Robbie Williams has admitted that he would love to beat The Beatles‘ record for Number One albums with his forthcoming ‘BRITPOP’ LP.
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The former Take That singer is currently tied on the same number of chart topping albums as The Fab Four, which currently stands at 15. If his new record goes to Number One when it drops on February 6, he will finally beat that record.
When asked how he feels about the prospect, Williams told The Scott Mills Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2: “Yeah I want that more than anything in my career right now, of course I do.”
He added: “Let me just qualify that by saying I’ve broken the matrix. When that sort of record is mentioned and it’s me, I don’t know how that’s happened, I just know that it has. It massively makes my imposter syndrome come out to play and the first thing I feel is embarrassed about it.”
“And then the other bit, where the ego steps in is going, ‘It’s outside of my family, my kids and my wife, the most important thing to me in the world’,” he added. “Do I think I deserve that? No. Am I on the precipice of maybe achieving that? Yeah. Should I grab it with both arms? Yeah. And can I learn to be grateful and happy for it? Grateful, maybe, proud, I’m not sure yet, we’ll see if that happens.”
Williams went on to say that “all that happens when good things happen to me is that I exhale that the bad thing hasn’t happened. I don’t actually sit in it and go, ‘Yeeeeah!’”
He added: “At the end of an incredible gig or an incredible run and people go, ‘That was amazing wasn’t it?’, all I’m doing backstage is going, ‘The bad thing didn’t happen, good.’”
Williams delayed the release of his 13th studio album to avoid a clash with Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life Of A Showgirl’.
Williams has already previewed ‘BRITPOP’ with the singles ‘Rocket’, which features guitar from Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi, ‘Spies’, ‘Human’ and ‘Pretty Face’, and he also played the album in its entirety at a very intimate show at Dingwalls in London in October.
Telling the crowd why he chose to delay the release of the album, he told the crowd: “We’re all pretending it’s not about Taylor Swift, but it fucking is. Here’s the truth: I want 16 Number One albums.”
“Taylor then decided to put her album out the same weekend as me. I was like, ‘For fuck’s sake! I’ll put it out the next week’, and they were like, ‘She does these other deluxe versions’. I was like, ‘Fucking hell! Can I put it out the week after that then?’ They were like, ‘Oasis might be around then’… ‘For fuck’s sake! Let’s do it in fucking February when no one’s got an album out’.”
Elsewhere, Williams recently teased a future reunion with Take That, saying he is “sure” he’ll perform with the group again.
