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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/'By PAUL SCOTT
Last updated at 23:28pm on 22nd September 2006
Robbie Williams: Rachel GilsonHoled up amid the bucolic splendour of a lavish country house hotel early this week, Robbie Williams was in an unutterably bad temper.
Pacing the floor of his suite as his retinue of advisers and hangers-on sat heads bowed in embarrassed silence, the singer launched into a four-letter-word-strewn stream of consciousness, complaining about everything from his constant insomnia to how he feels his fans don't appreciate him enough.
It was a somewhat erratic performance and one that - sadly for the talented Williams - has become an all too regular occurrence in recent weeks.
Five months into a gruelling world tour (this week he finished the UK leg after playing to more than half a million British fans) and his fragile health is of grave concern to those around him. Not least because it is threatening to cost his record company - and the star - a fortune.
This week, his management team announced that Robbie's £10 million tour of the Far East, planned for November, is being cancelled as they finally confirmed rumours that the star is exhausted and stressed.
On Tuesday, his understandably jittery handlers put him on a flight back to his home in Los Angeles for a two-week break, in the hope that he will recuperate in time to resume the tour in South America next month.
Some within his entourage are openly speculating that he won't come back.
Last night, his father Pete told me: 'He is exhausted. He's hardly been home for ten months and he just needs to sleep in his own bed.'
At the same time, the planned release of his new album (tastelessly titled Rudebox) has been thrown into disarray over a vitriolic and ranting attack by the former Take That singer on his exmanager, contained in the lyrics of one of its songs.
Threats of legal action have led to panic at EMI, with the record label facing the possibility of having to hold up the October 23 launch date amid rumours that the track will have to be scrubbed.
Meanwhile, Williams's lawyers are preparing for a £1million libel writ from Nigel Martin-Smith, the manager who masterminded Take That's rise to fame and the subject of the song's scathing lyrics.
Martin-Smith is incandescent over the track, called The 90s, which makes a series of allegations about his treatment of Williams, who joined Take That as a 16-year-old.
But EMI's plan to jettison the song, or at the very least bleep out some of the lyrics (it has already removed the offending track from promotional copies of the CD), has not gone down well with Williams himself, the Mail has learned.
Insiders at the Williams camp reveal that the star has been advised by his legal team to make no further reference to the dispute with Martin-Smith for fear of inflaming the row.
Hardly surprising, then, that there were gasps of horror from Robbie's management and invited record company executives when the unpredictable star went on stage at the Milton Keynes Bowl last week and rapped an impromptu version of the potentially highly defamatory song to 65,000 of his fans.
One line includes the words: 'He's such an evil man. I used to fantasise I'd take a Stanley knife and go and play with his eyes.' All very unpleasant, and enough to have his lawyers squirming in case a recording of the section of the show becomes public. Too late, a fan, who filmed the unscheduled rendition on her mobile phone, has already posted the clip on the highly popular YouTube website.
As members of the audience are heard yelling abuse about Martin-Smith, Williams tells them with mock incredulity: 'I don't know what he is upset about.'
No wonder Robbie's friends and fans are worried about his behaviour.
This week, Elton John, who used to be close to Williams before they fell out when Robbie bizarrely accused him of once trying to kidnap him to get him off drugs, went public with his concerns.
He said: 'Robbie is the No.1 star in the world. He should let the other s*** go and, if he can't, then he needs to see someone and talk about it. All he is doing is burning a hole inside of himself, eating him up, making him angry and miserable.'
Sound advice - but if recent events are anything to go by, advice Williams is unlikely to heed.
What a shame, because Robbie is great performer who is adored by his fans. By the time his Close Encounters tour ends in Australia in December he will have played to three million people across the globe. It has already won him a place in the Guinness Book Of Records for selling out 1.6 million tickets in a day.
At the same time, he has won his battle against drink and drugs that once not only threatened his career, but also his life. So what, then, is going on with Robbie and why, at the age of 32, does he still seem so intent on self-destruction?
It is no secret that he has been harbouring an unhealthy obsession with Martin-Smith since he walked out of Take That in 1995, complaining the control exerted on him led him to alcoholism and drug-taking.
Since then, he has wasted no chance to pour opprobrium on his Svengali-like ex-manager and his former Take That companions (he refused to join them on their comeback tour this year, and last week was still mocking them from the stage).
But at the same time, he seems incapable of enjoying the success (£100 million fortune) his talent has earned him. Friends say he has become increasingly nostalgic for the life he had in Stoke-on-Trent before he found fame.
He has spent days in front of his computer on the Friends Reunited website, tracking down his old school chums and telling those close to him that he wishes he could go back to being unknown.
His message, posted to former pupils at St Margaret Ward High School in Tunstall, jokes about his one-time ambition to be a holiday camp entertainer.
'It's turned out well for me so far, got the interview at Butlin's and haven't looked back,' he writes. 'If you need an entertainer for your children's party, I do magic tricks and everything!'
But his nostalgia for his schooldays is also at the root of one bizarre episode which involves a former childhood sweetheart, Rachel Gilson, whom he has described as his 'one and only true love'. They dated at school and have been in touch on and off in the intervening years.
As he became increasingly wistful for a life long gone, he decided to look up the girl he described with unflinching certainty to friends as 'the one that got away'.
Those same friends, it should be said, have become all too used to such assertions. Williams, they say, is wont to indulge in flights of fancy about women he barely knows, imagining himself married and playing happy families within minutes of meeting a new woman.
Last summer, Williams rang Rachel out of the blue at her home in Bury, Lancs. There was little small talk. Neither of them was getting any younger, he told her. He was finally 'ready to settle down'.
Not surprisingly, Rachel was shocked, because their relationship had been little more than a playground crush in the final year of school.
With the impetuousness that has become familiar to those around him, Robbie told Rachel to pack a bag and said his PA would arrange to fly her out to Los Angeles that week. Rachel was swept off her feet and agreed.
His scheme, however, left some within his entourage openmouthed. What, they speculated, were the odds of Williams enjoying a 'happy-ever-after' with a girl he hardly knew?
Five days later, they had their answer. Amid claims that she blamed his bizarre behaviour on the anti-depressants he takes daily, a tearful Rachel fled home to Britain.
Friends report that the pair spent the first couple of days at his Beverly Hills mansion like a couple of loved-up teenagers, discussing their future together and exploring his adopted city.
But then they had a petty, but heated row. They tried to talk the following day, but the conversation ended in tearful recriminations. By the end of it, Robbie told Rachel that he was sorry but he wanted her to leave.
Rachel spent one last traumatic night in the house and departed for England the following day. In the intervening months, according to those around him, he has embarked on a series of short-lived affairs with women in Los Angeles including, it is claimed, U.S. model Jessica Cole. Meanwhile, on tour he remains surrounded by a retinue of willing groupies.
His constant companion, however, is his childhood friend Jonathan Wilkes, who performs a nightly and highly camp performance of Me And My Shadow with Williams on stage.
Williams and Wilkes, who is married with a baby son, have endured constant rumours about their sexuality - much, it should said, of their own making.
They have given themselves the nicknames 'Flank' and 'Spank' and allowed themselves to be filmed semi-naked in a paddling pool on Robbie's current tour, jokily discussing whether the singer might end up settling down with a man.
Such behaviour was particularly strange, given that Robbie took legal action nine months ago over a Sunday newspaper's false claim that he was involved in a gay encounter in the toilet of a Manchester nightclub.
At the same time, the star's fans have been posting their concerns for his health on a series of fan websites after he appeared to be sweating profusely during one of his Milton Keynes shows last week. Indeed, one pop reviewer described him as looking 'bloated and dishevelled'.
If that were not enough, his new album's title track has also had a mauling - with one critic labelling it 'the worst I've ever heard.'
And a source within his entourage told the Mail: 'The past few weeks before we arrived back in Britain have been pretty awful. Some days Rob has been sleeping till 3pm, then saying he can't go on stage that night.
'The tour is draining for everyone, but particularly for Rob, and he has not looked at all happy. In the end, the only thing to do was to cancel the Far East section.
'Some pretty terrified promoters from South America and Australia are desperate to know if their tours will be next to go.'
Robbie's father said: 'He's been getting through on adrenalin, but he will rest completely for a couple of weeks and do nothing. He'll have a break and finish the tour.'
His legions of fans (and those worried record company moneymen) will be hoping he's right.
. Paul Scott is the author of Robbie Williams: Facing The Ghosts, published by Andre Deutsch at £6.99.
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