football to that of music.
Singers Wanted: Singers and dancers wanted for a new boy band. If you have what it takes, call Nigel Martin-Smith at his Half Moon Chambers office.
Actual text of the audition advert for Take That in the Sun
There were two immediate predecessors to Take That, one British and one American. South London boys Bros were blond near-identical twins playing high-energy, cleverly crafted pop music and selling so many records to teenage girls that legions of so-called Brosettes followed their every move. Lead singer Matt and his drummer twin Luke, as well as their childhood friend Craig on bass, sold millions of records in the late Eighties, changed popular fashions with their Grolsch bottle-top shoe decorations and generated a hysteria among their fans that many observers likened to Beatlemania—when they did a signing in HMV Oxford Street, 11,000 fans turned up. Songs such as ‘When Will I Be Famous?’ and ‘I Owe You Nothing’ shifted hundreds of thousands of copies in a career that included eight Top Ten hits and two No. 1 records.
Just as Bros’s reign over the charts was coming to a close, an American group called New Kids on the Block took over the mantle. Already massive in the USA, where they played to football stadiums full of hyperventilating teenage girls, New Kids on the Block invaded the UK’s shores in 1989. They were originally conceived as an alternative to New Edition, Bobby Brown’s early Jackson Five-inspired group who had a hit in 1983 with ‘Candy Girl’. Blending the vocal talents and personalities of Donnie Wahlberg, Jordan Knight, Jon Knight, Danny Wood and Joe McIntyre was a masterstroke for New Edition producer Maurice Starr. Five was a magic number—it had worked for the Jacksons, the Osmonds, New Edition and now New Kids on the Block.
Joe McIntyre was only 14 years old on their 1986 debut, but within a year of 1988’s album Hangin’ Tough they were the biggest act in America. They cracked Britain too. Between ‘You Got It (The Right Stuff)’ in 1989 and ‘If You Go Away’ in 1991, New Kids on the Block scored eleven Top Twenty hits in Britain. Private jets, mansions, fast cars, all the signs of multi-million-dollar success abounded. Hysteria was the air their fans breathed. A management team who could market this new phenomenon properly had a licence to print money.
Nigel Martin-Smith was still a young entrepreneurial businessman watching all of these chart developments with great interest. His Manchester-based modelling agency was very successful and he was well-known in the north-west entertainment circles. However, he had designs on a much grander scale. His idea would turn him into one of the most famous pop managers of all-time.
Pop legend has it that Nigel had followed New Kids on the Block’s career closely, but when he actually saw them in person at a TV studio in Manchester, he was of the opinion that they were rude and arrogant. Noticing their behaviour had absolutely no effect whatsoever on their popularity, he’d thought to himself how massive a boy band could be if they were polite, professional and nice to deal with. He was also keen to recruit them from the North, rather than London as was often the norm for pop bands.
Fermenting this idea in his mind, Nigel then had that fateful meeting with Gary Barlow and played the demo tape the young songwriter had given him. Suddenly, almost out of nowhere, Nigel had the centrepiece of his concept: a young, experienced, gifted and very hard-working singer-songwriter. All he needed now was a band to mould around him.
Gary said he had a friend by the name of Mark Owen who was a good singer and great personality, so Nigel met up with him and immediately saw the potential. The jigsaw was coming together nicely. Then, on that day in late 1989 when Jason Orange and Howard Donald walked into Nigel’s offices looking for help booking dance work, Nigel knew immediately that his band was quickly gelling around him. He’d seen Jason Orange on The Hit Man and Her and after meeting Howard was impressed by both their dancing skills, but rather than offer them agency services or management guidance as a dance duo, as they had hoped, he surprised them both by suggesting they enrol in a boy band he was putting together. Jason was very reluctant and at first shunned the idea. Admirably, he spoke with his personnel manager at the council about his concerns over the showbiz proposal. Howard was keen from the start and needed no enticing. Eventually, Jason was persuaded by Nigel to meet up with Mark and Gary, whereupon the foursome got on famously and the nucleus of Take That was forged.
Given Take That’s relationship with, and profile in, the British tabloids, it seems only fitting that the elusive fifth member that was to complete the band’s line-up came to them through an advertisement in the Sun. His name was Robert Peter Williams and his mum went with him to the audition. This green-eyed Stoke-on-Trent boy would go on to become the biggest male solo star of the Nineties and the new millennium, but for now he was literally just an exuberant, hopeful kid turning up for an audition. Entertainment was in his blood: his mum was a singer and his father, Peter Conway, had been a highly regarded comedian who appeared on the TV talent show New Faces in the same year that Robbie was born (13 February 1974). Later regarded as Take That’s joker, Robbie admits that his first ever record was Alexi Sayle’s ‘Ullo John Got a New Motor?’. Typically, Robbie has the most glamorous of stars to share his birthday with, including Oliver Reed, George Segal and Peter Gabriel.
In light of his later battles with alcohol, it seems sadly incongruous that Robbie earliest years were spent growing up in a pub, The Red Lion, which his parents ran (he is the only Take Thatter not to be born and bred in Manchester). His now famous obsession with Port Vale Football Club was perhaps inevitable, considering his parents’ drinking hole was right next to the club’s grounds. (On one match day he showered the passing crowds with his mum’s undies.) Sadly, his mum and dad separated when he was only 3 years old, and he moved with his mother Jan and sister Sally to Stoke. ‘It didn’t have any effect on me,’ he later said, ‘because I’ve always been loopy!’
Robbie has a famously close relationship with his mother, and freely admits that during his darkest days to come, she was his rock. Back then, Jan ran a ladies’ clothes shop, then a small cafébistro and also a florist’s. Robbie went to Mill Hill Primary School in Tunstall, near Stoke, and then St Margaret’s Ward School. He was, perhaps predictably, the class prankster. Former school teachers who have been interviewed by the tabloids confirm this.
Like Mark and Jason, Robbie was a keen sportsman—again, Music Industry Five-A-Side tournaments play testament to his footy skills. Not surprisingly, his extrovert personality was drawn at an early age towards acting as a future profession (he told his mum he had no interest in being a pop star). In his early teens he joined the Stoke-on-Trent Theatre Company, playing small parts in Pickwick, Oliver (as the Artful Dodger) and Fiddler on the Roof. Although he would later claim to struggle with Take That’s dance routines, Robbie was also a keen break-dancer.
Robbie left school aged 16 and, after briefly working at his mum’s florist’s, he took a job as a double-glazing salesman.
He was not very good. ‘I just used to tell people they were over-priced and leave.’ Consequently, this career didn’t last long—he quit in order to focus on auditioning for acting roles. Despite his youth, however, he found that most roles were going to even younger actors with experience and often stage-school backgrounds. He did manage to win one role—and a clip that has surfaced on countless Before They Were Famous TV shows—is a bit part in the Liverpudlian soap Brookside. Years later he had a walk-on cameo role in EastEnders (on the phone behind David Wicks), which sounds like the CV of a typical wannabe actor…except that in between these two soap appearances, Robbie Williams was in one of the world’s biggest boy bands and went on to become the UK’s leading solo artist.
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The audition for Take That itself was at Nigel’s studio, and a nervous Robbie was keen to appear streetwise when he met what might be his future band-mates. ‘I came with my mum and I was saying through the corner of my mouth, “Right, Mum, go now.”’ He walked into the audition and Gary Barlow was sitting in the corner with a leather briefcase full of song sheets, wearing Adidas tracksuit bottoms, Converse trainers,