Smash hit

Disappointed that his faith in Acorah’s ability to contact the dead appeared to have been misplaced, Williams thanked him, saw him out of the flat and resolved not to see him again. Acorah, however, had other ideas. “The next thing I know,” Williams says, lighting another cigarette while scratching at his broken arm, “he rings up and goes ‘Robbie! Robbie! I’ve just been on the phone to the head of LIVINGtv and he says — and listen Robbie, this is true — he says that you can do whatever you want. Whatever you want! Make any show you like!’ And I’m on the other end going, erm, I think I could get ABC if I wanted, to be honest. I’ll be OK, Derek.”

Still, Acorah didn’t give in. Having failed at brokering the pivotal LIVINGtv deal, a week later he rang Williams to tell him that he’d arranged a dinner for himself, Williams and “my great friend, Uri Geller”.

Despite Acorah’s pleading, Williams did not turn up for this paranormal tête-à-tête.

“I thought, I’m not talking to you, you ****ing idiot. You’re outside the circle of trust. Next thing I know,” Williams says, rattling his belt buckle with his knuckles in a surge of nervous energy, “he’s promoting a DVD in a double-page spread in the Daily Mirror, going “Yeah, I got (contacted on ‘the other side’) Robbie’s nan. And when Robbie’s in America, his friends watch my DVD. Robert de Niro, Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman.”

Robbie does a face of scandalised boggling.

“I’VE NEVER MET THEM!” he shouts, slowly, as if communicating with a deaf idiot on the other side of the Thames. “I DON’T KNOW DUSTIN HOFFMAN! And hang on a minute — YOU’RE ALSO SELLING A DVD USING MY DEAD NAN!" Robbie sighs.

“Now Derren Brown — he is good. He tells you that it’s a load of shit.”

And he reaches for another cigarette.

We don’t know any more about Robbie Williams than we do about hundreds of other pop-culture icons. Elvis, John, Jimi, Janis, Kurt. Marilyn, James Dean, Jim Morrison, even Diana, Princess of Wales . . . we can all quote chapter and verse on their mental health, sex life, drug consumption, freakish beliefs, unhappy relationships and struggles with fame.

The only difference with the aforementioned pantheon of stars and Robbie Williams, of course, is that we learnt how unhappy, confused, chaotic, excessive and sporadically ecstatic their lives were after they died; or had at least long since cleaned up and retired to the country.

With Robbie, on the other hand, we hear about all this stuff at pretty much the same time as he is living through it. His long-term depression and “addiction” to antidepressants, his search for the future Mrs Williams (“I need a woman!”), his sexual prowess on a one-night stand (“He’s a real gentleman who knows how to please a woman”), his beliefs in the occult, his loneliness, his search for deeper meaning, and his phenomenal ability to break wind at will (“In-coming!”) — it’s all come as dispatches from the front line, and often in the present tense. This week his private life has been in the papers again. A comment in GQ that he has been “ingesting things, physically and mentally, that I shouldn’t. I’m trying to extend the rules of my sobriety” has kick-started speculation on just what it might be that a man can “physically ingest” while “ extending the rules” of his sobriety. When I ask him today what that meant, he doesn’t seem overly defensive.

“I can’t say, really. Soz. I want to do peyote, though. Have you got any?” With all this candour, then — with this level of fame — it makes the one thing the public doesn’t know about him all the more astonishing. For Robbie Williams is the most successful singer-songwriter of his generation, and yet no one seems to have noticed. It’s airily presumed that his former collaborator Guy Chambers wrote all the songs, and Robbie just turned up to do some winking and smirking at the end. But Millennium — Williams ’s name is on that song for a reason. Likewise Rock DJ, Let Me Entertain You, Feel, No Regrets, Doin’ it for the Kids, Radio, Misunderstood, Supreme and, of course, Angels, recently voted the greatest single of the past 25 years at the Brit Awards.