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The Fuses Are Lit

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 Fred, who were just about to have a big hit with “I’m Too Sexy”. They were sat in the dressing room and I went and said hello and they were all dressed in this ridiculous bondage gear, but it was entertaining! Once they went on stage, there was sort of thirty or forty girls stood around the fringes, pretty disinterested in what was happening on stage and more interested in the boys that were there to chat them up. And do you know what? By the time Take That had finished doing the first song, they were completely mobbed. As I said, I’d done club promotion for so long, so I just did some simple multiplication: there’s about 4,500 clubs in the UK and of that I reckoned there were probably a thousand of them that you could put this band on at; therefore, if you get the same reaction at each club, then make a decent record and somehow aggregate all the fans together, then you could be successful.

‘Because they weren’t on the radar yet, I thought we could have a clear run at them as a project—Korda was a hugely experienced A&R guy and I thought that he would help me with it. He wanted me to succeed because he’d actually brought me into the record label as the A&R manager, so he wanted me to be successful.’

So Nick took the tracks to his boss and this time Korda was hooked by one track in particular: ‘I remember listening to “A Million Love Songs” and thinking That’s a smash record,’ says Korda. ‘Nigel Martin-Smith had a very clear vision of what to do and I thought Gary’s songs were really very good. “A Million Love Songs” had that sax solo, there was something going on in there from chord progressions to harmony, melody, the whole feel. Yet what people won’t realise is that Take That were actually a bit of a joke at the time in the A&R community, and in fact when Nick brought the tape into that meeting, everybody kind of laughed. But Nick took it seriously.’

Nick agrees: ‘As we were going through the process of signing the band, everyone is telling me that I’m an idiot. “This is going to be your first signing for RCA, Nick, and you’re gonna sign this joke group that everyone has turned down!” Hearing all this, I started to get cold feet; I started to imagine how it would look if it all failed, the losses we’d make and so on. I mentioned this to Korda and he said a remarkable thing: “Look, if you sign them and they are successful, you’re a star and we’re all laughing because they’ll sell millions of records; and if they fail, you can blame me.” It was amazing. No one has ever brought that to light, Korda’s never mentioned that and it was unheard of for someone to put it like that. So we decided we’d sign them.’

The context for this relative scorn was that, for many, pop was dead. As mentioned earlier, Bros had ruled the pop world in the late Eighties and New Kids on the Block had taken over their crown shortly after, but since then many ears had either turned to the Pacific West Seaboard and the approaching juggernaut that was grunge, or lost a few brain cells in the rush for ecstasy and raving. Guitars and clubbing were back in, and a squeaky-clean boy band with carefully choreographed dance routines was in many ways the absolute antithesis of what was considered fashionable. ‘I remember the day we signed them,’ recalls Korda. ‘We got all these faxes from Sony and EMI basically saying, “What the fuck are you doing? You’re the laughing stock of the A&R community!” But you have to look at it from a social and cultural aspect, about whether there is a space with nobody in it. For example, years later I went to see Deep Purple and Lynyrd Skynyrd and you could see there was a huge audience for that style of music but there was nobody new doing it…and then I came across this band called The Darkness. Likewise, there was a phase in the early 2000s where there weren’t a lot of singer-songwriters around; there were a few “arty farty” singers and some quality people like Damien Rice, but for me there was no mainstream commercial singer-songwriter. Then I heard James Blunt. You look for a gap. That’s what we saw with Take That.’

Nick Raymonde and Korda both spotted this vacuum. ‘There were no boy bands, nobody was doing pop in that sense. It was the whole club/dance thing. Nick and I went to see Take That at a club called the Limelight in Shaftsbury Avenue where they did a three-song set which, to be honest, was so gay it was funny. They were still quite young at the time. They could obviously dance, the routines were fantastic, and I recall being struck by their complexions. It sounds funny but they were obviously going to be very photogenic. I could just see them all over magazines such as Smash Hits. If you look at any early photos, you have to agree there was a clear photogenic sensibility. I know this sounds silly, but even something as specific as their individual jaw lines, the way that their skin looked—Nigel Martin-Smith had done a good job of styling them too by then.

‘That night I remember thinking they could all dance really well, they’d got a good mix of looks and personalities, and they’d got a couple of songs that could be hits…Let’s go for it! That impulse was actually so unlike me, normally I’d strategise and make a decision on the music and the core creativity and suchlike.

‘As I say, in the very early days it was very gay. It was Nigel Martin-Smith who put it together and it was a market he thought they could tap into. When he came in, we had a long conversation about trout fishing, which I love—he’s a fisherman as well, so we talked about trout for most of the time. I got on with him really well. He had his own model agency in Manchester at the time, yet for this new boy band he had a really strong vision about what he wanted to do. This was crucial in the decision-making process, because it was evident that it wasn’t just five young boys new to the business, which has the potential to be a nightmare. I was effectively dealing with one grown-up man who knew exactly what he was doing.

‘I’d met the actual band on the night of the Limelight gig and then they came into the office and we chatted and talked. It was really evident that they were really good at gripping-and-grinning [meeting and greeting the general public], which, in a pop sense, is really important. At the Limelight and in our offices you could watch them working a room, chatting with women; they were great with women and they were really good with the media and they’d shake hands, they’d be interested and they’d turn up on time. I know it sounds silly but the ability for them to turn up at a TV studio at half six in the morning, looking bright, fresh, ready to go and cracking jokes when everyone else is blotchy-eyed, it was a hefty potential asset…in walk these five young kids and you could-n’t not look at them. You could see them being so attractive to women, which is an obvious bonus. Plus they were really respectful with their p’s and q’s. They were nice kids, well brought up, good characters. And, contrary to many reports, at that point they were certainly a gang, the five of them were together all that time, laughing constantly, mucking about. It was all new and fresh. They were a gang.

‘At this point we started to take them seriously. Nigel took us seriously and we finally agreed a record contract—it wasn’t a huge deal at all. It was in the region of about £70,000, which effectively committed RCA to a further investment of around £300,000 to £400,000 in terms of launching Take That. It was a pretty standard deal to be honest.’

Nigel and the boys’ hard work had finally paid off and they had secured themselves a major-label record contract. Take That joined a very ‘unique’ roster that boasted such diverse artists as Rick Astley, The Primitives, The Wedding Present and Pop Will Eat Itself. ‘I actually had several occasions where the paths of these polar opposites on our roster would cross,’ Korda told me.

‘High-profile new bands are usually signed in something of a fanfare, to start the PR machine rolling early. I remember the signing party for Take That very clearly. It was at the Hard Rock CafÉ. We all had a long chat and I started talking to Robbie. The rest of the band were all drinking Coca Cola and Robbie was like, “Can you shove a scotch in there please?” We had to look around to see where his manager and everyone else was before we gave him this sneaky drink. Bless them, they were under the thumb of Nigel in quite a big way, but in a positive sense; Nigel did a lot of good things for them and that was because he was very strong in knowing what he wanted to do and where he wanted to take it. He controlled the boys and I think their frustrations would later come through, but from a record label’s perspective, Nigel’s approach was a very positive aspect, because there was someone in charge, sailing the ship and knowing what to do.’

Take That’s first major-label single was ‘Promises’ in September 1991, exactly seven days before Nirvana’s seminal ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. One record changed the face of modern music, arts, TV, radio, music-industry strategies and pretty much every facet of popular culture; the other one didn’t. No prizes for guessing which one was Take That’s.

Nick Raymonde recalls that first major-label release: ‘I thought Gary was a great songwriter, but being honest, “Promises” was an all right song, but it wasn’t a great record. On top of that, we hadn’t worked out how to get all of these fans that existed everywhere alerted to the fact a record was coming out. There was so much hype around the group that the record company was almost wanting it to succeed too soon. This song was done with Duncan Bridgman at his own studio in Uxbridge Road: he produced it, played on it, but unfortunately I didn’t like it—to be fair to Duncan, though, I didn’t really know what record it was we were trying to make.’

Having said that, the single did mark the start of something big, not least their first ever chart entry. Robbie later remarked that the moment they all heard the single had charted at No. 38—their first chart hit—was the most excited he has ever been about any single, including during his own illustrious solo career. Apparently, the band jumped on his hotel bed so much it broke.

Nick Raymonde was equally pleased. ‘I thought when that first record had gone in at No. 38 that was a genuine hit, because at that time the Top Forty was regarded as success—actually, the fact that it only sold about 8,000 copies and probably hadn’t even washed its hands on the cost of the photograph on the sleeve was a more worrying reality.’

The video was low budget but did give an interesting insight into the band’s life on the road, featuring as it did footage of their club PAs and school shows, as well as a ‘live’ performance re-enacted at Hollywoods nightclub in Romford, one of their regular haunts. During the promotional campaign for ‘Promises’, they also made their first appearance on Wogan, which was Britain’s biggest chat show at the time, with viewing figures of twelve million a night. As part of his intro, Sir Terence called them—not for the first or last time—‘Britain’s answer to New Kids on the Block’.

***

Nigel Hassler of Helter Skelter Agency was, at the time, working for Primary Talent booking agents, and he became involved in some of Take That’s very earliest shows. Even at that early stage, there was a growing buzz within the music industry about these newcomers, as he explained to me: ‘I am always researching magazines, gig listings, seeing who keeps cropping up, who I need to keep an eye out for, and Take That seemed to catch my eye 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!’