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.
This look would quickly subside as Nigel began to notice a strange thing happening at a lot of their club shows—specifically, one night when they played an under-age mixed-sex club in Hull. Nigel—ever perceptive—noticed that the reaction to his band from the girls was actually far more frantic than from the gay clubs they’d been focussing on. Cleverly re-focussing his strategy, Nigel twigged immediately that he had a boy-band sensation in the making, and he began to book scores of mixed-sex nightclubs in order to confirm his suspicions.
At this point, Take That were just another pop band in among the thousands of wannabes trying to make it. But Nigel was more than just your average pop-band manager. Somehow, he got them a slot on a satellite TV show called Cool Cube. Gary worked on new material especially for the performance, including a track called ‘Waiting Around’ and they prepared special dance routines too. The tight ‘hot pants’ they wore might have been better suited to a softporn channel but the viewers (perhaps because of, rather than despite the shorts) approved and the band were asked back several times. Breaking a pop band on TV is a crucial way of operating nowadays and Nigel was ahead of his time in using that medium to gain exposure (in more ways than one) for his band (especially important because Simon Bates was the lone DJ playing their music on Radio 1 with any frequency). Furthermore, Nigel understood the need to have omnipresent press coverage, and managed to get a press officer called Carolyn Norman to work for the band before they had even had a hit, and was pivotal in orchestrating the band’s amazing press profile right from the early days. Thus, as quickly as June 1991, she had managed to shoe-horn the band coverage in various teen magazines such as My Guy, Jackie, Number 1 and Smash Hits.
The infamous jelly-smearing video was first shown in July 1991 on another influential TV show, Pete Waterman’s The Hitman and Her, the very same show that Jason had previously appeared on as a dancer. This coincided with the release date of their debut single, entirely self-financed by Nigel and his partner—a real risk for them, and also a genuine show of faith in the band’s potential. Nigel had already spent close to £100,000 investing in Take That.
‘Do What You Like’ charted at No. 82.
The furore surrounding the debut video may not have helped the record chart but it did contribute to seducing the major record label RCA to sign the band in September 1991. At the time, RCA’s head of A&R was Korda Marshall, who would later go on to found his own record label and sign Muse, Ash, Garbage and The Darkness. He is now the Managing Director of Warner Brothers Records UK, but in the early days his experience with Take That had a pivotal impact, both good and bad, on Korda’s own career.
‘The irony was,’ he told me, ‘that when we finally signed them to RCA, it was actually the third time we’d looked at them. Originally one of our scouts brought them in but we were not convinced about all the leather-bondage imagery and suchlike; the second time, a guy called David Donald brought it to an A&R meeting but again we did not commit; then the third time, one of our senior A&R managers called Nick Raymonde brought a Take That demo into a meeting, just a few months after he’d joined the company. It was a three-track demo with “Take That and Party”, “A Million Love Songs” and “Do What You Like”.’
Before now, Nick Raymonde has never been interviewed at length about his time with Take That—he worked with them on a daily basis for their entire career and, as the key A&R man, was their central contact with the record company. He still talks about the band with real passion and it is easy to see how he persuaded RCA to commit to a band that no other label was interested in: ‘I’d been doing club promotion for ten years before I started work at RCA, promoting dance music predominantly. I had started looking through all the pop magazines that I hadn’t really looked at for years, doing mental research—suddenly I’m reading all these magazines that I’d never looked at before like Smash Hits, Number 1, Just Seventeen and so on.
‘So I’d been reading through all this pop press and, in the back of my mind, the idea started to ferment that there weren’t any new pop stars—they were all TV stars: Jason and Kylie, Beverley Hills 90210, etc. I didn’t think “Right, I’ll go out and sign a pop group,” it was just registered in my mind. Then a scout called Dave Donald brought in this video of some TV Take That had done and said, “You’ve got to see this video, it’s hilarious.” I watched the video and I didn’t think it was hilarious, I thought it might be an opportunity.
‘The lads were sort of boy-next-door, just dead ordinary, and they gave off the vibe that they were really enjoying what they were doing. I contacted Nigel and it turned out they’d been turned away by RCA—they ended up sitting down in reception and not even being seen—so he was quite amused by the whole situation. By this time he’d been rejected by so many people he’d actually raised ?0,000 to make the infamous “Do What You Like” video—he spent even more of his own money on school shows. He just thought, “Fuck it, I’m going to do it myself”, which is amazing really. Him being involved was a big plus: I liked Nigel, he was one of those few people in the record industry like Tom Watkins, Jazz Summers and Malcolm McLaren-Bell—real larger-than-life characters. People don’t always realise but he is hysterically funny, he has you in stitches, yet at the same time he is totally driven.
‘I went to see them do a PA [Personal Appearance] at an under-18s club in Slough at four o’clock one afternoon. They were supporting Right Said
