One song on the record cost Robbie Williams a quarter of its income; the rest of the record made him the biggest-selling artist in Britain that year. The singer, two years out of the boy band Take That, was about to find out whether his solo gamble could absorb both a courtroom loss and a chart triumph. On October 26, 1998, Williams released I've Been Expecting You, his second studio album, through Chrysalis Records.
Millennium and the first solo number one
The album arrived with a lead single that had already changed what people expected from him. Millennium, issued that September, became Williams's first solo number one on the UK Singles Chart, knocking the girl group All Saints off the top. Its sales passed 400,000 copies within weeks, earning a gold certification that November. Suddenly the former boy-band member had a solo hit with the swagger of a James Bond theme, built on samples from John Barry's music for You Only Live Twice.
But the record also carried a hidden legal fault line. Williams and his co-writer Guy Chambers had started writing the album in Jamaica in the spring of 1998, and one track, Jesus in a Camper Van, lifted a line from the American songwriter Loudon Wainwright III's I Am the Way. Williams said he had heard the phrase from a young man in a rehabilitation clinic and only learned of its source after recording it. Ludlow Publishing sued, and in 2002 the publisher won the case and took 25% of the song's income.
By then the damage was done, and so was the fix. The album was reissued with Jesus in a Camper Van replaced by It's Only Us, the track that had served as the official theme for the FIFA 2000 video game. The original pressing had contained twelve main tracks plus two hidden ones, Stand Your Ground and Stalker's Day Off (I've Been Hanging Around). The reissue ran slightly shorter, and the borrowed line was gone from the official version.
Chart success at home and abroad
None of that slowed the record down. I've Been Expecting You debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart, Williams's second consecutive chart-topper, and became the best-selling album in the United Kingdom in 1998. By November 2016, British sales had reached 2,582,016 copies, enough for a ten-times platinum certification and the title of Williams's biggest-selling album in the country. Worldwide, the figure passed five million copies. The album also found an audience well beyond Britain, especially in continental Europe and Latin America. Its promotional campaign ended with a long run of European shows in late 1999.
A large part of that reach came from the people Williams gathered in London studios such as Abbey Road and Trident. Guitarists Gary Nuttall, Alex Dickson and Phil Eisler played on the sessions, while Chambers handled keyboards alongside his production and co-writing duties with Steve Power. Backing vocals came from Bevereley Skeet, Claudia Fontaine, Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy, Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys, and Nicole Patterson.
The lawsuit over one borrowed line became a story Williams told for years. At a London concert in 2019, he said the phrase had cost him two and a half million pounds. Yet the album that contained the offending track also cemented his place as a solo artist who could outsell his former group and turn a legal misstep into a footnote rather than a career-ender. The standard edition ran just over 76 minutes, while the 2002 reissue was slightly shorter. In 2005, Channel 4 viewers placed the album 91st on a list of the 100 greatest albums of all time.
I've Been Expecting You remains the record on which Robbie Williams learned the price of a single sentence and the value of a second chance. The reissue quietly erased the evidence, but the sales figures kept the proof: even with a courtroom defeat attached to one song, the album outsold everything else in Britain that year.