“When it’s time to sleep. My body says: ‘Well no.’ Four hours tossing and turning in bed and thinking about a bunch of things. Fear. Shame. Pain. A whole range of human emotions. I’m almost 50. I’m a father. I have four children and a lovely wife. Everything I have experienced in my life is impressive. But I feel like the past has me by the neck.” These are Robbie Williams’ first words in the documentary about him, his voice in off while he is seen wandering around his mansion at night and images of his past are interspersed. A hard story, marked by addictions and depression, which the British singer faces throughout the four chapters recently released on Netflix. Then he rings Let Me Entertain Youas a warning of the almost four hours that the documentary series that simply bears his name lasts, and whose chapters make it clear with their titles that his life and success have not been a bed of roses: Let’s go blind, Go unnoticed one day, Unbearable pressure and Break the circle.
The past of Robbie Williams (49 years old, Stoke-on-Trent, United Kingdom) lies in thousands of hours of behind-the-scenes recordings that had never come to light. Until now. And that is the objective of the documentary: for him to see them and comment on them. “I am trying to repair the damage of the past. And now I have opted for a special way to exorcise my demons,” he says. He does it lying on the bed (“If I’m not on stage I’m in bed”), dressed in a tank top and black boxers, watching the images on a laptop. Here there are no other guest stars who talk about him as happens, for example, in David Beckham’s documentary series. In addition to the singer, only his wife speaks to the camera—and little—and one of his daughters also appears, whom he kicks out of the room on two occasions because he doesn’t think she is old enough to see and hear what he did. and said.
The images, many of them homemade, date back to when he was a 16-year-old young man and began performing with Take That on the streets of Manchester, including scenes in which he is seen drunk and drugged and moments in which he performs in front of more of 80,000 people. And since the story is told chronologically, one of the most interesting parts is when he remembers how he felt in the boy band What made him famous in the early nineties and why he decided to leave.
“The beginning was fun. It was something big and then it became something huge,” he remembers of the beginnings of Take That. “It was like a pressure cooker. Too many interviews, concerts and countries to visit. There was an obsessive fanaticism. It was intense. To make matters worse, there was trust in Gaz [como llama a Gary Barlow, otro de los cinco miembros del grupo] and in his skill. Mixed with roughness. Everything revolved around him. And, as someone young, I think I was envious of him. I guess I got quite annoyed with him. I wasn’t good at managing the dynamics of the band at that age. That’s when I lost control,” he recalls. Getting into an adult world for which, he says, he was not prepared led him to end up consuming everything he could get his hands on: “Ecstasy, cocaine, alcohol. “I drank a bottle of vodka the night before rehearsals.” His addictions, added to an attitude that did not fit into a boy bandled him to leave the group in 1995 (according to what he says, they invited him to leave when they disinvited him from a tour), leaving millions of fans devastated.
“I hate these fucking bastards,” he is heard saying in a home video filmed in Jamaica in 1998, where he went to record his second solo album and he is seen composing a song full of rage directed at his former colleagues. By then he had already been admitted to a rehabilitation center once. “Who did you hate the most and why?” His daughter asks him directly. “The one I couldn’t stand the least was Gary, because he was the one who was supposed to have everything, and the career. And he wanted to make him pay. I was vengeful. I wanted to make him pay by having the career he should have. “I regret having treated Gary like that,” replied the man who would go on to become one of the solo singers with the most selling and highest-paid albums in the United Kingdom. Peace would come in 2010, when he ruled out doing a solo tour that was going to give him much more money for a series of concerts in the United Kingdom with Take That. “Meeting them was a vitally important part of my journey to where I am now.”
![Gary Barlow and Robbie Williams, during a concert in London in 2010.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/3vXH6X-iJhMzYSHtWof3JseEbhw=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/ETW4BRDAJBA3LGBKFDXZVCK7PQ.jpg)
Up to seven years have to pass in the images that he goes through of his life before he is seen smiling for the first time. And it is when talking about Angels, the song he released in 1997, became his first big hit and saved his solo career. A topic that changed everything: “Success, subconsciously, implied happiness,” he says.
But there are very few happy reflections. These are three of the phrases that he throws out in just the second chapter: “I was diagnosed with depression very young, at 22 or 23 years old. But people then still thought that if good things happened to you and you were successful there was no reason to be sad”; “I had to go on stage in front of thousands of people feeling like I was on a 100th floor burning and I had to choose to stay and burn to death or jump out the window to certain death. That’s how uncomfortable I was”; “How difficult it was to wake up every day and be in my head.”
![Robbie Williams, at the 1996 Brit Awards.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/YNWsM8sTMVSsmH58S7oTAaS0gQo=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/PMXNNYH7KRE2XGDCPM5YWVZP5Y.jpg)
“Looking back should only be done at the doors of San Pedro. I don’t know if I recommend it,” she says in a funny tone. But Robbie Williams’ review of his 30-year career shows very juicy moments for fans and nostalgics of 90s pop music. Like when he talks about his courtship with All Saints singer Nicole Appleton—who is seen proposing to him over the phone. But, above all, when he talks about his relationship with Geri Halliwell (today Geri Horner). To which are added some unpublished and intimate images of a vacation that he spent in 2000 with Ginger Spice in the Mediterranean. “Our relationship began when I was in Alcoholics Anonymous. They told me not to date anyone the first year, and rightly so. If I couldn’t even take care of a cactus, imagine a person. I found his company very pleasant. We were being silly, we had a good time. And we were a small group that shared a very magical moment in a magical place,” he remembers from the first video in which he says that he was happy there.
The singer also tells for the first time why that relationship ended: he believed that Geri was notifying the paparazzi of their meetings. “I was friends with Ginger Spice and that meant a lot to me at a time when I didn’t have many relationships in which I felt completely comfortable. But wherever we went the paparazzi were waiting for us. And some very private and personal moments became public property. And we were shocked that something like that happened. I ran into a paparazi and he told me it was Geri who did it. Now it doesn’t even cross my mind that it was true, but at the time I believed it.” And he adds: “It is an example of what it means to be in the spotlight; How it influences the mind when you can’t trust anyone. And, in a way, it spoiled the memory of an important part of my life and some very happy moments.”
![Robbie Williams and Geri Halliwell, at the Brit Awards held in London in 2001.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/WuwOfHEdU_brsz_CE9aPCMUZOWU=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/W7KEDYE6OBDV7HG44EYI4F7GU4.jpg)
What the British tabloids said about him or his music affected him enormously. And that was the reason why he put an ocean in between and, in 2002, he moved to Los Angeles. “What he needed from America was not to succeed, but to heal me.” In fact, he had already tried to be successful with a US tour in 1999, when no one in that country knew him even though he was number 1 in Europe. But that didn’t go very well, and he ended up depressed.
In 2005 he arrived Close Encounters Toura tour that began at the peak of his success (he took 93 trucks to set up the stage and his own jet) and that ended after launching the single Rudebox and not being well received by the British media, so he developed a panic about performing in the United Kingdom. At that time, a doctor had to give him steroids despite his team’s refusal to be able to go out and perform. Something that does not count, but is seen in the images.
![Robbie Williams during the recording of his documentary series for Netflix.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/kHmHZeahgfJbQipQdRdoy335CnA=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/EHYYSZC5KNHHNJ5QZQOCJGFRYA.jpg)
Two years later, the relapse came. “He was addicted to prescription amphetamine, oxycidone, adderal, hydrocodone, morphine. The best repertoire”, he is sincere. “I wasn’t aware of what I was doing to myself, nor did I care. And what was happening was a feeling that it would be better if he died. “That’s where addictions take you.” At that time he had met the woman who would become his wife, the American actress Ayda Field. But at the beginning of their relationship he had to end it to enter a rehabilitation center again. “It gave me a chance to recalibrate and see if he could live. My career had gotten so big that the only thing I could do to preserve it was take a break from it.” He came out of detox and spent three years without acting — that’s when he dedicated himself to searching for extraterrestrial life, something he doesn’t talk about at any point in the documentary, even though he has made numerous headlines. At that time he also resumed his relationship with Field, whom he would marry in a ceremony held at her Los Angeles home in August 2010.
![Robbie Williams and his wife, Ayda Field, at the premiere of their documentary, on November 1 at the London Film Museum.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/UmQg7tUcIvYsQa3iM3chF44pgYk=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/JND6CJN7EBHNVMQZV2OD5C3FKQ.jpg)
“It was hard to watch,” he says with obvious emotion at the end. “But I feel good because there has been a lot of lightness, humor and fun. A touch of tenderness in these videos that I didn’t expect to see. It has been cathartic for me. I have taken a weight off my shoulders emotionally speaking. I have managed to accept and love myself. I didn’t expect that I would feel this way when we were done. There is a happy ending. At least for me”.
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