Smash hit

When Williams turned up he had a different plan. “We’re just going to the cornershop for cigarettes,” he told his management. “We’ll only be ten minutes.”

As soon as we stepped out of the door, he grabbed my hand and shouted “Run!” We ran to the pub, where Williams ordered two drinks each, “to save time. We need to be back in nine minutes and seventeen seconds,” he said.

Within seven minutes, however, he’d explained that he had known me in a past life, that San Francisco was destined to fall into the ocean, but that he, Williams, had to attempt to save it, and that he was being watched over by the ghost of Richard Beckinsale from Rising Damp. Why, only the other week Beckinsale had materialised on an InterCity train and told Williams to turn back from his mission to the buffet carriage in search of beer. “He’s one of my angels, ” Williams said.

Discussing these topics on the way back to the management office — possibly still with our drinks in our hands — Robbie revealed that he was going to die before he was 30. “I know I am,” he said. “That’s just what’s going to happen.”

I suggested that all the things he was thinking are the kind of things you’re apt to think when you’re young, have an overactive imagination, and are constantly off your face. “Yeah, probably,” he said, looking like it would be nice to believe such a thing, but also entirely impossible.

Before we went back to his management’s office, he carefully ate a mint.

A few months later we went out and, with possibly unnecessary surrealism, got trashed in a branch of Garfunkels. When we went back to his flat there was red-wine vomit on the floor, “from two bisexual girls who came over. I didn’t shag them.”

The walls were lined with books beautifully bound in white leather. The effect of them over 20 square yards was quite mesmerising. When you opened them, they were all blank inside.

“I’m not gay, but I’d like to kiss Brian Molko from Placebo,” Williams said, struggling to hoist a guitar on to his knee. He sang a song “I wrote last week, actually”. It went: “Hair is the new hat/ Brown is the new black/ She’s looking real drab/ Just out of rehab/ I’m talking football/ You’re talking AbFab." “It’s about Tara Palmer-Tomkinson,” he said. “I got drunk and told her about it. It’s not very complimentary." Three months later the song appeared as the title track for his debut album, Life Thru a Lens.

There were a few phone calls after we said goodbye. One Wednesday night, two weeks later, he rang at 2am to tell me he was very drunk on champagne and about to take Rohypnol. I thought that might kill him, and told him so. He took it anyway, and lived, which made me feel quite a lightweight.

I can’t remember quite when the calls stopped. I think it was around the fifth time I said I didn’t want to go and see Lenny Beige, self-styled King of Cabaret, with him. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy Rob’s company; I just hated Lenny Beige.

At that time in his life, Robbie Williams seemed utterly lost. The only thing he seemed to have faith in was getting out of his mind because, if he succeeded in getting out of his own mind, he might get into someone else’s, and like it better there. My husband said we should have him round to the house, give him a baked potato and play him some Crowded House.

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