Robbie Williams comes clean on cocaine, alcohol and steroids in Netflix doco
For a man who says he’s not that interested in sex anymore, Robbie Williams sure as hell likes to take his pants off.
For a man who says he’s not that interested in sex anymore, Robbie Williams sure as hell likes to take his pants off.
The 49-year-old British entertainer spends almost all of the four hours “narrating” his Netflix special dressed only in his jocks and a singlet.
As he sits cross-legged or reclining in his big double bed we can perhaps be grateful that the underwear of the superstar is all black. Still it’s a surprise to see such semi-nakedness given that just a few weeks back, he more or less confessed that despite being mad about his wife, these days he’d just as soon eat a tangerine as get it off with her. Something about marriage and four kids and his sudden weight loss.
Then again, as is revealed in this four-part documentary produced by Ridley Scott Associates and directed by Joe Pearlman, Robbie has been getting his jollies via fame and zillions of fans across more than three decades.
Indeed we learn very early that if he’s not on stage performing, he’s to be found in bed (er, not performing?).
Perhaps he figures, if I’m being authentic why would I get out of me smalls just for the camera?
Perhaps the minimalist dress code is just a boy from Stoke-on-Trent, who struggled with his weight but is now skinny, showing off not just that new shape but a heap of tatts.
Perhaps it’s just a visual encouraging us to believe we are watching the star stripped bare, opening up about his depression, his ambition, his capacity for revenge.
Robbie Williams tells a tough story that is all too familiar - early, unmanageable fame; impostor syndrome; depression; cocaine and alcohol running in parallel with huge record sales; massive hits (the singer/songwriter has won a staggering 18 Brit Awards); mega audiences; and a following in the early 2000s that put him at the very centre of Lad pop culture.
We know that it all turned out okay for Robbie in the end – after all we saw him rock the stadium at the AFL Grand Final in September, and many will see him up close and personal at the top of his game during a national tour which begins on November 16. Knowing that he got through makes the relentless chronicle of self-destruction a little easier to watch, but it’s still horrifying to see private videos of his darkest moment.
There is one scene during his 2006 world tour when a doctor stands poised backstage to give Williams an injection of steroids while his devoted personal assistant pleads with him not to do it. She knows what will follow. And it does. It’s hard to believe the singer was happy for all this stuff to be recorded but it’s paid off. Without his archive of 30,000 hours, we would not have the documentary, which is cleverly built around Robbie reviewing these backstage and holiday tapes and providing a running commentary from a position of good mental health, a happy family life and an ongoing solid career.
Unlike the more complex and interesting Beckham (Netflix) to which it has been compared, Robbie Williams does not feature a stack of other people involved in his life, nor do we see much of life beyond his bedroom, other than occasional external shots of his Los Angeles house and garden. His wife, the one whom he appears rarely to mistake for a tangerine these days, plays a significant role in the final episode. American actor, Ayda Field, she saved him from his addictions and she seems terrific.
The doco, like Beckham and Harry & Meghan (also on Netflix), purports to be a warts and all look at the career of the impossibly famous. All three, of course, are curated by protagonists who understand that their lives laid bare are part of a new and lucrative “truth telling” genre, but also savvy enough to know that when it comes to people like them, real life is what they say it is.
Then again, who can blame them for wanting to have their cake and eat it too; in various monstrous ways they have all been trashed by the British tabloids, their privacy invaded, their bodies and relationships fed to an insatiable public. In Williams’s case, his success (19.8 million album sales and 6.8 million singles in the UK; 75 million records sold worldwide) still left the critics sniffy, his voice found wanting, his audiences dismissed as “naff Britain”.
He has proven them wrong despite those stints in rehab and time out from his career in the 2000s.
We begin with the 16-year-old Robbie (there’s virtually nothing about his childhood or parents here) joining the boy band, Take That. He takes to all that like a fish to water but it’s not long before this mix of adulation, fun, money and luxury begins to swallow him up. As we follow him through his solo career; the enduring success of the alternative anthem, Angels; the highs and lows of addiction; his 2006 world tour; his reunion with Take That and on and on, it’s impossible not to think of that other prominent addict, Matthew Perry, whose death last month generated such global sadness.
Chandler was dead and in the absence of a Netflix bio, all his fans could do was turn to streaming services and social media to watch endless episodes and clips of Friends, and once again fantasise THAT was the real life of Perry. The actor didn’t get his own Netflix show but left a tell-all memoir of a man who it seems had not quite got through.
There are many more celebrity docos to come with big names falling over themselves to wring even more attention and profit from their brands. It’s all curiously narcissistic but in a world where the line between reality and fiction seem increasingly blurred, why not? Fame, surely, is the ultimate construct and right now we’re at peak construct when it comes to this stuff.
Robbie Williams is streaming on Netflix.
