Williams sings Angels with Lima fans after cancellation

One Entertainment is lining up a fresh date at another venue. Chile, Argentina and Mexico remain on the Britpop tour, and the album of the same name is already out.

Robbie Williams gave an impromptu performance outside his Lima hotel after his scheduled gig at Arena 1 Park was cancelled on 24 September. San Miguel municipality ordered the venue closed because of insufficient evacuation protocols.

In a Peru national team shirt, he told the crowd he was "broken-hearted" and that the show had been "beyond our control". He performed Angels with the fans and promised to return. One Entertainment has confirmed that a new date is being arranged at a different venue.

Williams continues the Latin American leg of the Britpop tour. Dates still ahead include Chile on 27 September, Argentina from 1 to 4 October and Mexico on 7 and 8 October. His album Britpop is out now.

A career built for the big stage

Robert Peter Williams found fame as a member of Take That from 1990 to 1995 before launching a solo career in 1996. His debut studio album, Life thru a Lens, was released in 1997 and included Angels, the song that has become his signature and the one he reached for outside the hotel in Lima. The second album, I've Been Expecting You, featured Millennium and She's the One, his first UK number-one singles. Sing When You're Winning followed in 2000 as the solo run gathered pace.

The scale of the catalogue is plain on the figures. He has seven UK number-one singles, and thirteen of his fourteen studio albums have reached number one in the UK. Six of those albums sit among the top 100 best-selling albums in the country. In 2006 he gained a Guinness World Record for selling 1.6 million tickets in a single day during the Close Encounters Tour — a measure of live demand that has stood for nearly three decades.

Later chapters have kept the dual track of studio work and stage craft. XXV arrived in 2022. The Better Man original motion picture soundtrack followed in 2024. In 2025 came the singles Desire, the official FIFA anthem featuring Laura Pausini, and Rocket featuring Tony Iommi. Britpop, released in 2026, now gives the current tour its name and its centre of gravity. For an artist who left a boy band in the mid-nineties and rebuilt himself as a solo headliner, the hotel-step set in Lima is a small reminder of how directly he still meets a crowd when the formal stage is taken away.

The tour rolls on

The Lima cancellation was driven by the municipal order at Arena 1 Park, not by any decision to abandon the market. With a replacement show being arranged and Chile due on 27 September, the Latin American run remains intact. Argentina and Mexico follow in early October.

Angels, first heard on Life thru a Lens in 1997, remains the song he turns to when a night needs a shared chorus. That it was the number he chose with fans outside the hotel, nearly three decades on, says as much about the durability of that early solo work as about the evening itself. The fuller reply to the cancelled Arena 1 Park date will be the rearranged Lima show and the gigs still listed in Chile, Argentina and Mexico — the Britpop tour continuing under the title of the album now out.