Pop star 'scared'

TORONTO

Robbie Williams comes to us with an impressive resume.

Britain's biggest pop phenomenon has two Top 10 albums in the U.K. -- 4.2 million in sales, a bundle of Brit Awards and comparisons to George Michael, Elton John and Tom Jones.

Details of his romantic life, his haircuts and his "trainers" -- he owns 80 pairs, including five newly purchased in Toronto -- fill thousands of British newspaper column inches.

"I'm in a very privileged position, I know that, but there are things about my job that I don't like," he said Wednesday.

"I'm really scared," Williams, 25, continued. "It's like being injected intravenously with caffeine."

Now the dark-haired, blue-eyed pub owner's son from Stoke-on-Trent, 200 km north of London, hopes the buzz carries his first North American release, The Ego Has Landed, onto the charts here.

In stores Tuesday, it features 14 songs culled from his two U.K. discs, Life Thru A Lens and I've Been Expecting You and is preceded by Millennium, the hard-to-resist first single revolving around a string-laden sample from the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice. Williams was in Toronto en route to Calgary to ski and appear at MuchMusic's SnowJob festival in Jasper.

"I think Rolling Stone described me as a one-man rat pack, which I do like, but I don't know how they're going to take me or how it's going to go but I feel very positive being here."