Having established fairly thoroughly that they weren't gay, the Beatles went on to make Yellow Submarine instead: not bad, but, no insurrectionist transvestite humping-and-murder-fest. Up Against It joined the pantheon of tantalising rock what-ifs, alongside the Rolling Stones' film version of A Clockwork Orange, the acid house album Shane McGowan lobbied the Pogues to make, and Paddy MacAloon's concept album about Michael Jackson.

To that illustrious list, we can now add the improbable name of Robbie Williams. In 2007, he apparently recorded an album he later described as "career suicide" and "Robbie's gone mad music", presumably a sonic expression of the period in which he grew a beard, put on weight, searched the California desert for aliens and helpfully began dressing as a pop star who'd gone crackers. It sounds fascinating, but instead, Williams opted to make his comeback with Reality Killed the Video Star, a Trevor Horn-produced album that, he notes, "ticks all the boxes".

It certainly does. Williams and his songwriting team have recovered their ability to write ruthlessly effective radio-friendly songs. The album bulges with fantastic melodies and undemanding pop references: the opening Morning Sun nods to I Am the Walrus, You Know Me boasts a string arrangement based on John Barry's Theme From Midnight Cowboy. Alas, Williams's less lovable traits are also present and correct, among them his apparently irrepressible desire to release jokey novelty tracks – here represented by an entirely ghastly bit of cod cock-rock called Do You Mind? – and his penchant for groan-inducing wordplay, most of which doesn't even count as punning, because puns are supposed to make sense. You listen to him singing "you would never be my trouble and strife, if I made you my Swiss army wife", groan, then think: what's that actually supposed to mean? Perhaps she's good at getting stones out of horses' hooves.

You might expect an album this musically surefooted to be triumphalist in tone, but Reality Killed the Video Star is more complicated and interesting than that. The lyrics tremble with uncertainty about Williams's return. Morning Sun worries about reviews and star ratings. "Don't call it a comeback," pleads Last Days of Disco. A lovely, languid sigh of a song called Deceptacons touches on the beardy UFO-hunting years – it carries a definite hint of Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft – and their effect on perceptions of his sanity: "Well, he's never been right." On Starstruck and the brilliant electro-wriggle Difficult for Weirdoes, he aligns himself with society's outsiders, including make-up-wearing teenage boys and, a little bafflingly, the Futurists.

You might reasonably suggest that the precise similarity between Robbie Williams and Filippo Marinetti is a trifle difficult to work out. You might also reasonably suggest that pop music has come to a pretty pass when Robbie Williams can present himself as some kind of leftfield artist. Nevertheless, he has a point. The pop stars that have emerged during his absence have tended to cleave to the US model: bland, orthodontically perfect, deprived of their personality via the complex surgical process known as media training. By contrast, Williams belongs to a grand, possibly dying, British tradition of flawed, wonky pop stars, people whose appeal rests at least partially on the fact that they appear to have ended up at the top of the charts almost despite themselves. In that light, Reality Killed the Video Star's neurotic self-obsession seems not merely like honesty, but a rather canny move. Anyone can hire Trevor Horn and some crack writers and knock out an album of polished pop-rock, but perhaps only Robbie Williams would release an album of polished pop-rock consumed with angst, self-doubt and songs justifying his interest in extraterrestrial life forms. If it's not as daring and confounding as the tantalising what-if of his abandoned career-suicide comeback album, it's still a pretty unusual ploy given the current climate. Under the circumstances, it would seem churlish not to welcome him back.

Alexis Petridis, The Guardian, 05.11.09

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/nov/05/robbie-williams-reality-killed-the-video-star