Robbie Williams

Where ABBA had one director and The Cure effectively had one, Robbie Williams had eighteen. Thirty-six videos on this page, and he changed hands almost every time.

The list reads like a register of people about to become someone else. Garth Jennings, working under the Hammer & Tongs name, shot Williams's first solo single Freedom in 1996, then went on to make The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the Sing films. Samuel Bayer came to Angels from Smells Like Teen Spirit. Johan Renck filmed Tripping over two days in Los Angeles, working from Williams's own nightmares — fourteen years before he won an Emmy for Chernobyl. David LaChapelle, Jonas Åkerlund and Jake Nava each took one or two.

The exception is Vaughan Arnell, who made nine of them across eleven years — including the one nobody forgets. In Rock DJ Williams strips to get a DJ's attention, and when that fails he keeps going: skin, then muscle, then organs, until he is throwing pieces of himself into the crowd and dancing as a skeleton. French television refused it and a censored cut was made for broadcast. It won British Video of the Year at the 2001 Brit Awards.

That combination is the whole of it. A performer who never settled with one collaborator, and a body of work that ended up documenting a generation of directors on their way somewhere else.