Robbie's comeback goes awry

Robbie Williams stared out into space and his eyes rolled in their sockets. "Good evening, everybody, you nearly made me cry," he told his audience. "... but I realised it's not The X Factor."

The typically self-deprecating gag at a London concert this week was an admission of how close he had come to a career-wrecking performance only nine days earlier, when he had performed live on ITV1's all-conquering talent show, The X Factor, with disastrous effect.

His eyeballs rolled then too, but not in awe at his own talents. "His eyes looked like they were going to burst out of his head," said the Daily Mirror after the television show. "Manic panic was written all over his profusely sweaty face."

So bad was Williams on The X Factor that he felt the need to deny he had been on drugs when performing, saying he had taken nothing stronger than coffee but had felt like "the deer in headlights" and "had a bit of a wobble".

Suddenly, the pop star with sufficient tattooed swagger to draw 375,000 to a concert was describing himself as Bambi.

"They got it so badly wrong," says one music industry figure. "Robbie is a bit of a rock star and if you're a rock fan, you want him to carry on being a rock star, not suddenly become Bruce Forsyth."

How could this have happened? How could the most-awaited comeback album launch in the recent history of the British music industry have been so spectacularly miscalculated?

The comeback strategy aimed to make a success of Robbie's new album, Reality Killed the Video Star. The attraction of an appearance on Britain's most high-profile entertainment show is easy to understand.

The charismatic Simon Cowell, whose ability to spot a performer with public appeal is unquestioned, regards Williams as one of Britain's greatest showmen - so much so that Williams has been put forward as a possible future judge on the show.

Robbie may have blown that opportunity. He blamed his X Factor nerves on the fact that he found himself briefly trapped behind a jammed stage door.

There was something symbolic about that door. The whole concept behind Reality Killed the Video Star seemed to be a reaction against the power of the television talent contest and its domination of music sales; artists that Lily Allen recently derided as "nothing but puppets paid for by Simon Cowell".

The producer of the album is Trevor Horn, who produced the 1979 hit Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles.

It was Williams' idea to pick an album title that echoed the name of the song that launched MTV, a defining moment in music industry history, a generation ago.

In an interview with The Times, before Williams had faced the headlights of The X Factor, Horn tried to explain the difference between Williams and the talent-show acts.

"People from reality shows can be like a tree planted in a garden where the roots aren't deep - if they don't take quickly, they're going to die," he said.

"Someone like Robbie is born for fame, and it's not just talent but charisma: he charges through the door and the whole mood lifts."

Except this time, Robbie was behind the reality-show door, and it wouldn't open.

In spite of Williams' immense presence as a stage performer, he has become uncomfortable with playing live. His three shows at Knebworth Park in 2003 amounted to the biggest event in British music history.

A mere one-night stand in a hotel with New Zealander Robyn Reynolds was enough to headline the News of the World and launch her into a short-lived celebrity career.

But in a recent cover interview with GQ magazine, he described the terror he experienced when doing his world tour in 2006.

"I buckled under the weight of it," he said. "I got stage fright. And stage fright in front of 80,000 people is horrendous."

Robbie's management team are drawing considerable comfort from the fact that Bodies, helped or hindered by the performance on The X Factor, is his best-selling single in a decade and has made it to the top of the iTunes chart in five European countries.

Sam Delaney, editor of Heat magazine, says the failings of Williams just help to distinguish him from the "bland and boring".

"As far as we are concerned he's the perfect celebrity. There's just so much happening in Robbie's life; he has the narrative that we at Heat require."

But that charisma was not enough to make a success of Williams's 2006 album, Rudebox, which sold so badly that a million unwanted copies were recycled for road surfacing in China.

This time Robbie really needs to be on the right track.

- INDEPENDENT