Take That – Now and Then: Inside the Biggest Comeback in British Pop History

Nick Raymonde and Korda both spotted this vacuum. ‘There were no boy bands, nobody was doing pop in that sense. It was the whole club/dance thing. Nick and I went to see Take That at a club called the Limelight in Shaftsbury Avenue where they did a three-song set which, to be honest, was so gay it was funny. They were still quite young at the time. They could obviously dance, the routines were fantastic, and I recall being struck by their complexions. It sounds funny but they were obviously going to be very photogenic. I could just see them all over magazines such as Smash Hits. If you look at any early photos, you have to agree there was a clear photogenic sensibility. I know this sounds silly, but even something as specific as their individual jaw lines, the way that their skin looked—Nigel Martin-Smith had done a good job of styling them too by then.

‘That night I remember thinking they could all dance really well, they’d got a good mix of looks and personalities, and they’d got a couple of songs that could be hits…Let’s go for it! That impulse was actually so unlike me, normally I’d strategise and make a decision on the music and the core creativity and suchlike.

‘As I say, in the very early days it was very gay. It was Nigel Martin-Smith who put it together and it was a market he thought they could tap into. When he came in, we had a long conversation about trout fishing, which I love—he’s a fisherman as well, so we talked about trout for most of the time. I got on with him really well. He had his own model agency in Manchester at the time, yet for this new boy band he had a really strong vision about what he wanted to do. This was crucial in the decision-making process, because it was evident that it wasn’t just five young boys new to the business, which has the potential to be a nightmare. I was effectively dealing with one grown-up man who knew exactly what he was doing.

‘I’d met the actual band on the night of the Limelight gig and then they came into the office and we chatted and talked. It was really evident that they were really good at gripping-and-grinning [meeting and greeting the general public], which, in a pop sense, is really important. At the Limelight and in our offices you could watch them working a room, chatting with women; they were great with women and they were really good with the media and they’d shake hands, they’d be interested and they’d turn up on time. I know it sounds silly but the ability for them to turn up at a TV studio at half six in the morning, looking bright, fresh, ready to go and cracking jokes when everyone else is blotchy-eyed, it was a hefty potential asset…in walk these five young kids and you could-n’t not look at them. You could see them being so attractive to women, which is an obvious bonus. Plus they were really respectful with their p’s and q’s. They were nice kids, well brought up, good characters. And, contrary to many reports, at that point they were certainly a gang, the five of them were together all that time, laughing constantly, mucking about. It was all new and fresh. They were a gang.

‘At this point we started to take them seriously. Nigel took us seriously and we finally agreed a record contract—it wasn’t a huge deal at all. It was in the region of about £70,000, which effectively committed RCA to a further investment of around £300,000 to £400,000 in terms of launching Take That. It was a pretty standard deal to be honest.’

Nigel and the boys’ hard work had finally paid off and they had secured themselves a major-label record contract. Take That joined a very ‘unique’ roster that boasted such diverse artists as Rick Astley, The Primitives, The Wedding Present and Pop Will Eat Itself. ‘I actually had several occasions where the paths of these polar opposites on our roster would cross,’ Korda told me.

‘High-profile new bands are usually signed in something of a fanfare, to start the PR machine rolling early. I remember the signing party for Take That very clearly. It was at the Hard Rock CafÉ. We all had a long chat and I started talking to Robbie. The rest of the band were all drinking Coca Cola and Robbie was like, “Can you shove a scotch in there please?” We had to look around to see where his manager and everyone else was before we gave him this sneaky drink. Bless them, they were under the thumb of Nigel in quite a big way, but in a positive sense; Nigel did a lot of good things for them and that was because he was very strong in knowing what he wanted to do and where he wanted to take it. He controlled the boys and I think their frustrations would later come through, but from a record label’s perspective, Nigel’s approach was a very positive aspect, because there was someone in charge, sailing the ship and knowing what to do.’

Take That’s first major-label single was ‘Promises’ in September 1991, exactly seven days before Nirvana’s seminal ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. One record changed the face of modern music, arts, TV, radio, music-industry strategies and pretty much every facet of popular culture; the other one didn’t. No prizes for guessing which one was Take That’s.

Nick Raymonde recalls that first major-label release: ‘I thought Gary was a great songwriter, but being honest, “Promises” was an all right song, but it wasn’t a great record. On top of that, we hadn’t worked out how to get all of these fans that existed everywhere alerted to the fact a record was coming out. There was so much hype around the group that the record company was almost wanting it to succeed too soon. This song was done with Duncan Bridgman at his own studio in Uxbridge Road: he produced it, played on it, but unfortunately I didn’t like it—to be fair to Duncan, though, I didn’t really know what record it was we were trying to make.’

Having said that, the single did mark the start of something big, not least their first ever chart entry. Robbie later remarked that the moment they all heard the single had charted at No. 38—their first chart hit—was the most excited he has ever been about any single, including during his own illustrious solo career. Apparently, the band jumped on his hotel bed so much it broke.

Nick Raymonde was equally pleased. ‘I thought when that first record had gone in at No. 38 that was a genuine hit, because at that time the Top Forty was regarded as success—actually, the fact that it only sold about 8,000 copies and probably hadn’t even washed its hands on the cost of the photograph on the sleeve was a more worrying reality.’

The video was low budget but did give an interesting insight into the band’s life on the road, featuring as it did footage of their club PAs and school shows, as well as a ‘live’ performance re-enacted at Hollywoods nightclub in Romford, one of their regular haunts. During the promotional campaign for ‘Promises’, they also made their first appearance on Wogan, which was Britain’s biggest chat show at the time, with viewing figures of twelve million a night. As part of his intro, Sir Terence called them—not for the first or last time—‘Britain’s answer to New Kids on the Block’.

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Nigel Hassler of Helter Skelter Agency was, at the time, working for Primary Talent booking agents, and he became involved in some of Take That’s very earliest shows. Even at that early stage, there was a growing buzz within the music industry about these newcomers, as he explained to me: ‘I am always researching magazines, gig listings, seeing who keeps cropping up, who I need to keep an eye out for, and Take That seemed to catch my eye every now and then. So I went to the record label and Nick Raymonde put me in contact with Nigel Martin-Smith. The buzz was building already so I phoned him and said I’d love to get involved.

‘I was employed by Nigel Martin-Smith to try to get them on any kind of club show, mainly under-18s discos, the odd gay club and a schools tour. There was a combination of markets there from way back then. Basically, though, at that stage it was like pulling teeth trying to get them booked, and it was always for very low fees. We were almost giving the band away to give them exposure: I think it was about £200 a night on average.’ Given that this money had to cover fuel, food, any accommodation if it was needed and so on, it is easy to see that everyone involved was, at this point, just investing their efforts in the future.

Their innovative manager was very keen to gig the band as hard as possible—at the time this was a relatively forward-thinking strategy, one of hard road-work normally reserved for more rock-oriented acts. ‘Everybody was working very hard to break the band,’ explains their former agent Nigel Hassler, ‘yet it was actually quite difficult to fill up a date sheet; gigs were not easy to come by. Nigel Martin-Smith would take anything, so they ended up travelling all over the country; Ipswich then up north, then way back south, miles and miles and miles, wherever they could play in front of people.’

Far from concentrating on almost exclusively gay clubs, Nigel Hassler saw a much more focussed attention on school tours. ‘In my opinion,’ continues Hassler, ‘it was the first time this school touring schedule had been done so strategically. Occasionally the odd band may have done one or two school shows, but none had actually gone and done a deliberate schools’ tour. That’s what we were putting together for them. The typical day would involve playing a school in the afternoon, perhaps with a meet-and-greet afterwards and a quick signing session, then off to a club show and very often back in the car for a drive to a late-night club, not always in the same towns. Weekends were always two shows a night. It was relentless. They really put in the time.’

Having seen literally thousands of gigs in his career, Nigel Hassler was impressed by the band’s show even when they were playing tiny venues for next-to-no money: ‘They were great; they looked good, the choreography was fantastic, the costumes were well thought out, they looked like the “real deal”. You often get rock bands who can’t perform too well and they need a couple of years to actually develop and grow to become an accomplished live band, but from what I remember, Take That were doing very well indeed so early on. I actually went to one of their earliest London shows at the Brixton Fridge for a gay club night. They would usually play about five songs, playback with a live vocal. They were very, very good.’

Despite the paltry financial returns, Nigel recalls that their record label was firmly behind them: ‘BMG were giving them major push-ups to make some connection with the public. We had a few problems with show dates clashing with some booked by Nigel Martin-Smith’s office, and when I spoke to him about a few concerns, it was taken as me ducking out of doing work on the band; we had a bit of a disagreement and that was the end of the relationship. It was a fairly short affair but very interesting to see Take That at such an early stage in their careers. I think I may have made about five hundred quid out of the band!’

Something Remarkable This Way Comes (#ulink_ff4846bd-328d-5c49-a61d-cfc000e7f18b)

Unfortunately, chart matters were only to get worse. In January and February 1992, the band embarked on a gruelling ‘Safe Sex’ tour of predominantly gay and under-18s clubs—complete with the support of The Family Planning Association—as part of their concerted promotion for the second RCA single, ‘Once You’ve Tasted Love’. More gigs were played—sometimes four a day—radio and TV had started picking up on the boys, and with the might of RCA’s press office behind them, all eyes were on a chart position higher than the No. 38 achieved by ‘Promises’. The campaign was assisted—sort of—by the promo video, which, although it didn’t feature naked arses and bondage gear, still had the boys prancing around in a rehearsal studio, wearing the sort of eye-watering, skintight lycra last seen on a Tour de France winner.

In the first week of February, ‘Once You’ve Tasted Love’ fell well short of the Top Forty at No. 47. This was an unmitigated disaster…Take That were a band in crisis. The night they found out, they were on the road and all admitted they cried at the news. There was even talk of splitting up if things didn’t improve.

For Nick Raymonde at RCA, this was a real shocker: ‘I was in a bit of a rarefied balloon because Take That were all over the pop press so you think, They’re huge, I’ll put a record out and it’ll be massive. Everyone was hyping everybody. No one wanted to say, “Hold on a minute, is that record good enough?” I’ve been there so many times, because you get caught up in the hype and no one says, “We’ve made a video, we’ve spent £30,000 making the record, we’ve given them an advance and it’s shit.”’

Yet Nick still buoyed spirits and sat them down to pep-talk them. ‘The band were grafting their tits off, but when they wandered in after the second single had gone in at No. 47, they looked like beaten men. I said, “Look, we are going to do this, we will win, we just have to get the record company on board and all you’ve got to do is tour and tour and tour and tour and tour. I have to make you a hit record.” And that’s exactly what we did.’

To compound their problems, the band had started work on their debut album and it was proving to be a far from straightforward process. The album sessions had started at Southlands Studios in London over the Christmas period and were riddled with complications. Almost an entire album’s worth of tracks had been recorded, but Korda Marshall at RCA wasn’t entirely happy with them. Nick Raymonde and Korda knew they weren’t getting it quite right, as Nick recalls: ‘I listened to the track we had, then sat back with Korda and said, “It’s not really any good, is it?” So it wasn’t really a great place to be.’

Korda told me about the behind-the-scenes issues: ‘At that point I had a band called Londonbeat, a male harmony group, who’d had a couple of big hits most famously with “I’ve Been Thinking About You”. I had a meeting with a producer called Ian Levine to discuss working on Londonbeat with him. It came up in that conversation about what else I was working on and I explained we were in the middle of making this album with Take That and it wasn’t happening at the moment. I said, “We’ve spent a fortune making this album which just doesn’t sound very good, it’s too Pet Shop Boys-sounding.”’

Ian Levine was a maverick music-industry heavyweight with a portfolio of hits and artists as hefty as RCA’s growing Take That overdraft, including work with Erasure, Nina Carroll, The Pasadenas and the Pet Shop Boys (he would later also work with Blue). Ian had been the UK’s top club DJ in the Seventies, famed for his profile and reputation in the Northern Soul scene and later as resident DJ at the legendary Heaven nightclub. To date, along with the eighty hits he has produced or remixed, Ian is also listed as one of the Top Ten Most Influential DJs of All Time by Bill Brewster in his book Last Night a DJ Saved My Life. For Take That’s ambitions of getting their debut album right, Ian seemed like he could be a magic bullet.

‘So I had this meeting with Korda,’ Ian explains. ‘I’d been brought in previously to produce The Pasadenas, who looked like they were going to be dropped, and we came up with a hit single—I was told I was being brought in to resurrect their career and yet it actually resurrected my career because I’d had a few years where things hadn’t gone very well and I’d nearly lost my house over one project in particular. So I gave The Pasadenas their biggest hit, “Tribute (Right On)”, which was Top Five for weeks.

‘With that in mind, Korda asked me to come in and talk about Londonbeat. Suddenly, in the middle of the conversation we started talking about Take That and he said, “I’m very frustrated, I’ve put a lot of money into this band”, and Korda was very unhappy with what had been done.

‘I was well aware of Take That because I was in admiration of what their press officer Carolyn Norman had done with them, which was take a group who hadn’t made a hit and somehow plaster them over every single magazine going regardless—everyone was talking about them. However, the general feeling that I’d heard in the industry about Take That, the word on the street if you like, was that here was a group surrounded by a lot of hype, a lot of publicity but with crap material. At the end of the day, no matter how much money you spend on an act, if the songs aren’t there you’re not going to make it…and the songs weren’t there.’

The band themselves have said they were ‘becoming the most famous group in Britain for not having a hit’. The problem for Korda was that his budgets were already shot: ‘There was no money left to make the album again, so the irony of this story was that we gave Ian Levine a royalty as well as a small fee. Normally he was charging about ?5K a song, but because RCA didn’t have any spare cash for the projects I agreed to give him a really big royalty. So when Take That went on to sell millions it was a great deal for him. He said to me, “Korda, next time you want something doing, don’t pay me any advances, just give me a really big royalty again! That’s the best thing you ever made me do.”’

Ian had grand dreams for the band but had to be very creative with such a limited budget: ‘The most we could squeeze together for recording was twenty grand, with which I had to cut five tracks, including flying in Billy Griffin [former lead singer with The Miracles] from Los Angeles to get the right sound I wanted for the vocals. I had an expensive studio in Chiswick and I had to use live musicians like a sax player and a guitar player. It was all very expensive. It cost me much more than that twenty grand to make, but I had to make a decision—RCA couldn’t come up with any more money and I wanted to do it. Fortunately, in the end I did very well out of it because of my royalty being increased.’

Once the new sessions had been set up, Ian was in his element: ‘We went in and the first meeting with the group was down at the studio. Jason wasn’t involved in any of the studio recordings but he came down on the first day to meet me, so we had all five of them there. We all went out to a restaurant called New Orleans, one of those Tex Mex places that do charcoal-grilled hamburgers and food like that. It’s even done out like Bourbon Street in New Orleans with big awnings and all that stuff. I remember we went in their car—it was a big, dark blue Previa people-carrier. They had no money for a road manager so Gary had been doing a lot of the driving up and down the country for all these under-18 gigs. I sat in the front seat with Gary.

‘When we had this dinner, they were the nicest guys I’d ever met and I thought at the time, If we give them a hit they won’t change at all: they were genuine and humble. Gary and Robbie were saying things like, “Ian, we are really pleased to be working with you, we know what you’ve done in the past.”’

Ian says Take That were pretty typical of a boy band in the studio: ‘They all knuckled down eventually, but they’d muck about and were always laughing and joking. Gary was very serious about knuckling down, he was very responsible—when they came back later in the year to redo some stuff, Gary had really got his act together and did loads of backing vocals. I think he’s very talented and I liked him very much.’

Korda thought bringing in a veteran such as Billy Griffin was a great idea: ‘The process wasn’t about bringing in someone to sing the songs for them, it was about bringing in a great vocalist from America to help the boys learn about breathing and vocal techniques and add some of the harmonies and melodies, give the bv’s [backing vocals] some strength and colour.’

Korda had his own thoughts about where the band’s vocals could go: ‘Robbie was a cheeky chappy naturally, but there was something about him. He was always one of the strongest voices and I remember saying to Ian that we shouldn’t just focus on Gary, we should try and bring some of the others out. It was evident that Robbie could actually sing. Mark could sing too. They could all sing backing vocals and hold a tune, but they weren’t great singers at that point because they hadn’t had any experience of learning how to sing properly in a studio. I signed them because they were great dancers, had good complexions and a couple of hit songs and I thought I could work the vocals out.’

While Gary Barlow was the creative hub of Take That, Ian Levine saw something in Robbie that he wanted to explore. ‘They were messing around in the studio and I heard Robbie’s voice and I said, “Robbie, you should be singing some lead.” He just said, “Don’t be daft.” At that point he saw himself as the clown in the group, just dancing around and mucking about, having fun. I thought his voice was better than Gary’s, to be honest.

‘They were all very wet behind the ears but Robbie was the most inexperienced. I wanted him to sing lead regardless. He had a fantastic-sounding voice, he just hadn’t learned how to sing in the studio. He could sing a song perfectly with no music playing, but when the music came on he couldn’t pitch in tune and would end up singing in a different key. But I took a lot of care because I thought he was worth nurturing, I thought he was a raw talent. He was very appreciative of that. Months later, we had a press conference for the launch of the album Take That and Party, and were upstairs in the private bar. Robbie was quite near me and one of the newspapermen who was in my earshot asked Robbie what made him start singing lead. He put his arm around me and said, “Come here, big fella,” then said, “I owe it all to this guy, Ian Levine. He’s the one who persuaded me to sing lead.” He was actually very acknowledging of the fact publicly to the press in 1992.

‘I am proud of picking him out at that raw level when he couldn’t even sing in tune—that vindicates certain things to me. Sometimes, if you ever doubt your own abilities, which you do when you have a bad period, things like that help. How many people can do that? It’s like picking The X Factor winner out of 75,000 people.’

One controversial choice for the album was a cover of the song made famous by Barry Manilow, called ‘Could It Be Magic?’. There’s a fine balance between the camp chic of Manilow and the undoubted quality and professionalism of his song writing, and covering his music is a high-risk business. Interestingly though, Ian Levine was coming from an altogether different angle for this idea: ‘I’d never heard Barry Manilow’s original, I only knew of the 1976 disco version by Donna Summer, which big gay clubs in America treated as an anthem. When I was working at Heaven as a DJ, we would always put that record on at the big party nights. It was revered by everyone, it was a godlike record.’

Nick recalls that ‘Korda recognised that there was a need to have one absolute dead-certain record that was going to nail it.’ Korda recalls the tension this suggestion created: ‘I like to sign an act if they’ve got the songs. I make a big deal of that. So when I said we are going to do a Barry Manilow cover, some people at RCA looked at me as if to say, “What the fuck are you talking about?”’

‘I cut the original Take That version,’ explains Ian, ‘and the first mix was directly influenced by the Donna Summer arrangement.’ With Ian’s brilliant high-energy disco-style version on the vinyl album, Nick Raymonde also contacted the Italian producers the Rapino Brothers about remixing a version as a club promo. ‘They had recently done “Love Me the Right Way” for Kym Mazelle and that had been a big hit.’

‘What I wanted to do,’ Nick told me, ‘was bend the perception of Take That a little, from being a pop group into being a band that had maybe something else attached to them. Even later, when they were having hits, still radio wouldn’t play them so we had to say, “Look, they’re not crap, they’re actually quite cool, they’ve got an Italian hardcore house remix and look at the video, it’s quite cool…” We were constantly trying to invent new ways of presenting the group.’

Speaking to me from their Italian studio in early 2006, Charlie of the Rapino Brothers revealed more: ‘We were having problems finding the right way forward, we were struggling for about four days. We were always fighting, shouting in Italian and the band would just sit there on the sofa watching this Italian comedy. Then Marco fell asleep for half an hour and then said “Let’s do it like Freedom by Wham!, so it sounds like that.”’

Marco remembers the record label’s reaction. ‘When we delivered it we were told they said, “I can’t believe those two Italian bastards have delivered a worldwide smash!”’ This track was originally planned as a club promo entitled ‘The Rapino Brothers featuring Take That’ but then it was made into a seven-inch and people loved it. Charlie says, ‘Gary Barlow was on tour when he heard it and he said when he heard the mix, he went nuts!’ This was eventually the version of the song that won the Brits’ Best Single of 1992 with the production credit of the Rapino Brothers/I. Levine/Billy Griffin. (Oddly, the band was not invited to perform at the ceremony that year, quite a snub given their profile.)

Stephen Budd, who manages the two Italians, remembers those times with relish: ‘I got this call from Nigel Martin-Smith and he said, “What have you done? I’ve got them in the studio with those Italians and they’ve got soft-core mags! Tell them not to bring those magazines into the studio ever again!” Also, what was amazing was that when they were working with us there were these code words. We were issued a list of code words to tell us which day and which studio they would be at and we were not supposed to talk to each other unless we used these code words—the problem being that if the fans found out about it there’d be two thousand girls outside the studio. Robbie used to go to the Rapinos’ house but they were always well-behaved in front of Nigel. The only scandals were with the Rapino Brothers themselves.’

Charlie agrees: ‘The band turned up with bodyguards at the studio some days when there were no fans around and we were like, “What do you need bodyguards for?” and we later realised it was probably to protect Take That from us!’

Stephen Budd loved the result: ‘We were in the Roundhouse for the seven-inch version of “Could it Be Magic” and Nick Raymonde came in and listened to it and we all had that moment when you know without a shadow of a doubt we had a monster smash record—that very rarely happens, it was a big moment. Nothing was going to stop it being a huge hit, clear as daylight.’

The fans weren’t the only ones who loved the song: ‘We then took a call from Barry Manilow,’ recalls Stephen Budd, ‘he said, “I’ve heard this arrangement and it’s the best I have heard of one of my songs that I didn’t do, so could you come over and meet us at Wembley Arena?” So we did and met him and he did the actual arrangement live on stage, which was a nice moment.’