In the latest episode of Robbie Williams, the Netflix documentary series, a reunited Take That perform The Flood live. The song, cheesy, exaggerated and shamelessly intended to be an anthem (spoiler: it wasn’t, it isn’t) displays its enormous power live. Everything about The Flood may be ridiculous, but that doesn’t stop it from being one of my favorite songs of all time. Just like the concert that Robbie Williams gave, just 20 years ago, at the Palacio de Vistalegre in Madrid, it was one of the concerts of my life. I belong to the Robbie generation and that is why I write this. It is very likely that the series with which the artist reviews his career is not good, but let me not have the necessary criteria to judge it. If I like The Flood, how can I not like this.
In the UK, Netflix’s Robbie Williams has been savagely vilified by quite a few media outlets. Thus something that is told in it is repeated: there are Britons who still have not forgiven Williams for leaving Take That, the boy band that made him a star. He didn’t do much to obtain that forgiveness, everything must be said, but you have to be childish to continue reproaching him for something that happened in 1995. In the series he doesn’t go into much detail about the reasons for that breakup. Yes, he was already beginning to be, as Belén Esteban would say, bad.
In Robbie Williams we see Robbie Williams in his underwear reviewing videos of his career. The star thus appears vulnerable but in control of the situation. He has never been modest (not even when more than once, recently, he has lost his temper on his networks) and his fans, among whom I count myself, choose to believe. And we are not so stupid as not to understand that a pop icon is made of artifice and projections, and that what counts is the story. That of Robbie Williams, more than one of improvement, is one of acceptance. “I look authentic,” he says of images in which, now in his thirties, he spouts nonsense at the camera.
The format is a bit “video reaction from Robbie Williams to Robbie Williams” and a bit found footage of, for example, his two most famous romantic relationships. First, with Nicole Appleton, a member of All Saints, the reaction group to the Spice Girls; and then with Geri Halliwell, leader of Spice and her female equivalent. She also decided to leave a successful group and become a solo artist. She fared worse than Robbie, but she handled it better than him. For the nineties generation (see: mine) seeing them on vacation in Mallorca is mythical and endearing. They are two burned-out guys, two superstars, two legends and two broken toys. I couldn’t go to Robbie Williams’ last concert in Barcelona, ??but it was almost better this way. I imagine that it was full of forty-somethings nostalgic for a star that perhaps only they recognize as such. What a painting. It’s enough for me to have The Flood and Rudebox on loop in my headphones when I go for a run, like the middle-aged man I already am.