And Finally Artist News Awards

Robbie not really sure why he got that BRITs Icon Award either

By Andy Malt | Published on Monday 20 February 2017

Last November, for no obvious reason at all, Robbie Williams was handed the BRITs Icon Award at a standalone event in London. Now it emerges that he’s not even sure why he got it.

The justification for the event at the time was that Williams had a record-breaking seventeen BRIT Awards already. Although that wasn’t really news, given that the last one he’d received was in 2011, as part of his brief return to Take That. The year before that he’d won the Outstanding Contribution To Music prize, which you might think would do the job of an Icon award.

Williams was only the third person to receive the BRITs Icon trophy. It was first handed to Elton John in 2013, at a similar standalone event fortuitously managing to coincide with the release of a new album. It was then rolled out again at last year’s main BRITs show so that they could give something to David Bowie, who had just died. Then Robbie had an album out, so why not make it twice in one year?

“Look, it was a great bit of promo for my tour”, shrugs Robbie in a new interview with Digital Spy. “It’s kind of that big an achievement, [in] that it’s hard to work out why I’ve got eighteen BRITs and no one else has. It’s fucking odd”.

I’m not sure that alone justifies a big party though. I mean, Kaiser Chiefs have three BRIT Awards, and we don’t go around shouting about that.

“Why hasn’t Paul McCartney got eighteen?” continues Robbie, warming to his theme. “Why hasn’t Elton John? Why has a half decent singer who can’t dance very well from Stoke got eighteen? It feels like a glitch in the Matrix”.

Robbie was being interviewed to promote this year’s BRIT Awards and his involvement with its Priceless Surprises initiative: