FOR a man who sang: “I hope I’m old before I die/I hope I live to relive the days gone by”, against all odds, he got there.
(Quite literally, reliving the days gone by in a recent four-part Netflix documentary).
Tomorrow, Robbie Williams turns 50 — the baby-faced star of Take That is all grown up.
With 14 No1 albums here, countless awards, a wonderful family, several homes across the planet, millions in the bank and more social media followers than the population of Finland, he is a success by anyone’s definition of the word.
His is a life well lived.
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“I know I have a big life,” he told me, unsentimentally, last year. “I know it’s not normal.”
With his phone book, Robbie could be celebrating this milestone birthday with a gram of Colombia’s finest, two bottles of 1996 Dom Perignon and half of Hollywood’s Walk Of Fame (the non-dead half).
Back in the day, he probably would have been.
Instead, he tells me, he’s spending it at his home in Switzerland with his wife, Ayda, and four beautiful children, Teddy, Charlie, Coco and Beau.
The couple’s menagerie of dogs, including 18-year-old Poupette, no longer continent, and Mr Showbiz OBE — an ironic nod to Robbie’s own lack of Buckingham Palace gong — will be there too.
Deeply ambitious
As will his beloved mother-in-law Gwen, and her partner, who live with Robbie and Ayda for much of the year.
The family will have a quiet supper together and be in bed by midnight.
Robbie will be made to blow out the candles on his birthday cake as the family warble “Happy birthday”, with varying degrees of tunefulness.
At heart, Port Vale supporter Robbie remains one of us — normal, despite his anything-but-normal lifestyle.
He says he may well have a series of small celebrations with family and friends over the summer, once the weather in London is less depressing.
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The Robbie of 50 is all about family.
Yes, he remains deeply ambitious, but the chaos of yesteryear is long gone — in its place a calmness and happiness.
This is a man with absolutely nothing left to prove.
Frankly, Robert Peter Williams could be a complete and utter to**er.
Once upon a time, he kind-of was.
Lost in a world of drink, drugs and his own exacting ego, Robbie hated the world, he hated the tabloid press and, above all else, he hated himself.
He also really, really hated me.
He despised an ill-considered quip, referencing his former penchant for cocaine, that ran in a showbiz column I headed at another newspaper.
For years we’d glare at one another from afar, like Coleen and Rebekah, or Tom and Jerry, at parties.
Me chasing him for interviews, him steadfastly refusing. And fair enough, really.
When I joined The Sun, the paper who resolutely panned his big comeback single, Rudebox, he must have loathed me that much more.
For years we’d glare at one another from afar, like Coleen and Rebekah, or Tom and Jerry, at parties
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But then, slowly, things started to change.
I interviewed his wonderful wife, Ayda, and we got on brilliantly.
A couple of years later I bumped into her at hardcore gym class Barry’s Bootcamp, where neither of us could understand the instructor.
Ayda is beautiful, funny, smart and charming. I was determined to befriend her.
Over time, I ground her down, and she — gingerly at first — re-introduced me, piecemeal, to Robbie.
Today, 25 years sober, he is kind, knowing, hugely self-aware and, well, incredibly happy. He’s also very forgiving.
Eventually, he entrusted me enough with an interview, and we’ve got on ever since.
“Friends” might be pushing it, but I genuinely adore him.
The other day I texted Robbie and he immediately FaceTimed back from his sprawling Californian mansion.
I was outside Tesco, in the dark and rain.
But for all the Coutts accounts and supercars, Robbie remains defiantly down to earth.
Sure, he may have a private chef, but you feel he knows his way around a toilet brush, so to speak.
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He’s certainly not shy of hard work, and be it art, writing music, going to the gym, negotiating deals or making films, Robbie is, and always has been, a grafter.
He also takes everything with a pinch of salt — including fame.
As I once told him: “Rob, you’re the most insecure famous person on the planet.” Because he is.
He’s certainly come a long way from Stoke-on-Trent.
Robbie was just 16 when he joined Take That in 1990.
He was the youngest member of the band alongside Gary Barlow, Howard Donald, Mark Owen and Jason Orange.
The quintet redefined what it was to be a boyband, with their homo-erotic music videos appealing to schoolgirls, mums and gay men alike.
The group went on to exceed all expectations, selling out shows all over Europe.
But by 1994 pressures were beginning to show and Robbie had become caught up in the darker side of the industry.
In November that year he nearly suffered a drug overdose the night before Take That were scheduled to perform at the MTV Europe Music Awards in Berlin.
Less than a year later he shattered hearts nationwide when he quit Take That as tensions between him and Gary escalated.
In 1996, with his notoriety at fever pitch thanks to a very intoxicated trip to Glastonbury the previous summer, Robbie launched his solo career.
Despite being a household name, he initially struggled to make waves by going it alone.
His single Old Before I Die reached No2 in the UK charts in 1997 but overseas the track went under the radar.
Luckily for him, despite his first album Life Thru A Lens at first missing out on the Top Ten, debuting at No11, it contained a trump card — Angels.
The Guy Chambers co-written track went on to become an instant classic and is still his best single to date.
It was also the 34th best-selling UK single of the 1990s.
The track’s success caused sales of Life Thru A Lens to rocket, and the album remained in the Top Ten for 40 weeks.
It went on to sell more than 2.4million copies and once again made a household name of still-young Robbie.
Two more albums followed, as well as a hit single, Kids, with Kylie Minogue on third album Sing When You’re Winning.
Every time we turn on the TV, there’s a woman Rob’s slept with on my screen
Ayda Field
In 2003, and at the height of his fame, Robbie played to 375,000 fans over three nights at Knebworth in Hertfordshire.
Though after living in a whirl-wind for the past decade, he says he can’t even remember the gig.
As a man who once joked he’d “slept with four out of five Spice Girls”, the star’s love life was the stuff of tabloid dreams at this time.
He dated both Ginger Spice Geri Halliwell and All Saints singer Nicole Appleton, and was linked to a string of glamorous leading ladies including actresses Cameron Diaz, Nicole Kidman and Lindsay Lohan and Anna Friel.
As Ayda once quipped: “Every time we turn on the TV, there’s a woman Rob’s slept with on my screen.”
However, that all changed in 2006 when he met American Ayda after she appeared in a UFO documentary he was working on. (Robbie really really loves UFOs.)
Married 15 years next year, Robbie and Ayda are, genuinely, the most sickeningly loved-up couple I’ve ever met — famous or otherwise.
It was their chemistry which landed them multimillion-pound deals as judges on The X Factor — they are good friends with Simon Cowell and his fiancée Lauren Silverman — and their no-holds-barred podcast is refreshingly unsanitised.
Unlike many stars, Robbie does his own social media and isn’t governed by an all-seeing publicist or agent.
He is his own man.
He’s also half the man he once was after finally overcoming his long-documented battles with food, which saw him dubbed “Blobby Williams” at his heaviest.
Last year he joked that the secret was an Ozempicesque fat jab, due to his crippling “diagnosis of type two self-loathing”.
Whatever he’s doing, it’s working — as recent photos to plug his wife’s new collection of Ayda Activewear demonstrate.
It seems, aged 50, Robbie really has cracked that crazy lil’ thing called life.
Happy birthday, Rob.
