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
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
