Robbie Williams, Dingwalls, London review • DIY Magazine

It’s gone midnight, and international stadium-filling pop star Robbie Williams is performing a song in which Morrissey - yes, that one - is communicating with him via some kind of one-sided telekinesis to about 600 people inside Camden’s Dingwalls. ‘Morrissey’, he tells the assembly-sized crowd, was written with former Take That bandmate, Gary Barlow.

It’s a bop - perhaps unsurprisingly - but that this fails to register as something strange goes a considerable way to expressing just how surreal the evening is. Between a late stage time (Robbie having rushed here straight from recording with Graham Norton’s chat show), an audience that’s one-hundredth of that for his previous London headline show, and a distinct lack of bells and whistles compared to the self-styled ‘King of Entertainment’’s usual fare, tonight’s showcase of his now-delayed ‘Britpop’ (“We’re pretending it’s not about Taylor Swift, but it’s about Taylor Swift,” he quips of moving its October release date to early February) sees him, for the first time in several decades, go full pelt on stage while those assembled in front aren’t capable of following, echoing or screaming along to every beat, key change or syllable.

From tonight’s set it looks like ‘Cocky’ and ‘Bite Your Tongue’ - described as being the kind of song he’d “always wanted to make” - should become highlights of the album; the former is a glam rock-inspired stomp, the latter, alongside ‘Morrissey’, is akin to IDLES-gone-pop. But even nostalgia and familiarity aside, it’s the first half of the gig (ahead of this preview of his forthcoming 13th studio album) that’s ultimately and unsurprisingly the best part.

For tonight, this outing of his 1997 debut ‘Life Thru A Lens’, he’s performing as “Robert”, the artist to Robbie’s affinity for jazz hands and spectacle. Each song comes prefaced with a short introduction of its conception, where he’s as self-effacing and matter-of-fact as most have come to expect following both his Netflix documentary series and 2023 film ‘Better Man’. (Here, anecdotes about intoxication ('Clean') and boarding a flight to Miami to work alongside US songwriter Desmond Child with nary an idea in his pocket sit alongside the heartfelt ‘Baby Girl Window’, written for actor Samantha Beckinsale about the death of her father).

The restriction of playing it in order only further highlights the qualities that made the hits, well, hits. Out of its usual gig-closing pomp and city-sized singalong, the intimate emotion of ‘Angels’ is able to shine. Conversely, ‘Let Me Entertain You’ - which most often acts as concert opener (“Where else could it go?” he shrugs, with a wink) - oozes with the ‘70s glam it intended. Predictably, the venue setting suits the record’s indie rock spots (‘Lazy Days’; ‘Old Before I Die’; ‘South of the Border’), and as such, when Robbie-the-entertainer does threaten to barge his way in, its by way of charismatic band frontman rather than solo pop behemoth (even if partially due to the lack of available space to offer more than the odd shoulder shimmy between bandmates).

So, surreal, yes. Even the comparatively massive Academy dates planned for the new year will themselves still seem tiny to the star, but the lack of ‘entertainer’ does not lack of entertaining make - and if what he’s shared tonight of ‘Britpop’ is any kind of signpost, letting more of ‘Robert’ in on those larger stages would be no bad thing at all.