A songwriter who has claimed for years that he wrote Robbie Williams’ break-out hit Angels has again taken aim at the singer.
In 1990 Robbie rose to fame as part of the boy band Take That, which he eventually left five years later to embark on a solo career.
His debut studio album, Life thru a Lens, was released in 1997, and included his best-selling single Angels, which reached number four on the UK Singles Chart. In the years since its also sold more than 1.16million copies in the UK and was also voted the best song of the past 25 years at the 2005 Brit Awards.
However, in the nearly 30 years since, Irish singer-songwriter Ray Heffernan has repeatedly claimed that he in fact wrote the hit song.
He’s again spoken out this week after Williams spoke about his debut solo album in a recent interview on BBC Radio 2.
‘I spoke a lot about the album I wanted to make, but the one I did make was Life thru a Lens,’ he said.
‘My memories of making it are, it took me less than two weeks with Guy Chambers to write the whole album.
‘That didn’t necessarily mean that it was going to be a success. My album came out and it sold 33,000 copies in three months and that is not what EMI expected to do.’
He went on to recall: ‘I was about to be dropped and then fortunately I dropped The Angels, didn’t I? And it gave me the career that I’ve got today. I’m incredibly grateful for that song.’
Since then, Heffernan has been sharing videos on TikTok, where he’s discussed ‘signing his rights away’ to the song.
He also posted a throwback clip of Williams from 1997, where the singer talked about how he ‘wrote Angels in a couple of hours’, with Ray captioning it: ‘Body language never lies.’
What has Ray Heffernan said about writing Angels?
Heffernan’s previously said that he wrote the first version of the song after his girlfriend had a miscarriage, with the lyrics stating: ‘I won’t have a baby to love so I’ll love an angel instead.’
Recalling how the song developed, he said he met Williams in a pub in Dublin in 1996 and played him an incomplete version of the song, with the pair going on to record a studio demo that same week.
‘I was on the guitar, he was shouting ideas at me, and I was kind of shaping it into a song so that would have been a 50/50 songwriting session,’ he told the BBC’s Good Morning Ulster in 2024.
Although they lost touch after Williams returned to England, Heffernan was later offered £2,500 for his rights in the song’s creation.
However, he said that after being asked to be credited as a writer, the offer was increased to £7,500.
‘I was 22 at the time and taking advice from the adults around me,’ he said.
‘I accepted the deal and then the song kind of took on a life of its own.’
Although Williams has confirmed Heffernan’s version of events of their meeting and initial songwriting session, he said he rewrote the song significantly with producer Guy Chambers, going on to call Heffernan a ‘fantasist’.
Despite the dig, Heffernan has previously said all he wants was ‘acknowledgement’. ‘That’s what the young kid in me really wants – acknowledgement. It’s not about the millions,’ he said.
However, in August last year, Heffernan said he planned to pursue legal action under a new part of EU copyright law that allows creators to seek retrospective compensation for successful works.
He is now seeking around a third of future royalties.
Heffernan – who was most recently working as a language teacher in rural Italy – once said that in the years since Angels was released, he ‘always turned it off when it came on the radio’.
Responding to William’s criticism, he once declared: ‘How can Robbie Williams call me a fantasist?
‘I have always maintained that as a young man, I wrote a song with Robbie, that went on to become his hit song Angels and my story of how that came about has never changed.
‘Robbie now says publicly that I’m a fantasist. My question is what part of this am I making up?’
He’s also said he has the legal documents to ‘prove’ his story.
In 2017, Williams defended the decision to pay Heffernan saying: ‘We could have gone to court, and it all would have been down to whether what way the judge wakes up that day out of bed…so I gave him some money, and he went away.’
In a previous interview with former Take That bandmate Gary Barlow on his podcast, Williams was asked if the title or melody of Angels came first.
‘I was off my head basically, the record company has spent a lot of money signing me,’ he said.
‘I made a big song and dance about leaving Take That and wanting to do my own thing, and I hadn’t done anything.
‘I thought I’d better get down to it, figure out my voice, and whether I can actually do this … I was at my sister’s house in the garden with a pen and a paper and I thought, right then, I’d better come up with something…(so I wrote) “I sit and wait”.’
Speaking about the ongoing disagreement about how Angels was written, Heffernan has told The Irish Sun: ‘You could certainly call me a dreamer in life but not a fantasist. I have never lied about this story, and every part of it is true.’
Metro has contacted representatives for Robbie Williams for comment.
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