Robbie Williams: “Here are the effects of boyband dysphoria”

“Boyband dysphoria”: Robbie Williams uses this term to talk about the dark side behind the success of groups considered idols of very young people. He refers to Take That, of course, the boyband that launched him, before his solo breakthrough, but the reflection to which the singer indulged in responding to the group’s former manager of “Pray”, “Relight my fire”, “Everything changes” and “Babe” can also concern other cases similar to those of Take That, starting with those One Direction who have been talked about again following the tragic death of Liam Payne.

Robbie Williams has decided to put pen to paper, virtually speaking, and write an open letter addressed to former Take That manager Nigel Martin-Smith, to contest the claims made by the latter about the singer’s drug addiction in a three-part documentary parts of the BBC, “Boybands Forever”, the first episode of which aired yesterday and focused on the difficulties that members of Take That, Westlife and the Five faced at the height of their popularity. Martin-Smith, who managed Take That in the 1990s, when Williams was still part of the band, before leaving in 1995 and embarking on a successful solo career, has said that when the singer became addicted to drugs, he was “clever and quite smart” to blame his drug use on being “in this band where he couldn’t have girlfriends or go out”. At one point, he said Williams acted like a “wanker” and was made out to be “bad.”

Now Williams has responded to Martin-Smith’s claims in a long post on Instagram, in which he wrote:

Let me respond to your statement. My drug taking was never your fault. My response to the distorted world around me is mine alone. How I chose to self-medicate is and has been something I will monitor and deal with throughout my life. It’s part of my nature and I would have had the same disease if I had been a taxi driver. I got there faster thanks to finances and having more money, while I tried in vain to counter the turbulence of the media centrifuge of pop stardom.

Williams then added:

If you follow the story closely, you can’t help but notice a pattern emerging. The boys join a boy band. The band becomes huge. Kids get sick. Some are lucky through a series of self-examinations and help overcome their experience. Others never manage to untangle the mess of wreckage from the past. I’m not violating anyone’s anonymity by sharing the side effects of boyband dysphoria that only affect us kids.

And he detailed the difficulties his bandmates had, recalling how Howard Donald became suicidal when Take That first broke up, how Mark Owen dealt with drug addictions , how Gary Barlow suffered from bulimia and how for Jason Orange “whatever effect Take That had on him is so painful he can’t even be a part of it anymore”.

Robbie Williams will tell his life story in a biopic, “Better man”, to be released on January 1, 2025. A computer-generated chimpanzee will play the pop star. That’s right.

The project is at least original, with even bizarre features. The voice of the animal, generated with CGI (computer-generated imagery) technology, will be that of the former Take That, while the body is that of the English actor Jonno Davies who wears a motion capture costume to record the movements. The chimpanzee’s eyes are those of the pop star thanks to high resolution scans. The film covers three decades of Williams’ career, from his early days with Take That, through the highs and lows of his career. “I’m Robbie Williams, one of the biggest pop stars in the world but I’ve always seen myself as a little less evolved,” the former member of boy band Take That says in the film’s trailer. And the wait is growing for the return to concert in Italy: the chosen date is June 17, 2025, when the singer’s new world tour will stop at the Nereo Rocco Stadium in Trieste.