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Bernard Zuel

On the day the ARIA Awards announce the latest crop of pop star nominees, Wind Back Wednesday winds back to 2009, but in a way winds back two or three decades further. Back to the days when pop stars were properly Pop Stars.
Here, a look at what Robbie Williams was all about.
Pop stars, real pop stars, not makeweights elevated by 15 minutes of fame in television karaoke, are not meant to be like the rest of us.
I don't mean they are made smarter or sexier or funnier, though they may well end up believing the inevitable sycophants around them who tell them this is true.
What I mean is that we don't want them to be like the rest of us; the quotidian just doesn't work here otherwise we may as well do it ourselves, failing inevitably from lack of imagination, wit or recklessness.
We expect pop stars, no we need pop stars to be more bold, more extravagant, more outrageous, more ridiculous. More.
Robbie Williams is a proper pop star. He's shagged more women, sold more records, snorted more coke, filled more stadiums, feuded with more members of Oasis, squired more members of All Saints and Spice Girls, necked more prescription drugs, seen more UFOs and been slagged off by more media and bloggers then you and me and everyone we know or will ever know put together.
He has done it in full view of a rabid media which was high on its own supply of ogling and outrage and then in his lyrics he has glorified and agonised over it, paraded his ego and his insecurities and often enough skewered himself before any of us writing or reading about him could say or do it first.
We can be jealous of him and glad we’re not him at the same time.
Now that's a proper pop star.
Robert Peter Williams, a late winter baby in February of 1974, sang and danced and watched Top Of The Pops at home in Stoke-on-Trent, a once vital town outside Manchester, through the 1980s boom years for pop of Madonna, Michael Jackson and Prince.
When at 16 he saw an ad looking for singers and dancers to make a British version of the contrived boy band New Kids On The Block, placed by aspiring Manchester impresario Nigel Martin-Smith, Williams got to do it seriously. Albeit on other people's terms.
Take That, marketed as a slightly edgier version of New Kids, tightly controlled and overworked by Martin-Smith and dominated by the songwriting of its most experienced member, Gary Barlow, became one of Britain's biggest selling bands in the first half of the 1990s with sales of nine million albums and 10 million singles.
But almost from the start Williams, the youngest, frankest and ultimately most dangerous member, was frustrated, bored and insecure.
He drank heavily, coked heavily and in the summer of 1995, as a final straw, took off to Glastonbury to party with Oasis instead of preparing for a tour.
He was asked to leave. Or as he put it in his 2006 song, The 90s, “I can't be bothered cause I'm lazy … So fuck the band/Give me Sambucca and gak”.
A solo career began shakily, not least because Williams was in his first visit to rehab.
The first few singles (one a generic piece of rock pop co-written by corporate songwriting giant Desmond Child) wallowed in the charts and his now ex-friends in Oasis derisively described him as "that fat dancer from Take That”. He looked most likely to end up a joke footnote in a future pub quiz.
However, his meeting in 1996 with songwriter Guy Chambers was to change that.
As Chambers was to note much later, they had little in common, eventually lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic and their partnership would end after eight years in sharp words and then a long, bitter silence.
But they gelled and it was their song Angels, a soaring ballad of classic pop form, which became Williams' career saving first hit across the UK and Europe.
From then, Chambers and Williams tapped into a great British tradition of blending pop and theatre, cockiness and camp, flamboyant upbeat tunes and genuinely moving ballads.
There was No Regrets, halfway between Pet Shop Boys and Dusty Springfield; Millennium, which took film score maven John Barry and grafted him onto the Human League; Better Man, a tearjerker from a ‘70s pub rock band done with strings and choir; and Kids, a tongue-firmly-in-cheek parody of rock lyric cliches done up as a sexy duet with Kylie Minogue.
And among them all Williams wrote lyrics which toyed with facetiousness and teased with openness.
"Everything I touched was golden/Everything I loved got broken/on the road to Mandalay/every mistake I've ever made/has been rehashed and then replayed/as I got lost along the way.”
He was selling millions, playing to stadium crowds – including eventually a massive outdoor show at Knebworth, which had also hosted his bete noire Oasis, and two decades earlier, Led Zeppelin – and having whom he wanted when he wanted them.
He jokingly told a TV interviewer he was “rich beyond my wildest dreams” and awards were falling out of his back pocket.
He even pulled off a credible attempt at recapturing the swing and cool of the Sinatra Rat Pack with an album of Vegas/Atlantic City favourite.
The man could sing and dance, had charisma and wit, was the biggest thing around. And he was hating it. And himself. “So unimpressed but so in awe/Such a saint but such a whore/So self aware so full of shit”.
Robbie Williams was nothing if not contradictory.
"[It was] a really sad time, actually, because I was fucked up. I didn't know how not to do cocaine on Tuesday at five o'clock in the afternoon. I just lost the ability to say no," he told his biographer Chris Heath.
Later he confessed that he wasn't satisfied with his work, certain that he’d been tossing it off while others crafted.
"I used to go around people's houses and see that they've got a fantastic record collection. And I was never in them. That upset me. I'd like to be."
What he couldn't or wouldn't see was that in fact he already was in those collections. And was getting better.
A move to Los Angeles, the split with Chambers and sobriety led to a sympathetic and symbiotic new partnership with cult favourite songwriter Stephen Duffy to produce 2005’s very satisfying Intensive Care album.
The album began with the cocksure line "here I stand victorious/the only man who made you come" and ended with a far less assured "a hand through the clouds keeps knocking me down/it's no less than I deserve". Some things hadn't changed.
After the mixed reception to the adventurous, entertaining but inconsistent Rudebox in 2006, and a world tour where in Australia he looked bored to tears, Williams retired to his LA home occasionally being quoted saying that he wasn’t sure that he could be bothered continuing with his career. UFO spotting excited him more.
It may have been the drugs talking.
Here’s a line from the Rudebox song Good Doctor: “I want Xanax, Vicadin and Oxycontain … ‘Robert Williams take one Adderall with water in the morning’/As if I'm going to take one tablet/I'm Keith Moon, dickhead”.
Soon he was off to rehab again, recently telling GQ "If I hadn't gone into rehab I would have died. The left arm was going numb, chest was contracting. That's the sign isn't it, that you're on your way out?"

Instead of going out he has recorded a new album, his eighth, called Reality Killed The Video Star, where he asks that we “don’t call it a comeback/look what I invented here”.
It seems Robbie Williams isn't done yet with being a pop star. Which is good news for those of us who aren't and never will be.