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
