Take That

It is among the strangest and most compelling stories in all of British pop history. It's also among the most inspiring. To say that the reunion of Take That as a fully fledged five-piece is wholly unexpected would not be quite right; just such a possibility has been the subject of fevered speculation at least since 2006, and the astonishing return to the top of the charts of Gary Barlow, Howard Donald, Jason Orange and Mark Owen, more than a decade after their famous split.

Even after that unlikely triumph, though, the prospect of Robbie Williams rejoining the band to complete the original, early Nineties line-up seemed remote in the extreme - to the group themselves, and to Robbie, as much as to anyone else.
However the band have come a long way in a short time. Friendships have been repaired, and in some cases built for the first time. New allegiances have been forged, too, and something beautiful has emerged: five men in early middle age, all of whom have known triumph and disaster, success and failure, happiness and depression, united, genuinely united – perhaps for the first time – by a common cause: making music together, on their terms.

To understand how this happened it's necessary to scroll back to 2005, when Gary, Howard, Jason and Mark were first reunited to discuss the idea of a Take That greatest hits album. At that stage, the members of the most successful British pop group of the Nineties spent had spent almost ten years apart, seldom seeing each other or even speaking. Each had been affected in different ways by their time in Take That, and then by their experiences away from the boy band hothouse. While Robbie had scaled unimaginable heights of popularity and acclaim, Gary's career had started promisingly but then stalled. Mark's had been longer but less commercially successful. Howard had returned to his first love, dance music, as a DJ. And Jason went back into education studying Psychology, History and Sociology in between bouts of acting and travel. It had been a difficult time for everyone, but not without its compensations. Gary, Howard and Mark became fathers, and all five slowly had constructed identities distinct from their ex-boy band personas.

When an ITV documentary was proposed to mark the tenth anniversary of Take That's demise, to the others' surprise Robbie agreed to appear on film, though not with the rest of the band. The documentary was a ratings winner, attracting over seven million viewers, and as a direct result, on November 25, 2005, Gary, Mark, Howard and Jason appeared at an official press conference to announce a British tour. They sold 560,000 tickets in record time, and the tour ran from April to June 2006, taking in 32 arenas and stadiums across the UK and Ireland. Again, Robbie put in a virtual appearance, beamed at the audience as a 20-feet high pre-recorded hologram during performances of "Could It Be Magic".

"I think it was inevitable that after that we'd make an album," said Mark later, and on May 9, 2006, bowing to that inevitability, Take That signed a £3 million deal with Polydor. The new members of Take That 2.0 (minus hologram) travelled to Los Angeles and co-wrote and recorded an album with the producer John Shanks, opening a new chapter in a book we'd all thought was closed.

"Patience", the first single from the second coming of Take That, was released on November 20, 2006. It had an epic grandeur to it as well as a classic, crowd-pleasing British pop sensibility. People connected with it, and with the story of Take That, the "man-band" that had fought its way back from obscurity. "Patience" became Take That's ninth UK number one and a hit across Europe. It was voted Best British Single at the 2007 BRIT Awards. "Beautiful World", the album that followed it two weeks later, sold 2.5 million copies in Britain. And "Shine", the feel-good second single, an infectious pop stomp featuring Mark's distinctive lead vocal, also went straight to number one. At the 2008 Ivor Novello awards "Shine" won PRS Most Performed Song, and at the 2008 BRITs it took Best British Single.
 
It didn't stop there: in the summer of 2007, Take That released a third, if anything even more powerful single, "Rule the World", from the soundtrack to the film Stardust. And that winter the Beautiful World Tour – Take That's most ambitious and successful to that point - played to sell out audiences across the country over 32 nights, bringing the group yet another BRIT, for Best British Live Act, plus the award for Tour of the Year at the Vodafone Live Music Awards. Take That's comeback generated a wave of popular and critical acclaim for a band that most people, including its members, thought they'd never hear from again.

"None of us saw it coming," said Mark in 2008. "I don't think we even wanted it. It's not like one of us was calling the others for years saying, ‘Let's get back together'. It was never going to happen. And then it happened."

"Our story is so far-fetched," said Gary. "It's crazy, really. I think it took a while for us all to get our heads round it, some maybe longer than others, but everyone's enjoying it this time. And that's what's most important to me. That and our audience. I really don't think any other group has got an audience like ours. It's like we'd won before we'd even sung a note."

The reformed Take That consisting of Gary Barlow, Howard Donald, Jason Orange and Mark Owen were dominating British music: Beautiful World released in 2006 went eight times platinum in the UK, three times platinum in Euroe, equating to over 2.5 million album sales in the UK.

The Circus released in 2008 went seven times platinum in the UK, had the biggest first day sale of 2008 and the third biggest first day sales in history. It was the first album ever to sell over 300,000 copies every week for four consecutive weeks and sold over 2.2 million album sales in the UK. It was also the third fastest million selling album in UK history.  

The band's The Ultimate Tour Live DVD was the fastest selling music DVD of 2006. Their Beautiful World Live DVD held the record for the fastest selling music DVD in UK history, selling 64,000 copies in its first week of release, more than the No 1 album of that week, (Amy Winehouse's  CD album "Back To Black") becoming the first time a DVD had outsold the No 1 CD.  The DVD remained at No 1 in the Official UK DVD Chart for a record breaking eight consecutive weeks.

Take That Present: The Circus Live DVD stole the award for fastest selling music DVD in UK history from Beautiful World Live in 2009 – a record achieved on it's first day of release.

The tour statistics are even more incredible: The Ultimate Tour original dates sold out within 30 minutes, and in total 28 dates sold out within one hour and ten minutes with six stadium dates being added making it the second fastest selling tour of 2005 (after Robbie Williams!)

The Beautiful World Live Tour  sold out within 40 minutes.

The Circus Live Tour held the record for the fastest selling tour in UK history, with 600,000 for all original eight dates selling out in just five hours.
Overall the band played to over 2.5 million people since reformation in 2005.

They also set a record at TV giving ITV their highest rating documentary of 2005 with over six million viewers tuning in for Take That:  For The Record which was also nominated for a Palme D'Or.

They've also scooped up three Brit awards and an Ivor Novello Award for 'Most Performed Work' for single ‘Shine' (Mark Owen on lead vocal) since they came back.

Rewind to the decade following Take That's 1996 disbandment, while the other former members of the group lived their lives largely away from the spotlight – in some cases by choice; in others very much not so - Robbie had become one of the most successful solo artists in the world, with 57 million album sales to his credit and an entry in the Guinness Book of Records for the most tickets ever sold in one day – a staggering 1.6 million for his 2006 tour. With an incredible 16 Brit awards to his name, Williams had become easily the biggest selling solo artist in the UK and still holds the record for playing the biggest live event in the country with his 3 Knebworth 2003 concerts playing to 365,000 people. Despite this huge success, he  had made no secret of his distress about the treatment he received during his time in Take That. There was anger and resentment and sadness on both sides.
As the success of Take That's return gathered speed, Robbie Williams, watching from afar, declined to take the role of Banquo's ghost: in interviews he was unfailingly supportive and enthusiastic. He wanted to get involved, and yet at the same time, he had his own, extremely successful career to pursue. And he'd been burned by the original Take That, perhaps more than anyone.

Take That was formed in Manchester in 1990 by Nigel Martin-Smith, the owner of a small casting and model agency, who saw a gap in the market and remortgaged his house to fund a British boy band to rival the waning American outfit, New Kids on the Block.

His first discovery was Gary, then a 19-year-old from Frodsham who'd been playing his keyboard on the working men's club circuit for five years, and writing songs since his early teens. Around Gary Martin-Smith hired four good looking young northern men: Howard, a vehicle painter, model and DJ; Jason Orange, a painter-decorator and dancer; Mark, a former child model; and Robbie, the last to be found.

Initially the band promoted itself by performing at gay clubs and under 18s discos. In September 1991, Take That signed to BMG for £75,000. Their first three singles flopped but in 1992, a cover version of Tavares' "It Only Takes A Minute" reached number seven and they were away. Gary's ballad, "A Million Love Songs", was next, followed by "I Found Heaven", and another cover, of Barry Manilow's "Could It Be Magic".

Their first album, Take That And Party, a mixture of Barlow ballads and hi-energy dance tunes, arrived, according to one writer, "like a silver brick through a teenage bedroom window".

Its sequel, Everything Changes in 1993, contained four number ones and broke the band across Europe and Asia. Throughout that year, and on into 1994 and 1995, Take That were huge. They were chased across continents by hordes of screaming schoolgirls; invited to tea with Princess Diana; shouted out requests to Elton John. They toured and performed and promoted relentlessly, and sold over 25 million records.

Their 1995 album, Nobody Else, was launched to huge fanfare, its Sgt Pepper-style cover reinforcing Take That's claim to be the biggest British band since the Beatles. "Back For Good" was their biggest hit single to date, number one in 31 countries and a hit, too, in America.

Then Robbie began to break ranks. In July 1995 he appeared on stage at Glastonbury during Oasis's set and shortly thereafter, he walked out of the group. Without Robbie, the group continued as four-piece until February 13th 1996, when they announced their break-up at a press conference in London. Take That's demise made the lead story on the BBC evening news, and Samaritans set up special hotline for distraught fans. The group's final number one in that incarnation, a cover of the Bee Gees' "How Deep Is Your Love", accompanied a 1996 greatest hits collection, called Never Forget. And it seems that no one ever did.

The 2006 reunion was both a tribute to that early success and proof that there was life in Take That yet, but it wasn't the end of the affair. Take That regrouped in April 2008 at Sarm Studios in Notting Hill, west London, and began work on a new album, just the four of them in a room. By the summer, when producer John Shanks arrived to start recording, they'd already written 25 new songs.

Any pressure to repeat the success of Beautiful World was internal rather than external. "We've proved how good we are time and again, how successful we are at getting in the pop charts," said Jason at the time. "What matters now is whether (i)we(i) like it. We want it to represent us, who we are and where we're at. We want it to be authentic."

The songs on The Circus were both vintage Take That and a bold step into the future: widescreen, stadium-sized anthems and intimate, heartfelt ballads, lyrically challenging and musically diverse, theatrical and rooted, appealingly naïve and strikingly mature, simple in design but epic in execution.

Robbie and Take That had maintained an on-off communication throughout the period of the group's second coming. In the aftermath of the Circus, in the summer of 2009, as Robbie was readying his own solo album, Reality Killed The Video Star, for release, he and Gary socialised in Los Angeles. Tentative plans were made for a song-writing date.

Shortly after that, in New York last September, the famous five were reunited. It was, says Robbie, "like coming home". But it was more than just that. It was the coming together of two mighty forces that could have destroyed each other or created something even more powerful. You only have to look at the recent statistics of their sold out ‘Progress' tour to get an inkling of which way it's gone: over a million tickets sold in eight hours and 1.34million in total making it the fastest and biggest selling tour in UK history.

Flash back to the studio twelve months ago and and Six songs quickly came of that first meeting and the album that they formed the foundations for, produced by the Stuart Price, which will be released through Polydor on November 15th. It's an album that's as bold as it is beautiful with a new direction that presents the band's final chapter of evolution.


The band's first single together in over 15 years, the epic and heart swelling The Flood' has smashed the radio airplay charts like nothing they've released previously.

After that "Getting the five of us to be in a room together, although always a dream, never actually seemed like a reality," says Mark. "Now the reality of the five of us making a record together feels like a dream. It's been an absolute delight spending time with Rob again."

After 20 years, 80 million albums, 14.5 million concert tickets, 19 BRIT Awards, 13 number one albums, 17 number one singles, eight MTV awards and five Ivor Novellos, as a boyband, a manband, as solo artists, as friends and enemies, as heroes and villains, at long last Take That are here as something new and refreshingly uncomplicated: a grown up pop group and a band of brothers.

"Life is beautifully strange sometimes," says Jason. If nothing else, Take That is thrilling proof of that statement.