Bizarre and bawdy proof that Robbie Williams is still a great showman

The last time Robbie Williams headlined BST Hyde Park – almost five years ago exactly – he took to the stage just minutes after England had won the Cricket World Cup up the road at Lord’s. This time, on Saturday night, he bounded onto the same stage moments after the England football team had reached the semi-finals of Euro 2024. “Thank f-ck England won!” he shouted. The result meant that Williams had 65,000 euphoric fans in the palm of his hand. And this most natural of showmen wasted no time in harnessing that energy to provide two hours of hugely entertaining, occasionally surreal music.

 His show was like a mash-up of The Two Ronnies, This Is Your Life and Live Aid. Rather than simply belting out his greatest hits – Strong, Rock DJ, Millennium, Feel, No Regrets, all performed and rapturously received – Williams took us through a potted history of his career, interspersed with guests, cover versions and monologues about overcoming addiction. “Tonight will be therapy for me,” he half-joked, “and it will be entertainment for you.” 

But what stopped the show from tipping into self-indulgence was its mixture of blow-out production – 10 backing dancers, fireworks galore – and Williams’s dry humour. He has a neck tattoo of the Two Ronnies’ trademark glasses, and it was Messrs Barker and Corbett whom he channelled with visual gags – he hugged a mini cardboard cut-out of Oasis’s Noel Gallagher in a nod to previous feuds – and bawdy repartee. 

 Sporting a grey mullet, the 50-year-old performed in an all-white outfit. Recall that Williams was only 16 when he joined boy band Take That in 1990; he has lived his entire adult life in the public eye. We were shown Take That’s first video, for a song called Do What U Like, which was basically a slice of soft pornography. (The screen paused on Williams’s naked bottom.) A Take That medley duly followed. From here Williams talked us through his ejection from the band and his infamous boozed-up appearance at the “Britpop” Glastonbury of 1995; so he covered Oasis and brought out Supergrass’s Gaz Coombes for Alright. The strangest moment was when Danny Dyer appeared with a 44-strong brass band from the Coldstream and Welsh Guards to perform Blur’s Parklife. “Let’s ’ave it, Hyde Park,” Dyer shouted. A tenuous inclusion? Yes. Will I ever forget it? No. 

Williams’s retrospection was perhaps about teeing up the audience for a forthcoming biopic called Better Man. Whatever the reasons, it was a fun slab of nostalgia. Only the hardest of hearts would have failed to have been moved by his dedications to his watching family and the hug he gave his wife Ayda and daughter Teddy at the end of a rousing Angels. And what of his synchronicity with England’s sporting victories? Well, here’s a thought: in two years’ time, BST coincides with the football World Cup. The festival should book him now.

 No further performances