Take That – Now and Then: Inside the Biggest Comeback in British Pop History. Martin Roach
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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