The ego has blundered

New Albums: Robbie Williams may be fed up with being a star, but does he have to take it out on his fans?

Robbie Williams

Escapology

Thea Gilmore

Songs From The Gutter

David Arnold / Madonna

Die Another Day

WHEN HE RELEASED his first album in America Robbie Williams called it The Ego Has Landed. Nice joke, even if the Americans didn’t buy it — or the album. But now that Williams is just about the biggest British pop star there is (in Britain, anyway) the ego has taken off again big time. Indeed, so inflated has Williams’s image of himself become that it casts a shadow over his latest album, Escapology (Chrysalis/EMI).

“Hello, did you miss me?/ I know I’m hard to resist,” he sings at the start of Handsome Man, a song which perfectly encapsulates the mixture of bumptiousness and insecurity that defines Williams’s