A few years ago Mojo magazine canvassed its contributors and came up with 50 quintessentially eccentric British albums. Jostling for pole position were records by Syd Barrett, Kate Bush, Scott Walker and Julian Cope. Should they choose to revise that list in a few years Robbie Williams’s seventh album will be up there too.

We might finally have to start believing him when he says that he doesn’t want to be big in America. Listening to Rudebox you wonder if he even wants to be big in his own country. More likely, he’s past caring. Which is an exciting place for any pop star to be.

If you’ve already heard the first fruits of his collaboration with the production of Kelvin Andrews and Danny Spencer, you’ll be forgiven for not rushing out for this. Even performing Rudebox’s eponymous opener live to more than 250,000 fans in the week of its release failed to push it higher than No 4.

It’s a false start, however. On other collaborations the three plough a wonky electropop furrow that reconciles Williams the wit with the Stafford boy blooded on Eighties pop. In particular, Never Touch that Switch is sinuous synth-funk of the first order.

Williams’s blossoming facility as a wordsmith repeatedly takes the breath away. Even if you want to believe that the rhyme on She’s Madonna — “No man on earth could say that he don’t wanna” — came with assistance from his co-writers the Pet Shop Boys, it’s clearly Williams who shoulders the conceptual burden on The Actor. Here, a sleek slice of moody Europop frames a take in which the singer attempts to locate a kernel of humanity in his thespian conquest.

Coming from anyone else, the amounts of autobiography Williams insists on sharing would have long become tedious, and you fear the worst when you see that the penultimate two songs on here are called The 80s and The 90s. But, for an album made so casually, the attention to detail stops you in your tracks: “School was a laugh/ They didn’t have ADD/ Thick was the term they used for me,” he sings on the former, while minor chords hint at the pain.

Of course, we all know what happens to Williams in The 90s — “I met the other guys/ One seemed like a cock/ ‘I think it’s going to be like New Kids on the Block’ ” — but that does nothing to dissipate the sense of alarm when he recalls facing his own demise after leaving Take That, at the age of just 19.

More than a decade on, Williams has dealt with another career crossroads in the only way he knows how — by doing exactly as he pleases.

PETE PAPHIDES

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