Robbie Williams covered 90s rivals Oasis’ ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ at his homecoming concert.
The former Take That star played Stoke-on-Trent’s Vale Park stadium at the weekend, where he surprised the crowd with a rendition of the Britpop legends’ 1996 mega-hit.
The ‘Rock DJ’ hitmaker – who also performed Take That’s ‘Could It Be Magic’ and ‘Do What U Like’ – reportedly told the crowd he was forced to leave the boy band after “going to Glastonbury and hanging out with the Gallagher brothers”.
Despite former Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher once dubbing Robbie, 48, “the fat one in Take That”, the ‘Supreme’ singer hung out with ex-frontman Liam Gallagher at the world-famous music festival in 1995, shortly before departing the ‘Back for Good’ band.
They have bickered for years, with Robbie famously challenging Liam to a fight at the 2000 BRIT Awards.
However, Noel recently appeared to pay Robbie a backhanded compliment when he said he wishes he’d penned 1997’s ‘Angels’, as he compared it to the ‘Wonderwall’ hitmakers.
Speaking on ‘The Matt Morgan Podcast’, the 55-year-old rocker said: “I’ve heard it. And thought, ‘I wish I’d written that.’
‘Angels’ is Oasis by numbers.
“Add a f****** electric guitar on it and it would be.”
Although Robbie appeared to be a willing participant in the slanging match, he previously claimed that the siblings’ comments, which many of his musical peers seemed to agree with at the time, left him depressed and ultimately inspired him to quit Britain to move to Los Angeles in 2004.
Speaking in 2021, he said: “My particular brand of entertainment and my particularly brand of pop music at the same time as my peers wasn’t, and isn’t, deemed worthy. I read the same magazines and watched the same television shows and wanted to be in the same tribe that most people my age found themselves but because of what I did and because of my output, what I created and how I presented myself it was deemed unworthy.
“There was a culture of ‘Robbie Williams is not cool’, ‘Robbie Williams isn’t very good’ and ‘Robbie Williams is naff’ and ‘Robbie Williams is fat’ and ‘Robbie Williams, we all agree, is awful’. That was apart from the 3 million people that bought my album each time it came out in the UK. At the time it was unbearable.
“In music, it was Liam Gallagher and Noel Gallagher, although it wasn’t just Liam and Noel Gallagher doing it.
“Liam said that I should be hung, you know. Famously, Noel said I was ‘the fat dancer from Take That’.
“I can name them because they go in my rucksack, they go on the list of people that I remember every single syllable of every single thing they’ve ever said about me.
“That was 20 years ago, and 20 years ago I just left the country because I couldn’t turn anything on or pick anything up without it saying, ‘This is a bad person, doing a bad thing, presenting himself in a bad way.’ I am far too sensitive to the job that I found myself doing.”
Although he is now cool with Liam, Robbie still has no love for Noel and insists his music is “s***”.