Delivering a jam-packed park of people from their own physical discomfort isn’t as easy as it looks. At least, it isn’t as easy as Robbie Williams makes it look. And yet even by his standards, Live 8 was something else. For audiences and A&R men alike, Robbie Williams is a dream. Not only does he occasionally turn out an Angels, but he’ll also sell you a rubbish song like Let Me Entertain You and leave you picking stardust out of your hair.

But what if he knuckled down to make a great album? When news of Williams’s new collaborator first emerged, some sections of the press queried his choice. Stephen Duffy hadn’t troubled the charts since his mid-1980s “Tin Tin” incarnation. How could that possibly work? Intensive Care is most of the answer. On songs like King of Bloke and Bird and Please Don’t Die, Williams has lost the audible smirk and learnt about restraint.

Prompted by his 30th birthday, he’s also started wondering why true love has yet to find him. But because he comes not from rock or indie but pop, Williams understands that confronting your dysfunctionality doesn’t have to be a painful experience for the listener. You know In Utero? The Plastic Ono Band? This is neither.

So much then for murmurings that early demos of Intensive Care sounded like one big new wave experiment. Current single Tripping bears as much resemblance to Bloc Party as the Police did to Gang of Four.

The Trouble with Me is sung over a three-note motif which (deliberately?) echoes PiL’s This is Not a Love Song — but, unlike last year’s Radio, the achingly pretty harmonies of the chorus are a million miles away from wanton artiness. This is, after all, an artist who has always grasped the needs of the milkman.

And come Christmas, it’s hard to imagine a song more worthy of the top spot than Advertising Space, not least because it boasts his best lyric to date. Singing about the death of Elvis, he’s never sounded so connected to his subject: “They poisoned you with compromise/ At what point did you realise/ Everybody loved your life but you?”

With these new career highs ringing in our ears, it’s inevitable that two or three tunes will draw fingers to the skip button: the Stones pastiche A Place to Crash and the cruddy frat-rock of Your Gay Friend most readily leap to mind. What remains, though, is probably the best album that Robbie Williams can make while maintaining his profile. If that sounds like a backhanded compliment, it’s not meant to be. Elton John, Rod Stewart and George Michael haven ’t made an album of satisfying enormo-pop for donkeys’ years. It’s not that they don’t want to, just that they don’t know how to. For Williams it’s a cinch. Over a gospel upswell and chords of sweet country-rock languor, Make Me Pure admits: “I don’t have to try/ I just dial it in.”

He may be lazy, but he’s not stupid. You wouldn’t make confessions like that on an album which will lead people to hold them against you. This time around, he’s made an effort.

Pete Paphides

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