Timeline / Books
Released 1 December 2010
You Know Me - Deluxe Edition
Twenty years of singing, songwriting and performing.
Twenty years of adventure, mischief, hiding and self-exposure.
Twenty years of triumph, mishap, uncertainty and irrepressibility.
For the past twenty years, ever since a 16-year-old boy called Robert Peter Williams joined a boy band and was told his new name, he has been Robbie Williams.
You Know Me provides an illuminating and candid portrayal of the singer/songwriter's twenty-year career. In turns funny, touching, and revealing, we learn about Robbie's life through his own words, while Feel author Chris Heath takes him through the sometimes unsettling journey of the last two decades.
Over 250 stunning images capture his personal and public life and grant us insight into the events that have made up his extraordinary career: the images never seen before include his holiday snaps from around the world, flashbacks to his Stoke-on-Trent boyhood and also the intense rehearsals and gigs leading to the inexorable rise of Take That. As such, “You Know Me’ becomes as much a chronicle of contemporary pop life as it is of an artist who seemed to do all his growing up in public.
Released from the confines of boy-band life, Robbie then embarks on his solo career, in which staggering global success is matched by an increasing sense of playfulness and exploration. (In Rob's own words, 1996 was 'the wasted year.... I did everything because I could, and there was nobody there to tell me no.') You Know Me covers his early tours – on which he performed 'like his life depended on it' - his relationship with co-writer Guy Chambers, and the creation of the song that would change everything for him, 'Angels'. The book includes stunning images of him on-stage at home and abroad, the making of many of his now iconic videos, and the untold stories behind performing at Glastonbury in 1998 and his groundbreaking Knebworth gig in 2003. But Rob also reflects on more personal aspects of his life: his breakdown in 2006; finding happiness with wife Ayda; playing football, baring his flesh ('If I had an extra inch, I'd be naked all the time’), and relaxing at his LA home with his beloved dogs. And finally he leaves us at the Brit Awards 2010 where he received the Outstanding Contribution Award to Music. Throughout, he reflects as only he can – with the wit, intelligence, sensitivity, irreverence, intimacy and brutal honesty that has made him so beloved – on this remarkable, unprecedented voyage.