The album was announced on 25 September 2016, the day Williams performed at the Apple Music Festival in London. It was not a quiet announcement: the same day, the title track of The Heavy Entertainment Show appeared on Spotify and iTunes. This was the eleventh studio album from the British pop star, and it arrived on November 4, 2016, with the weight of a fresh contract behind it.
Sony signing and Chambers reunion
Five months earlier, Williams had signed with Sony Music, a move that put him back inside a major-label machine after years of doing things his own way. The album had been in the works since June 2015, with Guy Chambers and Richard Flack as the main producers. Chambers had shaped Williams's biggest early hits, so his return felt like a statement of intent: this was meant to be a blockbuster.
The record itself is a strange, confident sprawl. It opens with a song that borrows music from Sergei Prokofiev and turns it into 'Party Like a Russian', the first single, released on September 30, 2016. There is a track called 'Pretty Woman' written with Ed Sheeran and Benny Blanco. The deluxe edition even includes 'When You Know', co-written with the comedian Jimmy Carr. Pop, rock, swing, country and electro-pop all rub shoulders across the standard edition's 11 tracks. The standard edition runs for 40 minutes, while the deluxe version stretches to 61 minutes. Guest appearances include Rufus Wainwright and John Grant, with Grant joining Williams on the deluxe track 'I Don't Want to Hurt You'.
The Killers write Mixed Signals
The most unexpected collaboration came from an American alternative rock band. 'Mixed Signals' was written by all four members of The Killers, the American alternative rock band, who also played every instrument on the song. Williams released it as the third single in February 2017, and it gave the album a strange second life: a British pop star stepping into the sound of a band from the other side of the Atlantic.
Critics could not agree on what Williams had made. AllMusic gave the album 4 stars out of 5, and NME matched that score. The Guardian and The Independent both landed on 2 stars out of 5. Clash went lower, with 4 out of 10, and Drowned in Sound gave it 3 out of 10. The review aggregator Metacritic settled on 59 out of 100 from 9 reviews, a number that means mixed or average.
Dutch gold and UK chart peak
Fans in the Netherlands had already made up their minds. Two days before the album came out, Williams received a gold record there for more than 20,000 pre-orders. When The Heavy Entertainment Show finally arrived, it entered the UK Albums Chart at number 1 with 67,000 copies sold in the first week. It stayed in the British top 10 for three weeks and also hit number 1 in four other countries.
The album then went on the road. The Heavy Entertainment Show Tour began in Manchester in June 2017 and ran for more than a year, finishing in Mexico City in November 2018. The tour gave the album a second life beyond its mixed reviews.
Ten years on, The Heavy Entertainment Show remains a fascinating moment in Robbie Williams's career. It is the album where he brought back an old producer and threw everything at the wall: Prokofiev, The Killers, Ed Sheeran, a comedian. Not all of it stuck, but the parts that did still sound like a man refusing to play it safe.
Not all of it stuck, but the parts that did still sound like a man refusing to play it safe.