people’s enjoyment and energy.

“Unfortunately I can’t afford to be indulgent like that. It’s scary being up there in front of thousands of people and conducting their energy anyway. It’s scary when you’ve got all your best weapons in place. It’s f---ing terrifying when you throw something at them and the room goes cold. I play the hits because it’s good for my health.”

Williams’ health took a battering during an unexpected frozen moment in Perth last year that reminded him that global hits are harder to secure these days.

His 2012 single Candy was not only a UK No. 1, but sold over 650,000 copies to become his second-biggest single in Britain behind his seven-figure-selling classic Angels.

“So I’m on stage in Perth, in my head I know I’ve got Candy coming next, it’s a sure fire winner,” Williams, 41, recalls. “My second biggest hit ever. And it fell like a sh — flan against the wall and plopped on the floor. No one knew it. It was confusing and destabilising.”

A lack of local radio support saw Candy stall at No. 59 in Australia, where, let’s remember, the same situation saw Angels only make No. 40 back in 1998.

“That night I went back to the hotel and Wiki’d it and went ‘Oh sh--, Candy made No. 59 in Australia, well f--- you!’ So yes, this tour is my greatest hits that have been hits somewhere in the world, just maybe not in Australia.”

Robbie Williams is back in love with touring. After the Close Encountersstadium tour, which ended in Australia in December 2006, he’d privately retired.

“My natural disposition is to be totally spun out by any success that I have,” Williams says. “So multiply that by selling three million tickets for your tour in one day. For those that are not that level headed, which I am one of, it can just blow your mind. I can’t get my head around all these people en mass coming to see me and me being the conduit for their happiness for two hours of an evening. That put major stress and pressure on me. Especially when I think I’m so sh — anyway.”

Yes, Robbie Williams could represent Great Britain in self-loathing.

“Oh my natural resting belief is ‘I’m sh--’ and everything else is sort of an act,” he admits. “So I exploded. It was ‘I’ve sold three million tickets in a day but I’m sh--. I’m going to go to rehab and get fat. And I did both those things. Then I thought that this was making me ill so I’m going to retire. So then I retired, but I didn’t tell anyone because I knew it wasn’t a real retirement.”

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Williams had a plan B — his well-documented love of UFOs.

“They say follow your passion and you’ll never do a day of work in your life,” he says. “My passion was UFOs. So I did some paranormal research. That didn’t come to fruition.”

He didn’t find any UFOs but did meet met US actor Ayda Field, the woman who’d end his exhaustive, global, lifelong search for the right partner. Everything changed, especially him.

“I met my wife. Then we had children. And now everything is through the perspective of clearer glasses. There’s nothing to put you on the straight and narrow more than responsibility. What it is, instead of me looking outwardly at these crowds for love and affirmation and to see how great I am, it did the opposite, it made me feel like sh — for some reason. Now I’m like a dad who goes to work. This is my job. It’s an unbelievable job I get to do. Because of my wife and the kids, I have a sort of safety place to go to that’s very real and keeps me anchored. Because of that I do my job, I go to work and I love my job now.”

On the Swings Both Ways album Williams wrote the song Go Gentle for daughter Theodora ‘Teddy’ Rose; a sweet pledge to always look out for her.

During the European leg of the Let Me Entertain You tour he’s been premiering a brand new song for son Charlton ‘Charlie’ Valentine. It is called, er, Mother F---er.

The lyrics include “One day you’re going to be told how daddy let his demons out” and a chorus that runs “Your cousin is a cutter, your granddad’s in the gutter, your mother is a nutter, one of the things you get from me and your mother is you’re a bad mother f---er.”

“Teddy’s my little girl, she needs that looking after energy,” Williams explains. “Charlie’s my little boy and he needs that ‘Oh you’ve fallen down? Well get up’ energy. That manly, go out there and take all before you energy. He’s got a song I would have loved to have written about me when I was 13. I’m a bad mother f----er. I would have loved that as a teenager.”

Williams and Field now have a son and daughter, but will there be more kids?

“I don’t have the power of no or yes in my life,” he says. “I will be told what’s happening at a later date. It’s like I do have the remote control in my hand, but I don’t choose what’s on. That is a metaphor for my life with Ayda. I have the remote control, but she chooses what we watch.”

Williams once hoped that having children would make him, as a self-confessed narcissist with a dangerous habit of self-Googling, less self-absorbed.

“Less self absorbed? The correct answer would be yes. When I’m with them I’m just their father and nothing else. But I’m f---ing Robbie Williams. The simple answer is yes. But not much.”

Bored with waiting for record company schedules, Williams released Under the Radar Volume 1 last Christmas through his website, filled with new songs gathering digital dust on his computer.

“It did fifty times better than I thought it would, an overwhelming success,” Williams says. “It’s another way to do my job. There’ll be another one at Christmas.”

He’s back working with old writing partner Guy Chambers and his Australian mates Flynn Francis and Tim Metcalfe.

“There’s f---ing tonnes of songs, enough to fill three albums, easily,” he says. “But I’m still trying to find that massive global hit that’s a hit for being a hit’s sake.”

Williams reveals he’s got a five year plan which includes a lot of hay-making and sun shining. “I’ve been a very busy daddy,” he says.

“I’ve been being daddy, but daddy on tour, daddy in the studio. I’ve set my stall out for the next five years. I’ve got a plan. Then after those five years I kinda want to go and live in the sun and take it a bit easier. For the time being I’m still relatively young, I’ve still got energy, I’ve still got the ways and means to go out there and live out my ambitions so I’m going to.”

Williams’ actor friend Ryan Molloy, who had played Frankie Valli in Jersey Boys in the West End for six years, provided the pop star with an epiphany.

“I said to him ‘How on earth do you play the same character for that long? It must drive you mad’. Then I got home and thought ‘Well, actually, I’ve been Robbie Williams for 25 years’. I need to go off and do other things. You can’t just keep churning out a greatest hits show or it’d drive you mad.

“I’m very lucky,” Williams continues. “I kind of have a few careers. I’ve got my pop career, my swing career, the Take That stuff and very soon I want to add something else to my repertoire that will be coming up.”

This is the only the second time in this chat the serially-loose Williams clams up.

Legally, he can’t discuss the sexual harassment case a former personal assistant made against he and his wife earlier this year.

``I’d love to say something, and normally I would, but it would absolutely prejudice the case we’ve got going on,” he says.

Then there’s this looming ‘new’ career, which he’s bursting to talk about but stops himself.

“Not talking about something is not naturally what I do. I normally say way too much about far too many things. There is something coming, it’s too early to say anything, but there’s another career about to happen. It’s very exciting.”

There is a chance he’ll reunite with Take That, to celebrate their 25th anniversary next year. Williams rejoined the boy band for the Progress album and tour in 2011 and just saw them perform in the UK now down to just a three piece. “Progress the album is my best work, I think,” Williams says. “It happened to be with the boys. There’s something about the energy with the boys that created that album. I’m really proud of it and us. And yes I want to go and do something with the boys again. It’s fun.”

He won’t confirm his ‘new career’ is acting when pushed, but says it’s something he’s interested in.

“I’m thinking about acting, but under my terms and my speed. I’ve been offered an awful lot of very nice film and TV roles, it’s very very flattering. I’ve always turned everything down because it’s a really f---ing boring job.

“I’ve been on a few film sets, I played the wedding singer in a (2004) film called De-Lovely. And I sat there that day and looked at the set and how long everything takes and thought `F--- that’. I need instant gratification. I know I write these songs and it takes 18 months for them to come out but at least I can get on stage and go `Hey’ and they go ‘Ho’.

“In a film you go ‘Hey’ and they don’t say `Ho’ back to you until 18 months later. So if I’m gonna do it, I have to write the theme tune, write the thing, come up with the jokes, I want to do everything. I don’t want to be at the behest of some director. I don’t want to be actor fodder.”

Williams and Field became unlikely YouTube sensations last year when they posted a series of hilarious videos from her hospital bed while in labour with their son.

One showed Williams singing Candy to Field, trying to get her to join in the chorus while she’s holding her stomach in pain, in another he’s singing Let It Go from Frozen while she’s in labour, a song no parent ever needs to hear again, especially under those circumstances.

They had to post a video saying the videos were done with Field’s consent and that “no mummies were upset or harmed in the making of these videos.” Williams was shocked at the backlash from some who didn’t get the joke.

“I credit people a bit too much actually. Maybe that makes me a bit stupid. We’re obviously doing a sketch, it’s comedy. The wife’s totally in on it. She’s coming up with the ideas: `Hey, what if you do this next?’

“There would be no reason for me to put me on YouTube, obviously looking like a c---. It’s obvious you wouldn’t behave like that, because that would make you a c---. That’s the joke.

“I will forever be polarising. It was another polarising moment but it did make me feel a bit embarrassed: `Oh, some clever people don’t get that I’m joking. Oh, maybe I am a c---?’.

“But these are decisions that I made and these are the decisions I will carry on making for the rest of my career because that’s how I’m built. It was supposed to be a bit of a laugh generated by me and my wife, who had a really good laugh doing it in the hospital. There was something like 45 million Facebook things about it in the space of 24 hours. We did think `Oh-oh, what have we done?’”

Williams hints it may have served as an accidental audition, with whispers of a reality TV show for the pair.

“Watch this space, we might be turning that into something, a complete career-shattering event. If anybody’s going to kill my career it’s going to be me!”

Robbie Williams, Perth Arena October 9,10. Adelaide Entertainment Centre October 13,14, Brisbane Entertainment Centre October 17, Rod Laver Arena October 22,23,24 (new show), Allphones Arena Sydney October 27,28. On sale now, Ticketek (Melbourne October 24 show on sale 9am tomorrow)

Originally published as Robbie Williams reveals he secretly retired as he brings LetMe Entertain You tour to Australia