This record, XXV, is a glorious hymn to Robbie's relationship with his legacy. It is a collision and a conversation and a collaboration between the past and the present. (Often a more distant past, though sometimes much less so: the newest song here, “Lost”, was accidentally conjured out of nowhere one recent November evening long after the rest of this album had been completed.) Here, it’s not just that these songs are being reimagined with whatever fresh wisdom and experience and orchestral arrangements that he and his collaborators these days bring. It’s that these songs have been, to use his phrase, “re-loved”.

Which is also maybe to say that in some cases they can now be held close by their creator in a way that a younger Robbie Williams couldn’t easily allow. When someone habitually writes songs drenched in both ego and its opposite, sometimes all the audience can hear is the former, and all their singer can hear is the latter. Maybe that’s changing. “It's still the same songs by the same man,” he says. “But maybe I care a bit more for him, and them, than I did before.” Maybe it gets easier to see what others already saw. “There are moments when I feel as though what I set out to do when I left Take That I achieved,” he says. “I feel like I didn't notice it at the time.”

If you listen closely to XXV, you can hear some of what he has learned since he first sang these songs. Edge a little closer still, you may also catch a whisper of other wonders that have lain hidden within them all this time, in a cocoon, waiting.