Something Remarkable This Way Comes

      Unfortunately, chart matters were only to get worse. In January and February 1992, the band embarked on a gruelling ‘Safe Sex’ tour of predominantly gay and under-18s clubs—complete with the support of The Family Planning Association—as part of their concerted promotion for the second RCA single, ‘Once You’ve Tasted Love’. More gigs were played—sometimes four a day—radio and TV had started picking up on the boys, and with the might of RCA’s press office behind them, all eyes were on a chart position higher than the No. 38 achieved by ‘Promises’. The campaign was assisted—sort of—by the promo video, which, although it didn’t feature naked arses and bondage gear, still had the boys prancing around in a rehearsal studio, wearing the sort of eye-watering, skintight lycra last seen on a Tour de France winner.

      In the first week of February, ‘Once You’ve Tasted Love’ fell well short of the Top Forty at No. 47. This was an unmitigated disaster…Take That were a band in crisis. The night they found out, they were on the road and all admitted they cried at the news. There was even talk of splitting up if things didn’t improve.

      For Nick Raymonde at RCA, this was a real shocker: ‘I was in a bit of a rarefied balloon because Take That were all over the pop press so you think, They’re huge, I’ll put a record out and it’ll be massive. Everyone was hyping everybody. No one wanted to say, “Hold on a minute, is that record good enough?” I’ve been there so many times, because you get caught up in the hype and no one says, “We’ve made a video, we’ve spent £30,000 making the record, we’ve given them an advance and it’s shit.”’

      Yet Nick still buoyed spirits and sat them down to pep-talk them. ‘The band were grafting their tits off, but when they wandered in after the second single had gone in at No. 47, they looked like beaten men. I said, “Look, we are going to do this, we will win, we just have to get the record company on board and all you’ve got to do is tour and tour and tour and tour and tour. I have to make you a hit record.” And that’s exactly what we did.’

      To compound their problems, the band had started work on their debut album and it was proving to be a far from straightforward process. The album sessions had started at Southlands Studios in London over the Christmas period and were riddled with complications. Almost an entire album’s worth of tracks had been recorded, but Korda Marshall at RCA wasn’t entirely happy with them. Nick Raymonde and Korda knew they weren’t getting it quite right, as Nick recalls: ‘I listened to the track we had, then sat back with Korda and said, “It’s not really any good, is it?” So it wasn’t really a great place to be.’

      Korda told me about the behind-the-scenes issues: ‘At that point I had a band called Londonbeat, a male harmony group, who’d had a couple of big hits most famously with “I’ve Been Thinking About You”. I had a meeting with a producer called Ian Levine to discuss working on Londonbeat with him. It came up in that conversation about what else I was working on and I explained we were in the middle of making this album with Take That and it wasn’t happening at the moment. I said, “We’ve spent a fortune making this album which just doesn’t sound very good, it’s too Pet Shop Boys-sounding.”’

      Ian Levine was a maverick music-industry heavyweight with a portfolio of hits and artists as hefty as RCA’s growing Take That overdraft, including work with Erasure, Nina Carroll, The Pasadenas and the Pet Shop Boys (he would later also work with Blue). Ian had been the UK’s top club DJ in the Seventies, famed for his profile and reputation in the Northern Soul scene and later as resident DJ at the legendary Heaven nightclub. To date, along with the eighty hits he has produced or remixed, Ian is also listed as one of the Top Ten Most Influential DJs of All Time by Bill Brewster in his book Last Night a DJ Saved My Life. For Take That’s ambitions of getting their debut album right, Ian seemed like he could be a magic bullet.

      ‘So I had this meeting with Korda,’ Ian explains. ‘I’d been brought in previously to produce The Pasadenas, who looked like they were going to be dropped, and we came up with a hit single—I was told I was being brought in to resurrect their career and yet it actually resurrected my career because I’d had a few years where things hadn’t gone very well and I’d nearly lost my house over one project in particular. So I gave The Pasadenas their biggest hit, “Tribute (Right On)”, which was Top Five for weeks.

      ‘With that in mind, Korda asked me to come in and talk about Londonbeat. Suddenly, in the middle of the conversation we started talking about Take That and he said, “I’m very frustrated, I’ve put a lot of money into this band”, and Korda was very unhappy with what had been done.

      ‘I was well aware of Take That because I was in admiration of what their press officer Carolyn Norman had done with them, which was take a group who hadn’t made a hit and somehow plaster them over every single magazine going regardless—everyone was talking about them. However, the general feeling that I’d heard in the industry about Take That, the word on the street if you like, was that here was a group surrounded by a lot of hype, a lot of publicity but with crap material. At the end of the day, no matter how much money you spend on an act, if the songs aren’t there you’re not going to make it…and the songs weren’t there.’

      The band themselves have said they were ‘becoming the most famous group in Britain for not having a hit’. The problem for Korda was that his budgets were already shot: ‘There was no money left to make the album again, so the irony of this story was that we gave Ian Levine a royalty as well as a small fee. Normally he was charging about ?5K a song, but because RCA didn’t have any spare cash for the projects I agreed to give him a really big royalty. So when Take That went on to sell millions it was a great deal for him. He said to me, “Korda, next time you want something doing, don’t pay me any advances, just give me a really big royalty again! That’s the best thing you ever made me do.”’

      Ian had grand dreams for the band but had to be very creative with such a limited budget: ‘The most we could squeeze together for recording was twenty grand, with which I had to cut five tracks, including flying in Billy Griffin [former lead singer with The Miracles] from Los Angeles to get the right sound I wanted for the vocals. I had an expensive studio in Chiswick and I had to use live musicians like a sax player and a guitar player. It was all very expensive. It cost me much more than that twenty grand to make, but I had to make a decision—RCA couldn’t come up with any more money and I wanted to do it. Fortunately, in the end I did very well out of it because of my royalty being increased.’

      Once the new sessions had been set up, Ian was in his element: ‘We went in and the first meeting with the group was down at the studio. Jason wasn’t involved in any of the studio recordings but he came down on the first day to meet me, so we had all five of them there. We all went out to a restaurant called New Orleans, one of those Tex Mex places that do charcoal-grilled hamburgers and food like that. It’s even done out like Bourbon Street in New Orleans with big awnings and all that stuff. I remember we went in their car—it was a big, dark blue Previa people-carrier. They had no money for a road manager so Gary had been doing a lot of the driving up and down the country for all these under-18 gigs. I sat in the front seat with Gary.

      ‘When we had this dinner, they were the nicest guys I’d ever met and I thought at the time, If we give them a hit they won’t change at all: they were genuine and humble. Gary and Robbie were saying things like, “Ian, we are really pleased to be working with you, we know what you’ve done in the past.”’

      Ian says Take That were pretty typical of a boy band in the studio: ‘They all knuckled down eventually, but they’d muck about and were always laughing and joking. Gary was very serious about knuckling down, he was very responsible—when they came back later in the year to redo some stuff, Gary had really got his act together and did loads of backing vocals. I think he’s very talented and I liked him very much.’

      Korda thought bringing in a veteran such as Billy Griffin was a great idea: ‘The process wasn’t about bringing