![]() ![]() We sent a car for Rob, drove him across from Stoke, and got the vocal on it. ![]() I said: ‘We need a song for Rob,’ and so we wrote ‘Everything Changes’ within about an hour. “I thought, ‘Right, I’ve got to do something quick!’ So I went to see my friend Eliot Kennedy – he’s got a studio in Sheffield – and he had a little team of writers with him. Upon delivering what was the finished album to the label, Gary realised Robbie had no lead vocals on any song. The fourth single, the album’s title track, almost never was. Jason was learning guitar, so he’d learnt it on guitar, and Mark used to sing it, so by the time we’d come to record it he just knew it off by heart.” “We had that from the first album, I think, and we used to sing it a lot on the road for vocal practice. “We had ‘Babe’ for years,” he says of their next hit. “But once we got in the studio it was just amazing. “I was a bit unsure, if I’m honest,” says Gary of the suggestion. ‘Relight My Fire’, a lively cover of Dan Hartman’s 1979 disco track, followed, and featured a guest vocal from Lulu, at the insistence of Martin-Smith. The first was ‘Pray’ – “The best song on that record,” according to Gary, which demonstrated their recent R&B leanings. Six singles were released from the Mercury Prize-nominated album, and four hit number one. ‘Everything Changes’ captures Take That at the height of their fame. But we didn’t have the time to play with for it not to be, you know?” “New Jack Swing was big at the time – you had your Blackstreets and R Kelly – that was the flavour coming from the States,” Gary says, “and so we got a UK producer to give it that New Jack Swing feel, so it was kind of cutting edge for us at that time.”īarlow wrote the new batch of songs within a specially designated two-week gap in their schedule, a fast-paced deadline he thrived in: “It was moving so quick! It was active, it was spontaneous it was just great. ![]() By the time it came to think about its follow-up, the group were already displaying more mature musical tastes.īesides the car stereo favourites 808 State and Extreme, and Gary’s love for Seal and George Michael, there was a distinct American influence taking shape. Naturally, it exploded, reaching number two domestically and staying in the charts for over a year. Its singles, with the exception of ‘A Million Love Songs’, were high-energy dance numbers with a full injection of camp disco and readymade choreography. Their first album, ‘Take That & Party’, was released in August 1992. It was nothing but live performances for at least the first three years.” “Three or four shows a night at different venues, sometimes with an hour’s drive in between! Even though we’re not a live band – we don’t play instruments – this, and our audience, started from our live. “The amount of live stuff we used to do!” Gary Barlow tells Clash, incredulously. Their first years together were filled with an exhausting schedule of live appearances up and down the country. The quintet was formed in 1990 around the songwriting nucleus of Gary Barlow under manager Nigel Martin-Smith, collecting fellow singers and dancers through auditions in and around Manchester – the final line-up, of course, was Mark Owen, Howard Donald, Robbie Williams and Jason Orange alongside Barlow. They dominated Saturday morning TV and Top Of The Pops, and the combination of their effervescent northern humour and infectious singles meant that, whether you admitted it or not, you knew every member and every song. In 1993, it was very difficult to avoid the Take That phenomenon.
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