Take That – Now and Then: Inside the Biggest Comeback in British Pop History. Martin Roach
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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 and immaculate kit being as much a part of his appearance as the match itself.
By now, Mark’s football skills had attracted the interest of several professional teams, not least Manchester United, as well as Huddersfield Town and Rochdale, but a severe groin injury curtailed what had been a promising soccer career. (Being only three years older than David Beckham and also a midfielder, it would have made an enticing team sheet at Old Trafford.) At the time, he was devastated, as soccer had been his main ambition in life. But, like Gordon Ramsay before him, football’s loss was certainly another profession’s gain. Years later, on tour with Take That, Mark would always take a football to play with inside the cavernous venues, hotel rooms or studios, earning him the nickname ‘Booter’.
As with much of the band, Mark left school aged 16 and got a job, initially in a fashionable clothes shop called Zuttis, then for some time as an electrician’s mate, before moving up the career ladder to Barclays Bank in Oldham. The owner of Zuttis, Maggie Hughes, told Rick Sky that he not only impressed her but ‘quite a few girls too…he just wanted to earn some money and was really nice, with a big, beaming, bubbling smile on his face.’ Despite his apparently meek demeanour, Maggie says Mark was a natural salesman because of the warmth of his personality. (Later, Zuttis would make one of Mark’s first ever pair of stage trousers, a see-through nylon number). The Barclays position was destined to last only eight weeks, as another part-time job was about to introduce him to a new friend who would help alter his life forever.
Eager to work, before his final exams Mark had also taken a job as a tea-boy and office hand at the local Strawberry Studios on weekends (his sister Tracey was already working part-time there). Mark soon befriended a local boy who was there to work on his demos…Gary Barlow. Mark often went to Gary’s house to listen to his songs and watch his friend cut and chop ideas onto his four-track Portastudio. It was a natural progression for Mark to start singing on the demos, and before long the duo formed their first band together, using the dubious moniker of The Cutest Rush. The idea was to perform cover versions as well as Gary’s own material. The fledgling band never actually gigged but it did cement the friendship and perfectly prime two members of Take That for their future careers. Meeting with Gary had an indelible effect on Mark and his ambition shifted from the world of 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