Robbie Williams rocks Sydney for Aunty’s New Year’s Eve show

Robbie Williams set fire to Sydney Harbour for a good 40 minutes before the bridge exploded at midnight.

“Allow me to reintroduce myself. This is my band, this is my arse and you better be good. Because I am phenomenal,” Williams said by way of introduction, part way through his opener Let Me Entertain You.

Rarely has there been a more perfect match of man and song.

He’s still got it: Robbie Williams on New Year’s Eve in Sydney.Credit: ABC

If you’ve never seen Williams in person, it is hard to encapsulate the flamboyant front he brings to live performance. He is part vaudeville, part Vegas, part stadium rocker, a boy-band tart, a crooner and sometimes just a very naughty boy, as he was keen to remind us throughout his eight-song set.

And though this was nominally a New Year’s Eve gig, Williams brought more than a wink and a nod to acknowledging the real (only) reason he was on this harbour stage 10 minutes before midnight.

“l’m here to promote my movie,” he said cheekily.

Robbie Williams set fire to Sydney Harbour for a good 40 minutes before the bridge exploded at midnight.Credit: ABC

“A narcissist’s dream,” he said of having his life turned into a film. He might also have mentioned the narcissist’s dream of the ABC handing over 35 minutes of its telecast to promoting that movie, but instead he just asked everyone to do him a favour by seeing it.

“Go and watch my movie, it’s full of drugs and sex,” he ad-libbed during Better Man, and it was hard to begrudge a man having this much fun with his performance, his crowd, and with the ABC people who hired him to pretend he was here because it was New Year’s Eve.

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As he wrapped his set with a cover of You’re The Voice, and then his lights-in-the-air anthem Angels, there was no doubt he’d enjoyed every minute, and the crowd loved him right back.

It was that kind of night, full of goodwill and nary a dud act to be found across the three hours of the post-9pm show.

The producers crammed in 27 songs and nine performers before Williams took to the stage. Hosts Charlie Pickering, Zan Rowe and Concetta Caristo are by now skilled at tap-dancing their way through the links between acts, and it mostly runs smoothly and without obvious glitches.

Wisely, the hosts mostly get out of the way and let the music do the work.

Oz music royalty in the form of Bernard Fanning (Powderfinger) and Paul Dempsey (Something For Kate) opened the 9pm show with a six-song set. The duo, performing under the name Fanning Dempsey National Park, set the tone for the night’s theme: revisiting songs that have starred in the Hottest 100 on Triple J, the network celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2025.

Between them, those two music icons have appeared on that hallowed list no less than 38 times. Newer faces were deployed to bring some of that history to the stage.

Bernard Fanning (Powderfinger) and Paul Dempsey (Something For Kate) opened the 9pm show with a six-song set. Credit: ABC

Korean-Australian rappers 1300 gave us 2001’s Where’s Your Head At? by Basement Jaxx; Becca Hatch opened her stunning three-song set with the Fugee’s 1996 hit Killing Me Softly, made famous by Roberta Flack; Nooky performed the Hilltop Hoods’ Nosebleed Section from 2003 and Silverchair’s Tomorrow from 1994; and G Flip showed why they are a superstar, joyously preceding Williams on stage with a four-song set including their original The Worst Person Alive (No. 2 on the Hottest 100 in 2024) and their knockout cover of Taylor Swift’s Cruel Summer.

And, as has become tradition, Casey Donovan all but walked off with the show once more, confirming that she is Australia’s Kelly Clarkson — in the sense that when she covers a song there is every chance she will out-do the original.

This time, she gave a great shake to Teddy Swims’ Lose Control, before leaping into the terrifying vocal territory of Defying Gravity from Wicked — a landmine for singers, handled with stunning power and touch.

Later, she returned for a deft romp through Journey’s 1981 Don’t Stop Believin′ and Benson Boone’s 2024 smash Beautiful Things, before turning her attention to the most treacherous cover-version waters of all.

You might have thought the world did not need another take on Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. You would be wrong. Donovan dedicated it to Melbourne musician James Simpson, who died just before Christmas. The pain of it was clear in Donovan’s every word.

It was, in all, a stunning night.

“Glastonbury with harbour views and working plumbing,” quipped Charlie Pickering at one point, but it was a lot more than that.

With Robbie Williams strapped in for the big bang, and local talent delivering in spades, it was a New Year’s Eve broadcast for the ages.

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