For the least straightforward of pop stars, the least straightforward of comebacks. Being away for three years has undoubtedly done Robbie Williams’ profile the world of good. When we last saw him in this country, it was for the Rudebox album which, as Williams noted, was “welcomed like a ginger stepchild”. Rudebox sold “only” 4.5 million copies, which, compared with his pomp — seven-times platinum for 2002’s Escapology — was a considerable downturn.

The British king of pop had made an album that was, to his constituency, unforgivably experimental — all drug confessions, beat-boxes and Eighties hip-hop — and then followed it up with an extended investigation into UFOs in a frankly boggling Radio 4 documentary. He’d tipped over from “loveable pop eccentric” to the kind of person who corners you at closing time and tells you he’s been probed by a Grey Alien, ie, lost that vital pink cowboy hat-wearing, hen-night massive.

But since then, Take That have reformed, UK pop has taken a turn for the weird — Amy Winehouse’s hair; La Roux’s hair, come to that — and Britain is more inclined to re-embrace one of its more eccentric singles-practitioners. Williams’ much-heralded appearance on The X Factor wasn’t the dream re-entry to the pop stratosphere: sweating, wild-eyed and struggling with a stage door that wouldn’t open, he came across less like a returning pop hero, more like someone who’d just nicked a jacket from Zara, and was worried about being stopped by security. The subsequent, eyebrow-raised tabloid coverage suggested that he might need to spend a longer spell on the subs bench before finally returning to the pop pitch.

But at last night’s gig at the Roundhouse — the first of Radio 1’s Electric Proms season — Williams showed no such nerves. In jeans and a swagger, Williams launched into the current No 2 single — Bodies — like a man who had not only paid for his Zara jacket, but could slap his credit card down on the counter and say: “I’ll buy all 1,560 stores, thank you.” Williams’ core appeal is a finely-calibrated balancing act between supreme self-confidence and teenage vulnerability, and as he introduced Feel — “I’m sure my aunt’s looking down on me now. She’s not dead; she’s just really condescending” — he not only aced his core appeal, but introduced about as fine a piece of pop as has been in the Top Ten in the last ten years. And when he revealed his new tattoo — a Take That logo on his wrist — while explaining that he’d recently shown it to his ex-bandmates, expecting an emotional reaction, only to have them all sigh “What a dick”, you could feel dozens of pink hen-night hats being taken out of storage, in advance of the now-inevitable Take That reunion.

But the majority of his set-list was an oddly tentative choice for a man with 29 Top 20 singles available to stuff in the back of the net. We had six songs from the new album, an album track from Swing When You’re Winning, and only with a finale of Angels, Millennium and a cover of the Buggles’ Video Killed The Radio Star, did he finally play like a multi-platinum stadium star, giving a small venue in North London the surprise of its life.

Williams continues to be one of pop¹s most diverting one-man soap-operas. But you do wonder when he¹ll find the songs that tell as compelling a story as his own life in the tabloids. It would ultimately, you sense, be very good for his nerves.

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