for Take That.
He started to supplement his feeble income by dancing at clubs such as Manchester’s Apollo, on podiums and stages to vibe the crowd up. It was an ideal way of getting paid to practise, and besides, if he wasn’t working at these clubs he would have been there as a paying punter anyway. Consequently he developed a very muscular physique at an early age, leading to his latter-day Take That nickname of ‘The Body’.
***
One of the people in Howard’s break-dancing circles was Jason Orange, the older of twins by twenty minutes, born 10 July 1970. Coming from a similarly big family, as well as Jason’s twin Justin there were four other brothers (Simon, Dominic, Samuel and Oliver) with his (now divorced) parents, bus driver Anthony and doctor’s PA Jennifer, bringing the family total to seven. Jason is reputed to have ‘blue blood’ in his veins—family trees suggest he is a direct descendant of King William of Orange, a Dutch Royal plagued by ill health who sat on the British throne as King William III in the second half of the seventeenth century.
The Orange family were Mormons, a faith shared by other pop stars including The Mission’s bacchanalian front man Wayne Hussey and The Killers’ Brandon Flowers. Like Flowers (and very much unlike the rock-and-roll beast that is Wayne Hussey), Jason’s family eschewed caffeine and alcohol as ‘drugs’ and lived very clean lives, something which Jason was able to continue even under the extreme pressures of being in a world-famous boy band.
Like Howard, Jason was not academia’s biggest fan. Attending at first Havely Hey School in Whythenshawe until he was 12, and then South Manchester High School, Jason was a keen sportsman, being particularly proficient at swimming, running and football. He has said that he was a quiet pupil and kept himself to himself, so it was perhaps not surprising that when he reached 16 he chose to leave school with only a modest amount of exam passes. On his final day at school, he walked through the gates for the last time, turned around, surveyed the buildings where he’d spent so many years and shouted ‘Freedom!’ out loud. He was keen to work and also joined the infamous Youth Training Scheme, which placed him as a painter and decorator for the Direct Works department of the local council (likewise his twin Justin). Typically, this involved decorating council property and amenities buildings.
It was hardly the most glamorous of work, and although Jason enjoyed it for the four years he was on an apprenticeship there, he had his sights set on greater things. In his first teenage year, Jason had also become fascinated with break-dancing—after a brief dalliance with Pink Floyd, whose The Wall was the first album he ever bought—so that by his late-teens every spare minute outside of work was spent practising, performing in the streets and watching American videos of the big-name dancers. He joined a local crew called Street Machine that was effectively a rival to Howard Donald’s RDS Royals. He too started working the clubs, and this was how he first met Howard at the Apollo. With so much in common they were bound to spark off each other, and a tight dancing partnership was soon formed by the name of Street Beat, which proved to be increasingly lucrative. They could soon command a week’s YTS money for one night’s work.
Progress was swift for both dancers, who started to rack up television work as well as regular jobs on the club circuit. Jason performed regularly on the TV show The Hit Man and Her, presented by Pete Waterman and Michaela Strachan. He’d got the gig after his girlfriend had written to the show telling them of his talent (along with his friend Neil McCartney). Howard, meanwhile, had the technically more impressive but rather less street-credible accolade of performing on that mainstay of conservative TV schedules Come Dancing, during sections of the show dedicated to modern dance.
Realising their dancing was proving very popular and that there might be a good long-term living to be had beyond the nine-to-five they were used to, Howard and Jason paid a visit to a local music impresario by the name of Nigel Martin-Smith. Unbeknown to them, their lives would never be the same again.
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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
