New studio album Britpop goes straight to No 1 in opening week, after Williams moved its release date to avoid a chart battle with Taylor Swift
Robbie Williams has scored his 16th UK No 1 album, surpassing a tally set by the Beatles in 2000 to become the all-time chart record holder.
Britpop, Williams’ homage to the lairy and zeitgeist-setting guitar music of the mid-1990s, went straight to No 1 in its first week of release. All but one of his studio albums have now reached the top – except 2009’s Reality Killed the Video Star, kept off the top by boy band JLS – plus three greatest hits compilations and his soundtrack to the biopic Better Man. Not counted in that tally are two other No 1 albums Williams recorded as a member of Take That.
Williams had clearly longed to break the record, moving the release date of Britpop back from its intended date of October after realising it was going to compete with – and inevitably lose out to – Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl. With Britpop then lined up for a 6 February release, he suddenly brought the release forwardto the relatively uncompetitive week of 16 January.
He has described Britpop as “the album that I wanted to write and release after I left Take That in 1995”. The Guardian’s chief pop critic Alexis Petridis praised it, writing: “There’s a swagger and sparkle to the melodies that shift these songs past the realm of pastiche, and the results are hugely enjoyable.”
