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