When Robbie Williams' fortune turned around as a solo artist thanks to his 1997 hit Angels, he had also started a budding romance with Mel C, but it ended in disaster
When Robbie Williams' time with Take That suddenly ended, he struggled to find success as a solo artist before his huge 1997 hit Angels turned things around.
The banger, which remained high in the charts around Christmas, saw his name on everyone's lips once again, but he was also making headlines for his blossoming romance with Spice Girl Mel C. They were getting on so well that the couple even flew to Ireland for a Christmas getaway with Mel's bandmate Victoria Beckham and husband David.
But everything went askew when the success of Angels saw the star promptly fall off the wagon with a 'very public marathon bender' at London's Groucho Club, according to author Emily Herbert's book, Take That and Robbie Williams. And Mel even admitted that she accepted she couldn't 'tame the beast' despite their undeniable chemistry together.
Robbie's relapse dramatically ended in a six-week rehab stay star at Clouds House in Wiltshire. Sharing the toll it had taken on his relationships, he wrote in his 1998 book Let Me Entertain You: "Last year, when I left rehab, I had to break with all my friends.
"But when I was taking drugs I didn't have any real mates. I didn't know how to stop drinking. I couldn't do any work, I wanted to be writing songs with Guy, or singing Angels, and it wasn't going to happen if I looked the way I did and presented myself in the fashion I did."
Years later, Mel acknowledged she had been seeing the troubled star. "It didn’t really work out," she told Star magazine. "It was just a chemistry thing really, sometimes there’s not a major reason. He was busy travelling all over the world and so was I. At the end of the day, you’re never going to get Robbie to settle down are you? You’re never going to tame that beast!"
Mel C went on to have daughter Scarlet, 15, with ex Thomas Starr, while Robbie married actress Ayda Field, and had children Charlton, nine, Teddy, eight, Colette, six and four year old Beau. Before that, Robbie had been struggling to find his way.
That was until a chance meeting in a Dublin bar changed everything. Most people think Robbie penned Angels as a thank you to his former drugs counsellor mum for getting him through his drink and drugs battles of the late nineties.
"My mum is the pillar of strength that has kept me sane throughout my mad life," the star gushed in 1998, following a year-long bender sparked by his sacking from Take That. "She's the most important woman in my life and always will be," he added.
However, a little known fact is that the song has a much more tragic meaning. Still raw and written-off after his acrimonious departure from Take That, Robbie was drowning his sorrows in Ireland when he got chatting to an equally refreshed singer-songwriter, Ray-Heffernan.
The latter had recently returned home to Dublin after experiencing a life-altering tragedy, and like Robbie, was at an all-time low. "We were both going through hell at the time and I guess such strong emotions bring people together," Ray previously told The Mirror.
"We just hung out and tried to cheer each other up. We talked about writing songs together. We were both really up for the idea - and I invited Robbie round to my mum's house where we could write together."
That night, Ray said they sat up until 6am with a bottle of whiskey and a guitar and he played Robbie a song he'd been working on about his girlfriend's miscarriage. Ray and student Joanne Louchart, then 20, had been living in Paris when she discovered she was pregnant.
For three months they excitedly mapped out their future as a family. But at the 12-week scan she received some heartbreaking news. "I was very excited and it felt great having the father of my baby with me. I'd forgotten all our worries. I felt wonderful," Joanne previously said.
"Then the doctor said: 'I can't see your baby's heartbeat.' I didn't understand what I was being told. So she added: 'I am sorry to tell you that you are not pregnant any more. Your baby's heart is not beating. I should be able to see it beating on the screen and I can't. Your baby is dead.'"
As she waited for a procedure to remove the baby, Joanne suffered chilling nightmares. Together, they named their son Matthew but the loss proved to be too much for their relationship to withstand. Six months later they separated and Ray moved back to Dublin.
Desperate to make sense of his grief, he wrote a song called Angel Instead about his lost little one. "It is a heavy statement about how I felt during one of the worst periods of my life. To me the song is misery upon misery," he said of the lyrics, which included the famous opening lines, 'I sit and wait, will an angel, contemplate my fate?'
He continued: "I played Robbie a song called Angels, which I had written the week before to try and make some sense of what happened. That's how Angels was born. I met Robbie and soon realised we were kindred spirits with troubles to share.
"I played it to Robbie and he really liked it. I told him where the inspiration came from." When Robbie left for London, Ray said he asked if he could take the song with him and work on it, which he did with producer Guy Chambers.
And when Ray learned it was going to be used on his Life Thru A Lens album two years later, he accepted an offer from the star's management to buy the rights for £7,500. As a thank-you, Robbie gave the fledgling songwriter a credit on the cover sleeve and in 1999, Robbie's manager, David Enthoven confirmed the song was a collaboration. "They got together two or three years ago and wrote a couple of songs together, one of which was Angels," he said.
