Onetime boy band superstar. Near drug casualty. Friend of Oasis. Boy Wonder. Fat wanker. Former All Saint fiance. Savior of the British music industry. Next big thing.|

Labels stick to Robbie Williams like an impossible-to-shake pop song. Labels and pop songs: The twenty-four-year-old star has plenty of both. The press and countless hours of teakettle talk from Soho down to Brighton have ensured the former. Legions of adoring British and European fans have affirmed the latter. So what, pray tell, remains for this multi-platinum superstar, who cleaned up with three wins at last year's Brit Awards (the U.K. version of the Grammys) and has dominated the rarified heights of his home country's album and singles charts for months on end?

America, what else?

"I've sort of had my affirmation fill in Britain," says Williams, sounding equal parts pop royalty and beleaguered guy next door (which, incidentally, is sort of what he looks like, with his winning smile and darting smart eyes animating a perfectly normal face.) "I don't think I can get any bigger there, which is great. But it's sort of a sadomasochistic thing, because the last thing I need right now is to be bigger than I already am. But it's the one thing that I'm striving to be."

Williams' can-do attitude is highly contagious. He says "affirmation" frequently and with a zeal that approaches the religious. Spend just a few minutes in his presence and you'll likely be convinced he could sell Beatles-era pop and assorted Eighties sonic anachronisms to Fubu-wearing street urchins, Sno-Core kids, wayward Gen Xers and your Sinatra-loving grandmother alike. Maybe even in the same room.

Of course, being captivated by charisma is one thing; following it up the charts with wallets full of hard-earned paper-route cash is another altogether. But Williams is no stranger to tough times. During the tumultuous years following his split from super boy band Take That in 1995, the errant singer took a high-profile detour into hard living and drugs -- as well as some general bad-boy lessons courtesy of the Gallagher angels from Oasis. The eager press, always happy to feast on such naked humanity, filled in all the rest of the blanks.

"It's really f---ing scary," says Williams of the British tabloids. "They have the power to bring down a government. It's literally like that. If they have the power to do that to governments, then my little life doesn't mean s---." More to the point, he adds, "Me dying would sell a lot papers. Put it that way."

To stave off the potential for public humiliation, let alone disaster, in America's pages, Williams has come up with a simple little plan: "I just don't buy [papers] anymore," he says coolly. "And, (a) I'm not going to rape anybody. (b) I'm not going to be a child molester. So, (c) whatever I do I'm cool, as long as I don't cheat on the girlfriend I'm going out with or cheat on the wife."

Indeed, Robbo seems to have a plan for everything when it comes to his American conquest. Take, for example, his Stateside debut, The Ego Has Landed, which comes out May 4 on Capitol Records. It's a compilation of his two listener-approved U.K. releases to date, 1997's Life Through a Lens and last year's I've Been Expecting You, and nearly every song is a potentially enormous single. The soaring singalong "Millennium," the bombastic, horn-buttressed attention-grabber "Let Me Entertain You," the pocketful-of-hankies McCartney tearjerker "She's the One" and the synth-colored John Hughes epiphany track "No Regrets" prove that, short of hip-hop beats or 808 outbursts, Williams has his pop territory well marked. Then again, not having a thudding beat at ear's length is a major label nightmare in '99. Having so many disparate influences, meanwhile, is a headache dressed up like a blessing.

"I'm finding it difficult to find out who I am vocally," says the versatile singer with typical candor. "Even now, and I'm on the third album." Whether that uncertainty will be obvious to Yank listeners is debatable. But one thing Williams knows for sure is that he can command a crowd: "For presence, I'd like to be somewhere up there amongst Tom Jones, Frank Sinatra and John Lennon. I don't mean as musically talented as John Lennon," he clarifies. "But you know that thing that Frank Sinatra got on stage and people just watched him? He could just walk around for an hour and people would just watch him. That's what I'd like to have. It comes naturally."

It's the kind of talk you'd expect from a man who celebrates his own ego as if it were a UFO about to abduct scores of music fans from a Kansas cornfield. "You know, that might sound very egocentric of me," Williams explains. "But I'm s--- at everything else. I'm s--- at life stuff. I'm s--- at relationships. I'm s--- at coexisting with people. I'm appalling. But one thing I can do is my job. And that's why I'm successful. I know it sounds very egocentric that I would compare myself to that. Or even dare to. But, I am good."

Just how good remains to be seen. Many industry pundits are putting their money squarely on Robbie's broad shoulders, his old-fashioned performer sensibilities and plucked-from-nature melodies. Skeptics, on the other hand, wonder how a twenty-something Oasis-lite crooner can appeal to a nation split between Britney Spears and Nas -- and fragmented further by West Coast ska-punks and country music divas. For his part, Williams has been to this brink before.

"It's just starting to go like Jenga. I'm really putting the top piece on and it's just about to fall. If I break in America then I've got this safety gap of affirmation. Not enough affirmation happening in Britain, I'll get on a plane and go to New York, to be honest with you," he says matter-of-factly, intimating that America is just another parochial singles chart to be scaled. Is Williams just playing it cool for his homeboys, shaking inside as he looks out over the lip of a yawning canyon the likes of which he's never seen before? Or is he endowed with such sheer pop instincts that he can't go wrong -- and he knows it?

Perhaps the answer lies within Williams' spoken-word hidden track that kicks in almost fourteen minutes into Ego's final track, "One of God's Better People": "Hello, sir, remember me? I'm the boy you never thought I'd be ... Thanks for the advice, I'm sure it'll do, for the negative dickheads just like you. As for now I've a different weapon. Stage and screen is about to beckon. And here I sit in first class. Bullocks, sir. Kiss my ass."

JOE ROSENTHAL(May 4, 1999)