Robbie Williams has revealed that he originally planned to call his new album 'Il Protagonisto', but his management forced him to change it on the grounds that the name was "too pretentious". In the end, of course, he went for 'Reality Killed The Video Star', a reference to the album's producer Trevor Horn's 1979 hit with The Buggles, 'Video Killed The Radio Star'.
Williams told The Mirror: "As in spaghetti western - man who comes in and clears up the town for the bad guys but you're not sure whether he's the bad guy or not himself. People would quite rightly go, 'that's pretentious', which is what my management did. They went 'no that's pretentious' and I went 'yeah, yeah'. So that was a mouthful. Got rid of that. 'Reality Killed The Video Star' is in".