Take That – Now and Then

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Hailing from the far-from-rock-and-roll town of Oldham in Greater Manchester, Mark Owen was the first future Take That member that Gary Barlow would come into contact with. The product of a northern Catholic family, Mark was born on 24 January 1972 (sharing his birthday with Neil Diamond) and grew up with his brother Daniel and sister Tracey in a modest council house, sharing a room with them for much of his childhood. Such small redbrick terraces were archetypal Mancunian accommodation, made famous by the opening credits of Coronation Street.

Mark’s parents, Keith and Mary, first sent him to be educated at The Holy Rosary Junior School. Mark was a good sportsman, being particularly adept at football despite his relatively diminutive frame, standing at just five foot seven inches tall. One local team he joined, Freehold Athletic, voted him Players’ Player of the Year several times, including one season where he scored a hat-trick in a cup final. (’That day will stay with me for as long as I live.’) Music Industry Five-A-Side football tournaments are testament to the fact that Mark has lost none of his silky skills, nor his quiet, sportsman-like manners.

But his skills were not always so smooth: ‘I got told off all the time for playing football in the house. I broke two windows in one day once. Just as they were fixing the one at the front of the house, I broke the one at the back of the house!’ When he broke a window another time, he went and bought a pane of glass to carry out a hasty repair. Unfortunately, his glazing skills weren’t quite up to his football ones and his parents came home to find his hands cut to ribbons because of his well-intended but ultimately doomed attempts to repair the window.

His interest in music was developed at an early age, the first record he ever owned being the theme tune to the blockbuster movie E.T. The Extra Terrestrial. Unlike Jason and Howard, however, Mark’s general musical taste was somewhat older, with his mother’s idol Elvis Presley being a firm favourite. Along with his sister Tracey, he would often dress up as Elvis, complete with blue suede shoes, and entertain people in the alleyway behind his terraced home. (He is still famed for his impersonation of The King, drawn from years of listening to his mum’s vast vinyl collection of Presley releases.) This very same alleyway would later become a shrine for Take That fans, who scribble messages of love and support on the wall to this day a la Abbey Road, despite Mark’s parents not having lived there for many years. Supposedly, his embarrassed mum used to regularly try to bleach the fan graffiti off the wall so as not to annoy her neighbours, and eventually had to post a notice on her front door asking fans not to knock on it all the time.

Throughout his time in Take That, Mark was famously amiable, laid-back and well-liked by everyone he worked with on a professional level. The media made no secret that they had great admiration for him and at any press conference he would hold court with his self-deprecation and northern humour. Signs of this mellow personality were there at a very young age and his parents speak of few rows between him and his siblings and friends.

His secondary education started aged 11 at St Augustine’s Catholic School, where he would eventually achieve six GCSEs in art, English, maths, religious education, physics and economics (although he failed German, achieving an impressive 13 per cent on one language paper). While his sister Tracey had an excellent voice, Mark developed a love of acting and was a regular in the school drama productions, including the part of Jesus in one Christmas show. Unfortunately his voice started to break mid-scene, as he said in Rick Sky’s The Take That Fact File: ‘Everyone was going around taking the mickey out of me because my speeches were turning into high-pitched squeals. It was so embarrassing.’

The extent of Mark’s childhood capers is pretty normal stuff—he and some friends briefly went missing on a school trip to Tenby before finally turning up in a local nightclub, having persuaded the bouncers to let them in despite their age. Interestingly, his teachers do not recall Mark being particularly involved with or interested in music when he was at school…it was all about football. He styled himself on former greats such as the late George Best, with his flowing locks and immaculate kit being as much a part of his appearance as the match itself.

By now, Mark’s football skills had attracted the interest of several professional teams, not least Manchester United, as well as Huddersfield Town and Rochdale, but a severe groin injury curtailed what had been a promising soccer career. (Being only three years older than David Beckham and also a midfielder, it would have made an enticing team sheet at Old Trafford.) At the time, he was devastated, as soccer had been his main ambition in life. But, like Gordon Ramsay before him, football’s loss was certainly another profession’s gain. Years later, on tour with Take That, Mark would always take a football to play with inside the cavernous venues, hotel rooms or studios, earning him the nickname ‘Booter’.

As with much of the band, Mark left school aged 16 and got a job, initially in a fashionable clothes shop called Zuttis, then for some time as an electrician’s mate, before moving up the career ladder to Barclays Bank in Oldham. The owner of Zuttis, Maggie Hughes, told Rick Sky that he not only impressed her but ‘quite a few girls too…he just wanted to earn some money and was really nice, with a big, beaming, bubbling smile on his face.’ Despite his apparently meek demeanour, Maggie says Mark was a natural salesman because of the warmth of his personality. (Later, Zuttis would make one of Mark’s first ever pair of stage trousers, a see-through nylon number). The Barclays position was destined to last only eight weeks, as another part-time job was about to introduce him to a new friend who would help alter his life forever.

Eager to work, before his final exams Mark had also taken a job as a tea-boy and office hand at the local Strawberry Studios on weekends (his sister Tracey was already working part-time there). Mark soon befriended a local boy who was there to work on his demos…Gary Barlow. Mark often went to Gary’s house to listen to his songs and watch his friend cut and chop ideas onto his four-track Portastudio. It was a natural progression for Mark to start singing on the demos, and before long the duo formed their first band together, using the dubious moniker of The Cutest Rush. The idea was to perform cover versions as well as Gary’s own material. The fledgling band never actually gigged but it did cement the friendship and perfectly prime two members of Take That for their future careers. Meeting with Gary had an indelible effect on Mark and his ambition shifted from the world of football to that of music.

Who Cares Wins

Singers Wanted: Singers and dancers wanted for a new boy band. If you have what it takes, call Nigel Martin-Smith at his Half Moon Chambers office.

Actual text of the audition advert for Take That in the Sun

There were two immediate predecessors to Take That, one British and one American. South London boys Bros were blond near-identical twins playing high-energy, cleverly crafted pop music and selling so many records to teenage girls that legions of so-called Brosettes followed their every move. Lead singer Matt and his drummer twin Luke, as well as their childhood friend Craig on bass, sold millions of records in the late Eighties, changed popular fashions with their Grolsch bottle-top shoe decorations and generated a hysteria among their fans that many observers likened to Beatlemania—when they did a signing in HMV Oxford Street, 11,000 fans turned up. Songs such as ‘When Will I Be Famous?’ and ‘I Owe You Nothing’ shifted hundreds of thousands of copies in a career that included eight Top Ten hits and two No. 1 records.

Just as Bros’s reign over the charts was coming to a close, an American group called New Kids on the Block took over the mantle. Already massive in the USA, where they played to football stadiums full of hyperventilating teenage girls, New Kids on the Block invaded the UK’s shores in 1989. They were originally conceived as an alternative to New Edition, Bobby Brown’s early Jackson Five-inspired group who had a hit in 1983 with ‘Candy Girl’. Blending the vocal talents and personalities of Donnie Wahlberg, Jordan Knight, Jon Knight, Danny Wood and Joe McIntyre was a masterstroke for New Edition producer Maurice Starr. Five was a magic number—it had worked for the Jacksons, the Osmonds, New Edition and now New Kids on the Block.

Joe McIntyre was only 14 years old on their 1986 debut, but within a year of 1988’s album Hangin’ Tough they were the biggest act in America. They cracked Britain too. Between ‘You Got It (The Right Stuff)’ in 1989 and ‘If You Go Away’ in 1991, New Kids on the Block scored eleven Top Twenty hits in Britain. Private jets, mansions, fast cars, all the signs of multi-million-dollar success abounded. Hysteria was the air their fans breathed. A management team who could market this new phenomenon properly had a licence to print money.

Nigel Martin-Smith was still a young entrepreneurial businessman watching all of these chart developments with great interest. His Manchester-based modelling agency was very successful and he was well-known in the north-west entertainment circles. However, he had designs on a much grander scale. His idea would turn him into one of the most famous pop managers of all-time.

Pop legend has it that Nigel had followed New Kids on the Block’s career closely, but when he actually saw them in person at a TV studio in Manchester, he was of the opinion that they were rude and arrogant. Noticing their behaviour had absolutely no effect whatsoever on their popularity, he’d thought to himself how massive a boy band could be if they were polite, professional and nice to deal with. He was also keen to recruit them from the North, rather than London as was often the norm for pop bands.

Fermenting this idea in his mind, Nigel then had that fateful meeting with Gary Barlow and played the demo tape the young songwriter had given him. Suddenly, almost out of nowhere, Nigel had the centrepiece of his concept: a young, experienced, gifted and very hard-working singer-songwriter. All he needed now was a band to mould around him.

Gary said he had a friend by the name of Mark Owen who was a good singer and great personality, so Nigel met up with him and immediately saw the potential. The jigsaw was coming together nicely. Then, on that day in late 1989 when Jason Orange and Howard Donald walked into Nigel’s offices looking for help booking dance work, Nigel knew immediately that his band was quickly gelling around him. He’d seen Jason Orange on The Hit Man and Her and after meeting Howard was impressed by both their dancing skills, but rather than offer them agency services or management guidance as a dance duo, as they had hoped, he surprised them both by suggesting they enrol in a boy band he was putting together. Jason was very reluctant and at first shunned the idea. Admirably, he spoke with his personnel manager at the council about his concerns over the showbiz proposal. Howard was keen from the start and needed no enticing. Eventually, Jason was persuaded by Nigel to meet up with Mark and Gary, whereupon the foursome got on famously and the nucleus of Take That was forged.

Given Take That’s relationship with, and profile in, the British tabloids, it seems only fitting that the elusive fifth member that was to complete the band’s line-up came to them through an advertisement in the Sun. His name was Robert Peter Williams and his mum went with him to the audition. This green-eyed Stoke-on-Trent boy would go on to become the biggest male solo star of the Nineties and the new millennium, but for now he was literally just an exuberant, hopeful kid turning up for an audition. Entertainment was in his blood: his mum was a singer and his father, Peter Conway, had been a highly regarded comedian who appeared on the TV talent show New Faces in the same year that Robbie was born (13 February 1974). Later regarded as Take That’s joker, Robbie admits that his first ever record was Alexi Sayle’s ‘Ullo John Got a New Motor?’. Typically, Robbie has the most glamorous of stars to share his birthday with, including Oliver Reed, George Segal and Peter Gabriel.

In light of his later battles with alcohol, it seems sadly incongruous that Robbie earliest years were spent growing up in a pub, The Red Lion, which his parents ran (he is the only Take Thatter not to be born and bred in Manchester). His now famous obsession with Port Vale Football Club was perhaps inevitable, considering his parents’ drinking hole was right next to the club’s grounds. (On one match day he showered the passing crowds with his mum’s undies.) Sadly, his mum and dad separated when he was only 3 years old, and he moved with his mother Jan and sister Sally to Stoke. ‘It didn’t have any effect on me,’ he later said, ‘because I’ve always been loopy!’

Robbie has a famously close relationship with his mother, and freely admits that during his darkest days to come, she was his rock. Back then, Jan ran a ladies’ clothes shop, then a small cafébistro and also a florist’s. Robbie went to Mill Hill Primary School in Tunstall, near Stoke, and then St Margaret’s Ward School. He was, perhaps predictably, the class prankster. Former school teachers who have been interviewed by the tabloids confirm this.

Like Mark and Jason, Robbie was a keen sportsman—again, Music Industry Five-A-Side tournaments play testament to his footy skills. Not surprisingly, his extrovert personality was drawn at an early age towards acting as a future profession (he told his mum he had no interest in being a pop star). In his early teens he joined the Stoke-on-Trent Theatre Company, playing small parts in Pickwick, Oliver (as the Artful Dodger) and Fiddler on the Roof. Although he would later claim to struggle with Take That’s dance routines, Robbie was also a keen break-dancer.

Robbie left school aged 16 and, after briefly working at his mum’s florist’s, he took a job as a double-glazing salesman.

He was not very good. ‘I just used to tell people they were over-priced and leave.’ Consequently, this career didn’t last long—he quit in order to focus on auditioning for acting roles. Despite his youth, however, he found that most roles were going to even younger actors with experience and often stage-school backgrounds. He did manage to win one role—and a clip that has surfaced on countless Before They Were Famous TV shows—is a bit part in the Liverpudlian soap Brookside. Years later he had a walk-on cameo role in EastEnders (on the phone behind David Wicks), which sounds like the CV of a typical wannabe actor…except that in between these two soap appearances, Robbie Williams was in one of the world’s biggest boy bands and went on to become the UK’s leading solo artist.

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The audition for Take That itself was at Nigel’s studio, and a nervous Robbie was keen to appear streetwise when he met what might be his future band-mates. ‘I came with my mum and I was saying through the corner of my mouth, “Right, Mum, go now.”’ He walked into the audition and Gary Barlow was sitting in the corner with a leather briefcase full of song sheets, wearing Adidas tracksuit bottoms, Converse trainers, an Italia 90 top and a coiffured Morrissey haircut. Robbie later said he was told, ‘This is Gary Barlow, he’s a professional club singer and he’s going to make this group happen.’ Despite thinking at the time that Gary’s haircut was ridiculous, Robbie has since admitted that he now sports a similar barnet. Music mythology has it that Gary introduced himself to Robbie and called him ‘son’. Gary’s confidence was understandable, as Nigel Martin-Smith obviously saw him as the core of the band—after all, by the time of these auditions, Gary had composed over fifty songs.

Howard had to take a half-day off his job as a vehicle painter to attend the audition, and he was late. Robbie said Jason was ‘very confident and liked Ford Escort RS2000 cars, Howard was shy, Mark was great and Gary was the obvious main musical driving force.’ Robbie sang ‘Nothing Can Divide Us’ by teen heart-throb Jason Donovan, but oddly admits, ‘I remember thinking what a weird bunch of lads they were and I really didn’t think we could ever be a band.’

The audition was soon over and Robbie was told that Nigel would be in touch. A few weeks later, his GCSE results were delivered and he’d failed all but two of them—consistent if nothing else (he got ‘shit-faced on Guinness’ when he received his results). The very same day, the phone rang and it was Nigel calling with the news that he wanted Robbie in the band. The timing could not have been more serendipitous. In a show of exuberance for which he would later become notorious, Robbie sprinted upstairs into his bedroom, flung the window open and screamed ‘I’m going to be famous!’ into the street. Robbie was just 16; Howard was the eldest at 20. Unbeknown to them, within eighteen months they would not be able to walk down any street in Great Britain without being recognised.

One footnote to add to the embryonic days of Take That is the fact that Nigel Martin-Smith insisted each member brought at least one parent with them to sign his managerial contracts. Pop music is littered with tales of teenage starlets signing contracts that are little more than slave labour. Nigel was clever—he knew that if his master plan with Take That worked, huge sums of money would be generated and he was adamant that every detail was precise. Being contractually transparent was an admirable first move. Plus, it gained the trust of the boys’ parents.

From day one, Nigel’s intellect and ideas were absolutely crucial to the band succeeding. This was immediately obvious by the intense programme of rehearsals he arranged, which saw his new charges spending hours every day in dance and choreography sessions, from the early hours until at least 7 p.m. Gary was writing constantly and their voices were improving all the time. Nigel oversaw every aspect of their prospective career, planning it all in intimate detail. The boys were also put on fitness regimes, with sit-ups, press-ups, aerobic work and gymnastics giving the whole experience a real boot-camp atmosphere. Outsiders sometimes wonder why this is so necessary, but if you were to take a bunch of 16—to 20-year-old men and ask them to create a business turning over an eight-figure sum in two years, you would expect there to be some long hours involved.

Let’s be honest, Take That is a pretty dreadful band name. It’s not as bad as The Backstreet Boys and not as good as Foreheads in a Fishtank, but it isn’t great. The boys had seen a photograph of Madonna with the caption ‘Take That!’ written under it and this was elongated to read Take That and Party. The latter two words were dropped when it transpired there already existed an American group called The Party, so that was that…Take That!

When they first heard there was a band called Take That, many music journalists thought it was a joke. It just sounded so limp, so wet. But their success became so huge that you soon forgot the actual words: they became more of a sound that you associated with the five superstars, and any reservations about the moniker completely dissipated.

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Over the twelve months after the five members of Take That had each inked the contract with Nigel Martin-Smith, they were still rehearsing and preparing. Rick Sky quoted Gary describing the band’s first ever gig in Flicks nightclub in Huddersfield thus: ‘There were about twenty people in the audience and a dog. Only about ten of them were watching…but it wouldn’t have mattered if only the dog was watching. Afterwards we were on such a high.’ That’s all those years playing to the pie-and-mash circuit coming in handy right there.

They had finally started to gig, and their workload was exhausting. In the year or so before they hit the big time, Take That took to the road relentlessly, racking up dozens and dozens of shows. At this stage the band’s lifestyle was far from glamorous: their average week comprised of piling into Nigel’s Ford Escort XR3i and/or a yellow Salford Van Hire vehicle and driving hundreds of miles to play countless gay clubs, then later schools and nightclubs. Funds were understandably tight, so the best they could afford each night were either numerous Little Britain-esque bed and breakfast guest-houses or a long drive home through the small hours. Howard later recalled in the ITV1’s 2005 documentary, Take That—For the Record how most of the gay clubs saw them ‘having our arses pinched and our front bits pinched’. If a gig was particularly hostile, missiles would be thrown. ‘Some of the audiences were kind enough to give us free beer. Say no more,’ said Mark on one occasion. Jason later admitted that he ‘left’ Take That for about two days during this very early phase, and actually considered going back to painting and decorating—he found the pressures and workload a culture shock but was soon able to gain some perspective and ‘rejoin’.

No record companies had shown any interest at this stage, so Take That’s debut single, ‘Do What You Like’, was recorded ready for release on Nigel’s own Dance UK label in July 1991. Written by Gary with Ray Hedges, who went on to work with Boyzone, the track itself is pretty ‘unforgettable’ (but for mainly the wrong reasons), a high-energy, keyboard-driven pop song that had none of the sophistication of the band’s latter-day pop classics. But this was a band learning as they went along, and the single was sufficiently rousing to help them book yet more live shows to promote it.

In the weeks and months leading up to their debut single, the band played scores of gigs. All the time, Nigel Martin-Smith continued working hard to break the band. He arranged press showcases, such as one at Hollywood’s Nightclub in Romford, and spent countless hours on the phone soliciting interest.

Without doubt, the most memorable moment of this fledgling phase of Take That was the bizarre and risqu?promo video they shot for ‘Do What You Like’, which would make The Village People blush. It was shot in Stockport, which is not currently famed for its glitzy showbiz vistas. In a blatant attempt to capture the pink pound, the boys were filmed in a white-wall studio wearing virtually nothing but numerous leather jockstrap-style combinations, codpieces and studded leather. Copious amounts of jelly were slapped and rubbed over various naked body parts and there was enough cavorting aplenty to make Will Young look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Gary Barlow’s hair is a miracle of modern science and the only thing tighter than the jockstraps was the budget. According to legend, the closing ‘bum’ shot was so hotly sought-after that the boys each auditioned—a screen-test for arses, believe it or not—to see whose was better. Not surprisingly, the moral minority complained the clip was too obscene and pornographic, but the vast majority took it as intended—a tongue-in-cheek bit of fun. Nonetheless, even David Brent from The Office would cringe watching the blatantly homoerotic video. It was all a far cry from seeing a velvet-voiced Robbie play the Royal Albert Hall years later in a suave lounge suit, but this was their first foray into the pop world and it is rare that a pop band nails their image from day one.

It is odd looking back at this video and the early photographs of Take That, because, to be honest, their look is laughable. Leather gear, tassels and tight trousers: it was all so camp and exaggerated. Fast-forward to the sophisticated, grainy images of ‘Back for Good’ and it might as well be a different band. But some context is needed. This was a bunch of young guys who—with exception of Gary Barlow—had relatively little entertainment experience. Contrary to popular belief, they were involved in their own look to some degree—they would shop in High Street Kensington at places such as Hyper Hyper, the amazing alternative clothes emporium where young, breakthrough designers often sold their wares direct.