Music Blogs

Hold tight pop fans because there are mutterings among the leathered faces in the high-rise, oak-panelled offices of Monumental Music Inc and the like that Robbie Williams has been taken from us. Secreted off Earth via a mysterious light beam hoovering-up his swanky Mulholland Drive pad in the dead of night, perhaps. Or, more convincingly, they say he's just finished with the game, a burnt-out star, disintegrating like a dirty particle into the LA smog, while pointless copies of "Rudebox" are dumped unceremoniously into land-fill in the Hollywood Hills.

For the latest dubious evidence of this meltdown, Robbie was apparently seen the other day with "an awful Robinson Crusoe style beard" by a ‘friend', who also claimed "he hadn't had a bath in days". For months, there have been fears he's becoming ever more reclusive in his adopted home of California. The pages of The Sun, driven by Bizarre overlord Gordon Smart, have been laughing at him all summer, preferring to laud the creatively crippled comeback of Oasis. In the aftermath of the critical pit-balling of "Rudebox" and his minor breakdown at the hands of a mammoth world tour, does he have anything left?

Robbie's famed new fascination for alien life-forms has only made things worse. Or so it seems. He recently starred in a BBC radio documentary with writer Jon Ronson, in which they travelled to a UFO conference in Nevada to learn more about extra-terrestrials. His explanation for the trip - "We can hear people's testimony about being abducted by aliens. There's an entire family of abductees going to be there, apparently" - does little to suggest the singer hasn't just replaced his previous addictions of sex, booze and drugs for something even more out there, unmanageable and foolish.

However, Ronson and Famethrowa are both of the opinion that Robbie's actually in a good place right now, daft facial hair or not. Why shouldn't he escape from the blood-sucking music business for a year or two, maybe longer? Speaking to the mother of an 'abductee' at the conference, he said: "I think joining Take That was like leaving on a spaceship and coming back and all your friends going, 'He's weird now.'" The beard is just evidence of him defying 20 years' work and escaping the many parameters that entails. And for those that dismissed "Rudebox", you forget it included "She's Madonna", which is about as close to perfection as pop music is likely to get.