'I'M AN ENTERTAINER WITH A COMPULSION TO ENTERTAIN'

Robbie Williams never went away, but he's back with, yes, an art show — and wildly candid tales of his days at the Groucho, surviving the 1990s and his desperation for affirmation

- INTERVIEW BY DYLAN JONES

The first time I met Robbie Williams I couldn't get rid of him.

It was 1998, I was leaving a big job, and someone was throwing a dinner for me in one of the upstairs rooms in The Groucho Club, the private members’ club in Soho. About an hour into the dinner, Williams burst in, obviously looking for the lavatories. But, pleased by what he saw, namely a lot of adoring young women making purring noises, and extremely attentive waiters, he stayed. And stayed and stayed. He stayed for the rest of the evening, uninvited but outrageously good company — singing, telling jokes, doing cartwheels, and even spending a good 45 minutes discussing the problems with newspaper and magazine distribution with our circulation director.

"I would have been high on cocaine, and I would have needed an audience," he says, thinking back. "The Groucho was somewhere I went nearly every night for 18 months. I enjoyed it because I found a kinship with people that I respected highly that allowed me to be a member of their fraternity without judgement. I was sometimes 20 years younger than them, sometimes 10 years younger, but they were all people I highly respected. It was all people who were mentally ill and addicts, most of them anyway. But to be allowed into the fraternity of people who had made me laugh or made me think without judgement felt special. While I was ruining my life at the same time."

As I would learn over the coming years, his performance that night was Very Robbie. I've since interviewed him a few times, and the interviews usually disintegrated quite quickly into therapy sessions, which, obviously, tended to make them more revealing. When I spoke to him on Tuesday this week, and asked him how he was in reference to his mental health, he was as positive as I've ever seen him.