Robbie Williams courageously came clean on Tuesday — about soiling himself in public.
The “Let Me Entertain You” singer was performing with his former band Take That at a reunion show in 2011 when a bout of food poisoning that “felt like death” took hold — and the Amsterdam crowd at Ajax Stadium unknowingly watched him defecate into his pants.
“Still not anywhere near well enough I ventured to the stage,” Williams wrote on Instagram. “I was in the precarious position of not being able to ‘trust a fart.’ Which was unfortunate because that’s what I needed to do during my opening song. Let me entertain you.”
“As I’m sure you can imagine it didn’t remain just a fart,” he continued. “But ever the pro I retained my composure and committed to the performance 100%. Because of the picture I’ve just painted I’m sure you have questions. But let’s just let sleeping logs lie for now.”
Williams continued to make light of the matter by claiming “a gig parp,” or live defecation, “can be liberating” at times. He then urged his 2.8 million followers to ponder what their favorite “Performing Parper” would sing while doing so — and kicked things off himself.
“I’ll go first,” wrote Williams. “1.Mick Jagger-Jumping Jack Flash. 2. Thom Yorke.”
Scott Garfitt/Invision/Associated Press
While he failed to give Radiohead’s frontman a song to “parp” to, Instagram users chimed in with their own suggestions. One person envisioned Phil Collins singing “In The Air Tonight” mid-defecation, while another was still rightfully shocked by the story: “I was at the Ajax and you hugged me! I didn’t know you’d shat yourself!”
Williams branched out as a solo artist in 1997 after breaking out with Take That from 1990 to 1995. While he’s the only member to make the above admission, Williams is in highly visible company — as another boy band singer recently confessed to public “parping.”
“Let’s just say it was a bad day to choose to wear white clothing,” Joe Jonas of the Jonas Brothers revealed in a recent episode of the “Will & Woody” podcast. “You think it might’ve been a little too. It might’ve been a little something else — a little something extra.”
Unlike Jonas, however, Williams accompanied his vivid confession by literally painting a picture — and shared the image in his Instagram post with an admittedly heartening and de-stigmatizing caption: “Sometimes your favourite artists fart on stage.”