Sometime in the early-to-mid-noughties, Robbie Williams took a very short shower. He was lathering up at his Hollywood Hills mansion where work was underway on Intensive Care, the multi-million selling monster of pop he created in a makeshift bedroom studio with Duran Duran co-founder and cult songwriter-producer Stephen Duffy.
‘We kind of jammed up riffs and he’d be singing all the time,’ Stephen tells M. ‘We were doing something — I can’t remember what it was; Ghosts or something — and we’d got the structure. He said, “I’m just gonna…” and he went off and had a shower. But halfway through the shower, he came back — still with shampoo in his hair — and started singing the lyrics. I have a picture of this great moment: this man with bubbles in his hair, grasping his Shure SM58 [microphone] and emoting.’
It’s a story that speaks to the seemingly instinctive way in which Robbie crafts the melodies and lyrics that have become soundtracks to our lives. During a solo career that’s spanned more than a quarter of a century, from Angels to Feel and – hell – even Rock DJ, Robbie is one of the most successful songwriters of his generation. The numbers speak for themselves: 15 UK number one albums, a record 18 BRIT Awards and over 85m album sales worldwide.
Robbie added yet another accolade to his collection at The Ivors 2025: the prestigious PRS for Music Icon Award. His fifth Ivor Novello Award, he follows the likes of The Cure’s Robert Smith and Simon Gallup and indie-pop titans James in receiving the honour, which was awarded ‘in recognition of a songwriting career that has touched millions and defined a generation’. However, despite having co-written his solo material since leaving the creative constraints of Take That to record his 1997 debut Life Thru A Lens, Robbie doesn’t always get the credit he deserves as a songwriter.
'I suppose, over the years, I haven’t asked to be taken seriously — and people have paid me in kind.’ - Robbie Williams
Reflecting on his win backstage at Ivors, the superstar told M: ‘It might as well be [me winning this award], if I look around me and just do brass tacks on the landscape of what I’ve done and what I’ve achieved. It’s very interesting to be sat in a room and only you know that you do melodies and lyrics; you bare your soul and be sensitive to the masses. But only you know which bit you’re doing! I suppose, over the years, I haven’t asked to be taken seriously — and people have paid me in kind.’
Rufus Wainwright, who’s co-written a handful of tracks with Robbie over the years, agrees that his pal’s penmanship should be held in higher regard: ‘Robbie is one of the great audiophiles of all time. He knows so much about music from A to Z and really tries to imbue his work with a deep sense of musical history. I think he deserves more credit for being so passionate about what he does and for having so much knowledge.’
Stephen agrees. He reckons that Robbie’s super-celebrity status often eclipses his standing as a songwriter: ‘I suppose that’s the thing about such huge fame: it takes over from the music and the quality of the music.’
Robbie reached superstardom thanks to 1997's Angels, his multi-platinum fifth solo single. The song is credited to Robbie and Guy Chambers, the songwriting collaborator with whom the former enjoyed a serious purple patch from the late nineties until a fallout in the early noughties. In a bonus DVD packaged with the CD edition of 2005’s Intensive Care, Stephen recalled first meeting Robbie on Top Of The Pops in 1996 when the latter was performing his cover of George Michael’s Freedom (a pointed choice of debut solo single given his acrimonious split from Take That). Explaining why it had taken them so long to work together, Stephen noted that Robbie had gone on to be in ‘the most successful writing relationship since Lennon-McCartney, so one felt a little reticent…’
Here was another pointed statement, it seems. After all, one of those partnerships is held in the highest critical esteem, the other… less so. Since the ‘imperial phase’ of those Guy Chambers years and that smash album with Stephen, Robbie has gone on to collaborate with countless songwriters and producers (the old Chambers-Williams magic has even been revived in recent years). The heavy metal banger Rocket, the lead single from his upcoming thirteenth studio album Britpop, was co-written with a quartet of songwriters that includes Robbie and — believe it or not — Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi, who also shreds on the track.
Stephen, who left Duran Duran to furrow his idiosyncratic path in the late seventies, reckons the singer could go it entirely alone if he wanted to: ‘My take on it is that the only reason that Robbie collaborates at all is that he likes the company.’
During the Intensive Care sessions, Stephen encouraged Robbie to follow his own muse: ‘He’s so good at hooks that I just thought, “He’ll come up with a hook on whatever instrument he’s placed in front of” — even though he didn’t know how to play any of them! That’s where the songs came from: him playing the keyboards and me jamming along, putting up a drum machine and him playing the bass.’ The songwriting on these sessions was split fairly equally, he adds: ‘Although I probably did more finessing of the music while he did more finessing of the lyrics.’
Perhaps, though, these collaborators have each had a hand in helping Robbie’s songwriting to evolve over the years. The Britpop-style tracks he created with Guy, for instance, gave way to sparkly electropop with eighties synth pioneer Trevor Horn on 2009's Reality Killed The Video Star. Throughout it all, even when his work has explored his challenges with addiction and mental health, there’s been an accessible lightness of touch. ‘What’s great,’ says Rufus, ‘is that on one hand Robbie has a very serious darkness to him, but he counters that with a joyous sense of humour. His unbalanced is very balanced.’
‘Robbie's so good at hooks that I just thought, “He’ll come up with a hook on whatever instrument he’s placed in front of” — even though he didn’t know how to play any of them!' - Stephen Duffy
Even when success allowed Robbie to indulge his formative love of big band music, resulting in 2001’s Swing When You’re Winning and 2013’s Swings Both Ways, he wove original material in with the standards. Rufus trades jokey come-ons with Robbie throughout the latter album’s title track, which the pair wrote with Guy Chambers.
‘I think what I love most about that period,’ says Rufus, 'is that I felt totally safe, accepted and admired by a heterosexual man, and that is something that should really happen more often between the boys.’
Speaking to this writer for NME last year, Robbie revealed the concept behind the upcoming Britpop: ‘I wanted to make the album that [I’d make] if I’d left Take That now. Knowing what I know, what is it that I would have made?’ This, combined with the retro title, might suggest a nostalgic nineties-style retread — a notion that the bombastic Rocket blew to smithereens upon its release. Here was another reminder that you never know what to expect from Robbie Williams the songwriter.
Whatever his first studio album in six years might sound like, you can bet it’ll be crafted with a lot of love. ‘He called [our] album Intensive Care because of the amount of care we took over it,’ Stephen says warmly. ‘He thought we’d put intense care into it.’
Two decades since Robbie was so inspired to create he jumped out of the shower, it’s the mark of a legitimate icon whose legacy as a songwriter scrubs up very well indeed.
This article features in the latest special edition of M Magazine, which you can read in full here.
