How Robbie Williamss 80 million Rudebox deal ruined EMI
Robbie Williams looks 50 shades of miserable throughout the new Netflix documentary documenting his rise, fall and baffling hatred of Gary Barlow. The only exception comes midway through his 2006 European tour when he tells fans watching him soundcheck that they’re in for a treat. “We’ve done a new song. We’re rehearsing this for the very first time. Nobody’s heard this song yet. Not even I – and I wrote it. That’s weird,” he says. For the first and last time, he glows with enthusiasm.
He’s still giving off happy vibrations as he plunges into the opening verse –seemingly unaware of the horror stealing over his audience. “OK then, back to basics,” Robbie raps, sounding like Mike Skinner from The Streets recovering from a chest infection. “Grab your shell toes and your fat laces.”
Williams had just introduced an unsuspecting universe to Rudebox – the best tune he had ever written and the one through which he could show the public “the real Robbie”. That was Williams’s logic at the time, at least. As it transpired, Rudebox and the accompanying album of the same name were the biggest collective disaster of his career – even more catastrophic than the leather trousers he sported in the video to Take That’s Could It Be Magic.
He almost didn’t get over Rudebox. His record label didn’t recover at all. In 2002, Williams had signed an £80 million contract with EMI – twice the previous biggest deal for a British artist (Elton John) and well ahead of what the industry was offering The Rolling Stones, REM or Michael Jackson. At the time, Robbie quipped, “I’m rich beyond my wildest dreams.”
EMI executives may have felt a chill even as the ink dried. By the time Williams struck the deal, he had already fallen out with songwriting partner Guy Chambers – midwife to lucrative smashes such as Angels and Rock DJ. Now, the only thing on the rocks was their relationship – and this at a time when EMI needed the hits to keep coming.
Initially, the contract seemed like money well spent. The final Williams-Chambers LP, Escapology, came out in November 2002 and sold 6.5 million copies. The following year, Williams played three nights at Knebworth. Robbie could do no wrong.
But as he adjusted to life without Chambers – their relationship had frayed when Williams tried to assert greater control in the studio – EMI saw the value of its investment shrivel. Williams’s next album, 2005’s Intensive Care, was his first without Chambers. It did a not-shabby 6.2 million units, though its big singles – Sin Sin Sin and Tripping – were quickly forgotten.
And then came Rudebox, which limped its way to a pitiful two million sales – less than half what EMI had been banking on. The timing could not have been worse. By 2006, the internet was having a devastating impact on the music industry – and nowhere was the downturn more acute than at EMI, then one of the traditional “big four” major labels.
With the tide going out, EMI was discovering who its friends were. In December 2005, The Beatles’s Apple Records had launched a lawsuit seeking $50 million in unpaid royalties (an undisclosed settlement was agreed in 2007). In desperation, in May 2006, EMI launched an audacious bid for its rival Warner. Warner rejected the approach – and made an unsuccessful $4.6 billion counter-bid for EMI. By year’s end, EMI would post losses of £260 million.
The entire industry was heading toward the rocks – but, saddled by the disastrous Robbie Williams deal, EMI was having the greatest difficulty staying afloat. In 2007, the company was acquired by venture capitalists Terra Firma. Amid swingeing lay-offs, Radiohead, The Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney headed for the exit. By 2010, losses had swollen to £1.75 billion. Twelve months later, EMI was acquired by its rival Universal. The jig was up. Today, EMI lives on as a zombie label owned by Universal.
Robbie Williams wasn’t solely to blame for EMI’s demise. But Rudebox certainly hadn’t helped to counter the impression nobody at EMI knew what they were doing – particularly when stories surfaced of unsold Rudebox CDs being shipped to China, where they were reportedly mulched and put to use (see below). Williams had been steamrolled, too. He acknowledged the dire impact of Rudebox recently. “My biggest regret is putting that out as the first single,” he told DIY.
That realisation was a long time coming. In the Netflix documentary, he predicts that Rudebox will be his “biggest single since Angels”. Today, he regards it more as a cursed negative image to Angels – undoing much of the good work of his breakthrough ballad.
“It’s my second most important single because Angels gave me the career and Rudebox heralded the end of my imperial phase. So in a way I was right, but not in the way I wanted to be.”
Rudebox, the album, was the product of a period of sustained upheaval in Williams’ life. In 2002, Williams fell out with his musical soulmate Chambers. In the new documentary, Williams recalls bringing his song Come Undone to Chambers. “I took it to Guy, and he said, “Hmm, it’s not very good.” And I’m like, “Oh, we’ve got a problem, this is a problem.”
Williams had a lot of problems in 2006 when he was working on Rudebox. The stage fright with which he had struggled on and off through his career was back. He was taking prescription drugs to deal with the stress of touring. And he was desperate for people to see the “real” Robbie – not understanding that it was the fantasy pop star of Angels and Millennium that audiences had responded to in the first place.
Rudebox was also an attempt to reconnect with his Stoke-on-Trent roots. A little bit of Williams had never left behind the streets of his hometown. Even as he travelled the world with Take That, part of him was still the cheeky imp who’d been expelled from school and who had impressed his pals with his amateur rapping.
Following the breakup with Chambers, he circled back to these formative experiences. Around then, he was introduced to two hometown musicians whom he felt could help him locate his true artistic identity. They were producers Danny Spencer and Kelvin Andrews. Or, as Williams described them, “Two Pharrell Williams in Stoke-on-Trent.”
Pharrell was the production genius behind The Neptunes and a collaborator with Justin Timberlake, Kelis and Gwen Stefani. Spencer had a murkier backstory as one half of Candy Flip, the “Madchester” duo who had scored an unlikely early 1990s hit with their woozy cover of Strawberry Fields Forever.
Those Strawberry Fields were transformed into the mean streets of Stoke on Rudebox. The song began with Spencer and Andrews contacting Williams out of the blue. “They sent me an email with a beat on it. The Rudebox beat,” said Williams. Hearing the groove was like being on drugs, he said. “I nodded [along]. Usually, that nod comes from, “I’m t_____ed – are you t_____ed?”. Now it’s – oh, that’s good.”
The track allowed Williams to make music that finally spoke to him. Forget the pious balladeer of Angels or Strong. This – the irreverent chap in the tracksuit – was the real Robbie.
“We were listening back to Rudebox. My internal dialogue went, ‘do stuff like the stuff you like’. I’m eight albums in. I saw the whole ‘Robbie’ thing coming to a close,” commented Williams in an interview released by EMI in 2006. “This has opened up a thousand other doors.”
It also kickstarted a thousand savage reviews. The first came before the album was released, courtesy of The Sun’s Victoria Newton, who described the title track as “rap with a silent c” and the “worst song” she had ever heard. Touring the Continent that summer, audiences seemed open to this new, rhyming Robbie. Once he hit the UK, he noticed a difference: as soon as he plunged into Rudebox, everyone took a collective step back.
“Perception was a motherf_____ on that album,” Williams told Chris Heath in his 2017 book Reveal: Robbie Williams. “They’ve been waiting for ages to give me a good kicking, you know, and kind of putting the boot in here and there, but then it was a like a collective, ‘Quick! He’s down! Jump on him!’… It was a moment of perceived weakness in a glittering career.”
The rest of the album is nowhere near as dire. It is an unsatisfying hodgepodge, however. Mark Ronson adds an unnecessary funkiness to Lovelight, the Pet Shop Boys seem ill at ease working with Williams on That’s Madonna – a song inspired by the time Robbie saw Madonna in concert.
Then there was the controversy around The 90s, a rap about his days in Take That. The lyrics earned him a lawsuit from the band’s old manager, Nigel Martin-Smith, who felt that Williams had implied that he had stolen from Take That. Williams ended up paying costs and damages between £300,000 and £500,000.
“I told him I didn’t want damages and would happily waive them if he would meet me to chat and put all this negativity behind us. I said we should be friends again, but he refused to meet me. So now he has to pay me damages,” said Martin-Smith. “Did I lock him in a cage or stick pins in his eyes? I’m not bitter, but it still hurts. It’s funny what fame does to human beings.”
Worse was to follow. Rudebox sold some 150,000 units on the week of release – far below his label expectations. It was soon overtaken by Take That’s comeback LP, Beautiful World – reversing the narrative that Robbie had eclipsed the band after his departure. In the end, and as already explained, it moved 2.6 million copies – compared to the more than six million shifted by the previous year’s Intensive Care. Williams was correct: his imperial phase had ended.
The humiliations would grow worse. By 2008, reports surfaced about unsold copies of Rudebox were being pulped and used to pave Chinese roads. Chris Heath later questioned the veracity of that story in Reveal. “I’m pretty sure it’s a complete fabrication,” former EMI chairman Tony Wadsworth tells Heath, explaining that CDs were manufactured to order: there was no need to stock-pile unsold copies of Rudebox.
Either way, Rudebox was more than just an underwhelming record. It had given the world a glimpse of the insecurities and manic desire to be loved that twitched just below Williams’s skin. It was an authentic glimpse of his toil and trouble. The problem may have been that, in the end, the picture it painted was all too real. “That was how Rudebox was to be remembered,” lamented Chris Heath. “As Robbie Williams’ legendary folly and failure.”
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