http://www.wilkesguitars.co.uk/downloads/robbie-williams-sentinel.pdf

Mr. Williams, three years ago you said: "I'm f*****g sick of being Robbie Williams." You grew a beard and became fat.

Well, I actually intendet to do some humanitarian work, but instead I sat on the couch, watched Big Brother and ate a lot of Donuts. I was waiting for another Job to come my way, but unfortunately nothing happened.

Before you disappeared from the spotlight you said: "I hate the machinery of the music industry." Why are you releasing a new CD now?

I just had to get out of my mansion, back into life. I need this job as a popstar, because otherwise my mind decays. So I started writing songs again, and at some point I wanted people out there to listen to them.

In 2006 you had to cancel you world tour because of acute exhaustion. How long did your creativity suffer?

Never. If I feel terrible I have even more things to write about. That's the tragic thing with me: I first have to really f**k up my life before I can do a new album. Though it certainly doesn't give me any pleasure to feel horrible. But now I feel really good.

You moved to Los Angeles in 2002 to escape the hysteria and permanent attention in your home country. Why have you moved back to England now - into a castle with seven bedrooms and helicopter landing pad in the garden?

I mainly moved to America to find Mrs. Williams. That was my mission. And now I've found her and can go back. I'm a very happy man right now.

"Mrs. Williams", that's been the American Actress Ayda Field for two years. How did you two meet?

Through a mutual friend. He said: "Robbie, I know a woman who would be perfect for you." He was right.

In America you're hardly known. Did Ayda know who Robbie Williams was at your first meeting?

If she knew, she didn't let it show. Maybe she was aware that there is someone who's called Robbie Williams and does Music in Europe. But that didn't impress her. She certainly wasn't some kind of hysterical Robbie Williams groupie.

How difficult is it for the notorious cheater Robbie Willias to stay faithful?

To be completely honest, it's quite hard, but isn't that the same for all men? Women are better at that. Or they are the better liars. But: I'm in love with someone now who returns my feelings equally strong - I've never experiences something like this. Therefor I'm careful with my relationship, because I don't want to hurt Ayda.

You haven't totally convinced us of your fidelity yet.

Men will always be Men. Maybe one needs a therapy to get this drive out of your system, I don't know. But, believe me, I'm the one who's most annoyed that I have this desire in me from time to time. Thoughts like that aren't helpful in any relationship.

How jealous is your girlfriend of the millions of women who adore Robbie Williams?

I don't give her any reason to be jealous. Ayda doesn't have a jealous personality though. She's got a great emotional intelligence. She doesn't try to change me, and exactly through that she changes me. For the better.

You never wanted to grow up. Now you are talking about wanting to have three children at once.

There are moments I'm thinking "Yeah, Robbie, do it! Daddy Williams! Cool!" And then there are moments in which I'm thinking: "Hey, you're still like a 14 year old yourself!" I'm very contradictory with that.

Please imagine you had children. And they will say one day: This is what I've got from my father. What should it be?

The Bentley. Now, seriously: I mainly wish for them to become happy people and not as neurotic as me. And that they will have a British accent. I don't want Hollywood kids.

Would you advise them against going into the showbiz?

I think they would probably be able to tell from my own life that this job isn't really worth striving for. Of course I'd love them to be musicians in a band, but I would strongly advise them against being the constant center of hysteria like I am.

You yourself seem to be desiring to be in a band again. You're toying with the idea of reuniting with Take That. Why does the successful solo artist Robbie Williams want to go back to his old boygroup?

To be honest: The boys are having fun together and I want to have more fun again, too. It's not about who's got the biggest ego anymore. I met the boys a couple of times recently and it was great. I have done eight solo albums and am often tired of always being on the road by myself.

Hmm... When we met you last time you were calling your ex-TT-collegue Gary Barlow an "asshole with a briefcase".

Really? I said that? Now your misquoting me!

That's what you said.

Right, ok, that's what I said to you then. But Gary and I have made our peace now. I have said a lot of bad things in the past I now regret.

On your new CD "Reality Killed the Video Star" you've dedicated the anthemic song "Morning Sun" to the late Michael Jackson.

Yes, I admired him, even though I've never bought any of his CDs. But nobody who is working in showbiz could have evaded his influence as a fantastic entertainer.

Michael Jackson was, like you, addicted to prescription drugs. How life threatening was you own condition, when you decided to check yourself into rehab in February 2007?

I have been through a few withdrawal treatments and I tell you: Robbie Williams doesn't go to rehab if his life has only gone a bit out of control.

And that means?

It was damn serious. I am a bit stubborn with things like that. Death has to come knocking on my door for me to put myself through something like this.

Do you feel cured from your addiction now? Allegedly at the time besides the pills you were consuming 36 espressi, 20 cans of Red Bull and 60 cigarettes a day.

Well yes, the healing is an ongoing process. I win battles, but never the war.

Where do get your kicks from nowadays?

Well, I don't need that many kicks anymore. But I have a race track in my garden for so called "rage buggies", which are go carts for grown ups. The neighbours have been complaining because of the noise. And I'm addicted to the computer game Football Manager. For some time my playstation was running day and night.

What did Ayda say to that?

She wasn't impressed. And one day I went to her and broke the disc in front of her eyes to show her my will to change.

And then?

I ordered the game on the internet the next day.

Are those all of your vices?

I became addicted because I was looking for kicks. Then the addiction became my problem. Maybe I've just become more quiet and relaxed nowadays and have learned from my life.

How big is your fear of a relapse?

It's always there. Daily. I am aware that I have an extremely self destructive character, but does that keep me from being happy now? No.

Are you still looking on the internet at night for bad Robbie Williams criticism?

For two years I was googling myself all the time and was searching for the stuff that confirmed all my bad opinions of myself, until my girlfriend said: "Robbie, you have to promise me to stop that immediately." And I've kept to it.

How come, that someone who can easily fill football stadiums with 80.000 people suffers from low self esteem?

There's a difference between the stage-Robbie and the private Rob.They're two different personalities. The first will enter the stage and make people believe he's the most self-confident man in the world. The private Robbie is a sceptic, prefers watching reality TV with his girlfriend and sits on his couch in his underpants. I don't believe I'm the world's best entertainer then. but strangely I often transform into this self-confident stage Robbie, when I enter the stage.

Then why are you suddenly scared of playing concerts?

Because there's f****g 80.000 people in front of me and staring at me- I'm still scared of going out there.

It's hard to believe after one has seen you live on stage. You are joking, playing with the audience.

The more self-confident that I seem, the more frightened I am. I'm very good at putting that mask on. That's the great art, that I've learned during my career. Sometimes I am having fun on stage, but there are days on which I've got the feeling I was standing up there for the first time. And then 80.000 people are really frightening. My last world tour brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. It's very hard work to tell yourself you're the greatest.

So you're most afraid of the one thing your fans love most about you: Performing live on stage?

Yeah, that's right. It's somehow tragic, but it's nothing uncommon. Michael Jackson didn't dare to enter a stage for twelve years. And he has been up there since his childhood. Like Me. It still scared the hell out him him. It's the same for me. Maybe this paranoia will go away as I'm getting older. You just never know what kind of performance you will get in the evening. Sometimes there's 80.000 friends in front of you, sometimes there's nights where there are 80.000 strangers and they all expect you to perform like a god.

When will Robbie Williams enter the stage again?

I will do it again, but not in the near future.

Instead you prefer going UFO hunting. Are you seriously believing in aliens?

Let's out it this way: I've seen things I can't explain.

What do you mean?

I saw a flying object of the size of a football field racing over my home in LA one night. Maybe it was military, something that can be explained rationally. But who knows?

Had you been taking drugs?

No, no drugs, no alcohol. A friend who was with me saw the same thing. Do you two believe in aliens?

No.

My experience is such: The more you get into the topic of UFOs, the more charlatans and crazy people you meet. I went to a UFO conference in Washington And highly ranked policemen and mitilary men talked about having made contact with extra terrestrials. They wanted to enlighten the world. Didn't work though, nobody was convinced. Not even me.

You've fulfilled one of your childhood dreams. You are an important shareholder of Port Vale, the football club of your home town Stoke-On-Trent. What are your plans as a real football manager?

I'd like to buy Messi, the striker of Barcelona. Unfortunately I will only be able to afford him when he's 40.
__________________

In the Eighties, London swung too, albeit in a slightly more accelerated, postmodern way. The designer decade started at the end of the Seventies with the emerging Blitz scene, and then ended ten years later, with Acid House and the second summer of love. And in-between - as the new-money culture collided with the lifestyle explosion - we had more fun than anyone ever did in the Sixties, believe you me.

It was a scene, a big fluorescent scene, and the scene's in-house magazine was Terry Jones' i-D, the ultimate situationist tip sheet, full of funny haircuts and off-the-cuff ideologies. i-D was all about the politics of style, and as its editor I got to work with some of the most stylishly political people of the decade. One of whom was the photographer Nick Knight, who we celebrate in this issue on page 234. Since working at i-D - and Knight and I worked on four years' worth of covers while we were there - he has had a stellar career, shooting for all the great and the good, most notably in Europe for British Vogue, collaborating with creative director Robin Derrick and fashion director Kate Phelan. Knight's latest (eponymous) book is published this month by Collins Design, and some of its most striking images are reproduced in this issue.

Knight and I once collaborated on a portfolio of the 100 most important people in London, to celebrate i-D's fifth birthday in October 1985 - everyone from the Face's Nick Logan to the Alternative Miss World's Andrew Logan - a series that took a year to plan, six months to shoot, and, I would calculate, more than 1,000 phone calls to organise. We were also planning a book, to be published by Faber & Faber, containing the same images. For one reason or another, the book never materialised, but the prints are still nestling in a plans chest in Knight's Petersham home in Richmond, Surrey (where many of the pictures for the portfolio were taken), and methinks, 25 years later, it might be time to see them again in print. If David Bailey's Goodbye Baby & Amen was the photographic book that perfectly encapsulated the Sixties, Knight's book should have been the one to do the same for the Eighties, and it's nothing short of a crime that this has never happened.

Politicians are the masters of the faux pas, and are accustomed to walking into a room with their flies undone only to put both feet in their mouths. In a 1966 speech that now seems decidedly ironic and not a little prescient, secretary of state for economic affairs, George Brown (no relation), told the House of Commons during a debate on crisis measures requiring a rise in interest rates, a wages freeze and cuts in public expenditure and investment, that: "For almost two years now we have tried to manage the economy in a way that no economy has been managed before." Or what about Ronald Reagan doing a radio microphone sound test that was inadvertently broadcast during his interview? "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."

Even when politicians go out of their way to appear sincere, it's often easy to assume that - for the speaker at least - saying it is actually in lieu of believing it. Why else would David Miliband have said to GQ two years ago, "You know what, Gordon Brown has my full and total support"? At other times, of course, politicians are rather less elliptical, such as when Peter Mandelson - allegedly - spent a good deal of 1996 telling anyone who would listen that Gordon Brown was gay. Read some more political outbursts on page 224.

Elsewhere in this issue of GQ you can read the fascinating account of Robbie Williams' comeback; he might not want to call it that, but this is exactly what it is. This project is a good example of how much the industry has changed in the past quarter of a century, because the negotiations for this one story - a photo session and several interviews taking place in LA over the summer - took almost as long, and involved nearly as many phone conversations, as the entire Nick Knight i-D portfolio. It is, however, a seriously great read (turn to page 214), and anyone with a scintilla of interest in how the entertainment industry works these days should read it. Congratulations are due to GQ's exemplary Features Director Alex Bilmes, not just for writing yet another super cover story (here's someone else who should be doing a book), but for keeping his head above water during the tortuous - though never unpleasant - negotiations.

Personally, I haven't seen Robbie Williams for well over a year, although I will never forget the first time I met him. It was 1998, and someone had kindly thrown a dinner for me at the Groucho Club in London - where the media like to go for cocktails, a gossip and a little light debauchery - in a private room upstairs; a small invitation-only event with a finely calibrated placement. During dinner, a famous head popped itself around the door, and asked what was going on. Having been told, he asked if he could join us, and spent the next three hours singing, entertaining us with stories, showing the younger guests how to do cartwheels, and - bizarrely - asking me how one went about editing a magazine (me being me, I obviously told him, at great length). Later, as we peeled off into the night, we left Robbie at the table, seemingly in a deep and engrossing conversation about the complications of magazine distribution. It is a subject sadly not addressed on his new record, in fact it appears to have been strangely ignored by most songwriters. Including, unsurprisingly, Stevie Wonder.

I was discussing Wonder - whose relationship with Barack Obama is explored on page 98 - with Tony Parsons at lunch the other day, and he mentioned a recent flight back from Tokyo, in which he spent the journey listening to Wonder's Talking Book, back-to-back on heavy rotation. Forgoing the dubious Hollywood delights on his entertainment system, Parsons instead decided to spend the entire journey listening to a record made nearly 40 years ago.

A few weeks earlier I'd sent Parsons an e-mail informing him of the premature death of an old friend, Gordon Burn, the author of, among many other books, Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, his extraordinary 1984 study of the Yorkshire Ripper murders. Parsons, who was halfway around the world at the time, obviously expressed his shock and sadness, reminding me that the last time they'd seen each other had been at my wedding. "Enjoy every sandwich," he signed off, and those three words have stayed with me ever since.

Enjoy the issue, but more importantly, enjoy every sandwich.

Dylan Jones
Editor, British GQ
http://www.gqmagazine.co.uk/the_mag....09.aspx