In the video for his seminal 2000 pop banger ‘Rock DJ’, Robbie Williams strips himself bare. He throws off his singlet and steps out of his jeans to reveal tight, tiger-printed Y-fronts; after a few moments of thrusting and bicep-flexing, he takes them off as well. Full-frontal nudity would seem like the logical endpoint of any striptease (Take That’s jelly-smeared buttocks serve as the final frames of their 1991 ‘Do What You Like’ video), but Williams is a solo artist now, and dammit he has something to say. His initially stricken expression settles into determination as he rips off his skin, tears into his blood-glistening muscles and pelts hunks of meat at the blank-faced women rollerskating around him, who feast on it carnivorously. By the end of the song, he is nothing more than a dancing skeleton.
It’s an expected, yet still powerful, image of how the British public, and our scabrous tabloid media, demand their pound of Williams’ flesh. A completely unexpected image – though ittedly deriving from that same fame-shunning impulse – underpins his musical biopic Better Man. In the film, the rockstar is played by a computer-generated chimp. One more time: a computer-generated chimp.
