No one knows what Robbie Williams was thinking about with 2006's Rudebox and thank god for that.

After fracturing off from an iconic English boy-band in the late '90s, Robbie went supernova, living up a life of a half a dozen consecutive world-wide number one albums that all, in a form or another, fed off of the Venn diagram space between the long, steady after-effects of Britpop and the overpowering rise of celebrity culture.

Then there was Rudebox.

Robbie's seventh proper full-length, Rudebox was the sound of mid-career crazy-pants. A man going random. There were collaborations (Lily Allen, William Orbit), covers (Human League, Manu Chao), and an unstoppable, nostalgic sense of creative freedom and surprise. At the time, Robbie said, "It's reignited how I think about what I can do with music myself. I've always been scared to try out different things and this album I think I've lost the fear of where I should be in my head as a populist, as a populist artist, and it means I can just go and do wonky pop now, which is all I really wanted to do anyway." In the end, Rudebox sounded like a shoplift of Justin Timberlake, the Pet Shop Boys, who co-wrote a couple of the songs, and a massive bizarro stylistic love-letter to the Happy Mondays that was somehow better and stranger, and more historically believable, than Shaun Ryder's previous own Amateur Night In The Big Top.

"She's Madonna," "Viva Life On Mars," "Good Doctor," the title-track.

R.U.D.E.B.O.X.,
Up yer jacksy, split yer kecks,
Sing a song of semtex, pocket full of durex, body full of mandrex,
Are we gonna have sex (yes!),
Will you wear your knee socks (ohh!).

Rudebox has become both 1.] his finest achievement and 2.] one of the most magnificent and unexplainable chart albums of the '00s.

Next week, meanwhile, Robbie Williams will release its follow-up.

Produced by Trevor Horn and entitled Reality Killed The Video Star, the album promises to blend the battering but eventually unpopular brilliance of Rudebox with the more traditional stadium universalism of the two musicians' pasts.

How's it working out, then?

Going by "Bodies," in any case, the album's first single: if Robbie was all Shaun Ryder before, now he's gone a bit Ian Brown.

Which is fine, seeing how Brown is also back on top fucking form.

So, Frankie Goes To Hollywood meets The Stone Roses?

We've all had a rough year.

Please. Be. True.