Whatever else you think about their legacy, you have to admit that the video for Take That’s farewell single in 1996 — a version of the Bee Gees’
How Deep is Your Love — is a work of bonkers, bizarre brilliance. Barry Gibb might have written the song 18 years previously as a treatise on the fragility of human relationships, but by the time the video director Nicholas Brandt got his mitts on it Take That’s rendition of the song took on an eerie allegorical resonance.
In the video pop stardom is a merciless dominatrix having her wicked way with four people who had long since come to depend on her. After pulling Howard Donald’s dreads and pronging the neck of a terrified Gary Barlow with a fork, she packs them, still tied up, into a meat wagon and proceeds to taunt them on the edge of a cliff.
The symbolism at the heart of this boy band version of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! couldn’t have been clearer. Being in a band such as Take That amounted to a kind of Stockholm syndrome. Even when “liberated” from the shackles of pop stardom, you always, eventually, return to your captor.
Hence the lack of surprise at the news this week that Take That’s triumphant reunion tour has been formalised into a fully fledged return: a £3 million deal with Polydor and an album of new material by Christmas. If the relationship between a boy band and the people around them is, by necessity, a dysfunctional one, the one into which Take That re-enter the frame is no less dysfunctional — one defined by two parties’ inability to move on.
On one side, four disparate former pop stars whose attempts to establish some kind of creative identity outside the thing that made them famous have come to little. On the other, the fans — the crying girls who jammed the switchboards of specially created helplines after news of Take That’s original split was announced. They’ve been there all along, patiently awaiting their idols’ return, like pop cultural sailors’ wives.
This sort of behaviour is not without precedents, of course. Even at his post- Osmonds commercial nadir Donny Osmond could still fill theatres. It’s just that the unprecedented scale of Take That’s reunion seems to have surprised even industry insiders: “It’s easy to be wise after the fact,” says Martin Talbot, the editor of the industry bible Music Week. “But no one really knew that there was this sort of demand out there.”
How could they? Nostalgia on such a mass scale is uncharted territory. Take That were the first boy band who quit before their audience showed any interest in outgrowing them. But it might just be that their audience would never have outgrown them. After all, Take That came into popularity during pop-literate times, when broadsheet newspapers didn’t think it beneath themselves to discuss “the phenomenon”, and having a favourite band member was an essential for anyone who lingered for a chat by the water cooler.
Amazingly, we were subtly buttered up to imagine that the band even had their own “George Michael”. In fact, they did — Robbie Williams — but while Robbie was embarking on his lost weekend, all eyes were on Barlow. It was almost as though Barlow’s innate chunkiness, his inability to dance and his perpetually crossed eyes verified his status as “the talented” one.
He wrote one indisputably great song, of course. But such was the yawning disparity between Back for Good and the quality of his other songs that the music industry invented a frankly laughable conspiracy theory to try to explain it — that the Bee Gees secretly wrote it for him in exchange for the cover of How Deep is Your Love.
The funny thing about the Take That reunion is that it has triggered no reappraisals of their music. But if they hadn’t been incredibly influential in their way, their reunion would probably attract no greater interest than that of East 17 — who have merely managed to sell out one reunion show, at Shepherds Bush Empire this month.
Unlike East 17 though, the sea changes that Take That set into motion are still with us. If Take That ambled into the audition room and proceeded to sing in front of Simon Cowell right now they’d stand every chance of making it through to the final stages of Pop Idol. If Tony Mortimer and his crotch-grabbing, baseball cap-wearing oompa-loompa friend walked into the same room, they’d elicit the sort of corpsing that you see repeated on those “worst of” anthologies.
Lest there be any doubt that Take That contrived to remould mainstream pop in their image, you only need to look at the records that fill up the racks beside supermarket checkouts. The generation with which Will Young, Shayne Ward, Ronan Keating, G4, Il Divo and the relentlessly popular Westlife have won favour is the generation whose musical template was laid down by Take That. Market research shows that they’re also the generation on which the profile of Sugababes and Girls Aloud as album acts is dependent. So, while a nation of teenagers attempts to compose Streets-style soliloquys on cheap laptops or master the chords to I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor, their older brothers and sisters see nothing wrong in purchasing a bit of good old-fashioned light entertainment.
It does mean that Take That will be restricted in terms of the kind of album they have to provide. Officially, the line is that they’ll be writing together for the first time. In all probability, though, there will be a pool team of songwriters on call to ensure that they deliver a solid, adult-orientated collection of songs. One insider says that an “updated Eagles vibe” has been mooted.
In a more carefree era, it might not necessarily have been that way. When the Walker Brothers — briefly the Take That of their era — released 1978’s Nite Flights, a mostly solid selection of MOR cuts was augmented by four Scott Walker originals, seemingly forged from the crucible of his own burning depression. When the Byrds reformed for their 1972 reunion, a mostly turgid set of tunes was briefly enlivened by two sublime, melancholy cuts from Gene Clark. After throwing him out in 1966, they were lucky he even deigned to turn up for the sessions.
If there’s a Scott Walker/Gene Clark figure in all of this — a talented but commercially unsuccessful artist forced by circumstance to reconvene with his old colleagues — it’s obviously not Gary Barlow. After ten years of minor acting roles, club PAs and DJ slots in dubious nightspots, the simian element of Take That — Howard Donald and Jason Orange — can also be comfortably discounted.
Poor Mark Owen, though, must sometimes gaze at Robbie’s success and wonder why he couldn’t have a bit of that. Attempting to resurrect his profile sufficiently to find a label for his second solo album, In Your Own Time, it was Owen who appeared on (and won) Celebrity Big Brother and promptly snagged himself a deal. “It was his best and worst idea,” says Chris Wilkie, a guitarist who worked with him on the record. “Mark had this notion that he wanted to make a record which reflected his love of bands like Talk Talk, Radiohead and Grandaddy. A lot of the songs were brilliant, but obviously it wasn’t something his label felt they could market, so he had to leave them off.”
After my conversation with Wilkie four MP3s landed in my inbox, all of them featuring Owen performances that remain unreleased. The Talk Talk references are just about borne out, albeit augmented by flashes of the La’s and Bee Gees’ pop-baroque years. We Could Rule in particular is the sort of song that the whole world has been begging Richard Ashcroft to make — but, crucially, no one can imagine Mark Owen making.
It might seem a little unnecessary to sympathise with Take That’s diminutive heartthrob when he has probably just landed the biggest pay cheque of his life. But his attempts to assert himself as an artistic entity highlights the very point made by that video.
Martin Talbot is swift to add, however, that for the reconvened Take That this may represent the chance to right a few of the wrongs that lingered from their earlier incarnation. The Take That of 2006, he says, will enjoy considerably greater bargaining power than the callow ingénues who auditioned first time round.
“Pop acts don’t tend to be in a position to negotiate the best deals,” Talbot says. “ It’s not like you are Chris Martin or Bono and you’re bringing something specific to the job of lead singer. When you’re just one of five successful applicants, you’re not bringing a huge amount to the party.
“But once you’ve had the kind of success that Take That had, then you’re no longer interchangeable with all the other people who turned up to the audition. Having worked a lot harder the first time around for an arguably smaller return, it would be cruel to begrudge them their moment of payback.”
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