It's official: Robbie Williams loves One Direction. For a while we thought Robbie was just latching onto the success of the pop-scamps, but this glowing praise isn't the first time he's come out waxing lyrical about the X-Factor runners up.

And Robbie thinks they could be as big as British pop powerhouse, The Spice girls, who have been thrust into the limelight again recently following their performance at the Olympics closing ceremony. "They're quite a power in the way the Spice Girls were," reports The Sun newspaper. "The Spice Girls took over the world and won and I think the One Direction boys have a similar chemistry." What comes with success for a young, heterosexual popstar? Girls, and Mr Harry Styles has been dating 22-year-old country-pop singer Taylor Swift recently (if you believe the pictures showing them kissing) and Robbie Williams believes he may have taken on his mantle of babe-magnet. "He's a magnet like I've never seen before. I don't think Harry needs any tips from me," he added. "He's beguiling, and so are One Direction. I wasn't him when I was 18. That didn't happen to me."

Robbie previously said that he felt 'sorry' for Styles, recalling his own time in a boyband as youngster. "I feel a bit for Harry," Robbie told The Sun newspaper in 2012. "At his age I was in this lilywhite boyband, Take That. But I was meeting up with mates, jumping out of the tour bus and into a Transit van at motorway service stations all around the country."