Last Monday, Robbie Williams made an announcement. "I'm really bored with Robbie Williams," he told a startled reporter. "After November, I'm going to kill him off. I'm everywhere." Williams, it seemed, was finally sick of his own ubiquity. And well he might be: the story was pounced on by the tabloids, as were the preceding weeks' thrilling Robbie exclusives, including Robbie plays golf, Robbie walks along beach and the truly gripping Robbie considers buying aquarium.
Four days later, however, Williams is on stage at a gig that has broken Irish records by selling 40,000 tickets in a matter of hours. He flexes his muscles to appreciative cheers, announces the address of his hotel and performs a jokey Irish jig. He does not look sick of his own ubiquity. Frankly, he appears to be enjoying it.
Such contradictions are central to Williams's appeal. It's difficult to think of another artist who inspires such incredible devotion, not from screaming teenagers but from dressed-down twentysomethings. More than any pop star before him, Williams has marketed his own personality: ordinary northern bloke, given to showing off but bewildered by his own popularity, beset by human, drink-and-drug failings.
On stage he alternates between smugly beckoning for applause and pulling knowing faces that suggest his success is a joke in which his audience is complicit. It's a very British form of stardom, riven with irony and self-deprecation, but Williams is a remarkable performer, capable of projecting his persona across the vastness of a rugby ground. He can fill a stadium in every sense of the phrase.
Williams's songs are ruthlessly effective concoctions of cod-Britpop guitar riffs, stadium-rock bombast, light dance beats and hummable melodies. They are studded with undemanding pop references: James Bond themes, current chart hits (tonight he sings DJ Pied Piper's Do You Really Like It over Let Me Entertain You) and old pop classics. Supreme marries a lighter-waving rock ballad to strings stolen from Gloria Gaynor's disco karaoke favourite I Will Survive.
It is the sort of music local radio programmers dream about. As a result, his music is omnipresent, his live set an endless stream of hit singles including a cover of Queen's We Are the Champions. Crowd-pleasing stuff, and the crowd are duly pleased. Williams's bogeymen - the press and Take That - get booed, his every grimace is rapturously received. After two songs, Williams breaks down in tears at the ferocity of the crowd's reaction. The chances of him becoming pop's own Reggie Perrin by November seem slim to say the least.
· Robbie Williams is at the Millennium Stadium, Cardiff (0870-558 2582), July 14 and 15, then tours.
