About halfway into Robbie Williams’s fifth album, 2003’s Escapology, there’s a track called “Handsome Man”. The song is solid gold Robbie – there is a lean in its shoulders; its bassline does not simply groove but swaggers. Its lyrics, as all his best do, play with his public image – and in mid-Noughties Britain, Robbie was sexy, self-aware and more famous than God.
“Handsome Man” is so full of zingers it could be a stand-up routine – “Have I gone up in the world/Or has the world go down on me?” Williams winks, forever walking the tightrope between pop and panto that is his alone – but there’s one line in particular that always stands out to me. Part way through the second verse, he sings “I’m the man who put the ‘Brit’/in ‘celebrity’”.
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