Reveal

This is a book about Robbie Williams. It’s an intimate and close-up account of his life as he has lived it, and of the things that he has done, and of what he has thought along the way. Because of who he is, and how he is, and how frank and open he instinctively prefers to be, it describes moments and shares information that you might not normally expect in a book with a photograph of a modern-day celebrity on its cover. Some of these will be silly, some heartrending, some funny, some unpleasant, some uncomfortably honest or disconcertingly blunt, some tender and uplifting, some ludicrously self-obsessed, some touchingly generous and open-hearted, some dispiriting, some life-affirming, some infuriating, and some transcendentally joyous.

Before anything else, here’s a story about a song that he recently tried to write. It may seem, to begin with, quite a dark story, because it is one in which he is unsparing about his frustrations and his shortcomings and his failures, as he himself briefly recaps his own life story in a most brutal and bleak way. It serves as a good introduction to one side of who he is, and to the churning cauldron of doubts and obstacles that can fill his head.

But it’s also a story in which, by following and facing these fears, somehow he will discover something magical. It spoils nothing to come in this book if I point out, at the very start, that this will be happening, in small ways and large, over and over again. There are no happy endings in lives that are still being lived, because we all remain vulnerable to capricious fortune and our own frailties. But if on one level this book is the ongoing chronicle of a troubled man’s quest for the rich life the world already assumes he has, then even if this account dwells at least as much on the struggles as the triumphs, that shouldn’t cloud the news that for the most part these days his quest is going extraordinarily well.