Even for such a universally acknowledged Great Showman as Robbie Williams, tonight is a tough call: a weird cross between a gig, an album launch (which means a set heavily loaded with unfamiliar tracks from forthcoming LP Intensive Care) - and a protracted attempt to flog mobile phones. The Berlin concert is being beamed across Europe in one of those dismal digital simulcasts. There are people sitting glumly in cinemas from Zagreb to Glasgow, wondering whether or not to applaud at the end of songs.
You have to be glad you're here and not there, although the sponsor seems to be doing its best to make you reconsider this position. Every inanimate object in the venue is plastered with the name of a certain mobile phone company. "If you can't see the stage, you can see the show on your handset!" booms the PA, offering people who have shelled out €98 for a ticket the opportunity to spend more money in order to watch a tiny flickering image of a concert that's taking place right in front of them. Williams will clearly have to draw heavily upon his Great Showmanship to make this one a success.
His traditional opener, Let Me Entertain You, is replaced by a powerful new song, Ghosts, while crowd-pleasers Millennium and Angels are dispatched midway through the set. The crowd don't seem to mind. Williams immediately has them eating out of his hand. Said hand is attached to an arm recently fractured during an impromptu game of football, but to Great Showmen, physical injury is a mere bagatelle. Williams rakishly waves a cane in a manner that recalls crooner Frankie Vaughan, a reminder that however cool his collaborators become - and Intensive Care is co-written by Stephen Duffy of the acclaimed Lilac Time - part of Williams' soul will always reside on the end of the pier. Certainly, he works the crowd like an old pro. He tells them to clap - they clap. He tells them to wave their arms - the venue becomes a vast sea of swaying limbs. You get the impression that if he told them to go and memorise Rilke's Duineser Elegien, they would dutifully troop out of the Velodrome en masse in search of the nearest public library.
Their devotion is bolstered by the songs Williams has written with Duffy. They subtly broaden his frame of reference - Place to Crash borrows a line from David Bowie's Queen Bitch, Trouble With Me recalls the Smiths - without sacrificing his character or innate commerciality. And they have the same sense of immediate familiarity that Coldplay's stadium anthems offer, but eschew windy generalisation in favour of genuine personality. "I 'ear there's a vacancy for King of Pop," Williams says. "Can I be King of Pop, please?" Not without reason, the crowd roar in a manner that suggests they think he already is.
