Robbie isn’t the greatest singer: in fact, at times, he doesn’t even have a particularly pleasant voice to listen to (Candy and his cover of 9 to 5 are particularly unpleasant). His music has neither been cutting edge nor influential. And certainly he couldn’t find the zeitgeist if it had a target on it.
So how come Robbie Williams has scored 30 solo top ten hits, was able to pack Knebworth over three days, achieved the fastest selling music DVD of all time with “What We Did Last Summer?” and has won a staggering 13 solo Brit Awards.
Possibly as Take That’s troublemaking bad boy, Robbie begin to attract the public’s affection. When he tried to grab a bit of Britpop cool on going solo, he was cruelly dismissed as the “fat dancer from Take That” by Noel Gallagher. But everything changed with the release of that maudlin karaoke classic Angels resonating with the public’s collective sentimental nerve (even though it reached no higher than #4 in the charts!)