Trivia / Take That (Band)

• Breakup Breakout: Gary Barlow had immediate success after the end of their first incarnation in 1996, but Robbie soon overtook him and became one of the biggest-selling pop acts of all time. Since the reunion in 2005, however, the band have now taken the spotlight away from Robbie. Mark Owen's solo career is a distant third behind Robbie and Gary though he has managed three top 10 UK hits in his own right. Howard and Jason have generally kept a low profile away from the band. Although Howard did have a fairly successful career as a house DJ, under the anonymous moniker 'DJ HD'.
• Career Resurrection: Take That released their comeback album "Beautiful World" in 2006 to critical and commercial success.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Robbie Williams doesn't think fondly of the band's saccharine earlier work, saying he gets a headache just hearing some songs.
  • No-one in the band is particularly fond of the song "I Found Heaven," one of their earliest hits. A troubled relationship with producer Ian Levine^note yes, Whovians, that one probably didn't help. In his autobiography, Gary said this:
    The song Ian made us sing was truly fucking awful. I still hate it to this day. In fact, we all hate it and absolutely refuse to perform it on stage. It is, by a huge margin, the worst song of Take That's and my career. At the time I said nothing because I felt I didn't have a leg to stand on.
  • The band so disliked their first single "Do What U Like" that it wasn't included on their Greatest Hits Album (the only other missing single being a promo that wasn't released in the UK to begin with). The song is available on their Youtube page, but the music video is a censored version with the shots of their bare backsides removed.
  • They admit that much of their earlier work has not stood up to the test of time. In fact, the only way they could perform some of their first hits, post-reunion, was to acknowledge the original concepts' absurdity and arrange them into a comedic clown routine during the Circus Tour.
  • The only early songs that they regularly perform straight are "Pray" and "Back For Good". Howard has expressed confusion at fan reaction to their continued use of "Pray"'s original dance routine, and that he's not sure if fans genuinely like the dancing or if they're cheering ironically.
  • The band express some discomfort at how they used to wear skimpy outfits for live performances of "Relight My Fire". They don't dress in assless bottoms anymore, but that doesn't stop them from dressing their dancers in outlandish outfits and trying to up the ante with each tour.
• Creator Couple: Gary's wife Dawn served as a backing dancer on both The Ultimate Tour and the Beautiful World tour. Her appearance on the '95-'96 Nobody Else tour doesn't count, however, since that's how she and Gary got together anyway.
• Follow the Leader:
  • By everyone's admission, they were very much an attempt to create a British version of New Kids on the Block, and were frequently compared to them in the early days. Conversely, their success wound up inspiring and influencing a whole wave of British boybands and other manufactured pop groups, including East 17 (the Darker and Edgier version, marketed as "The Rolling Stones to Take That's Beatles"), Boyzone, Westlife (the Irish equivalents), The Spice Girls (the Distaff Counterpart), and even arguably One Direction (the Spiritual Successor).
  • On their first album, Take That and Party, Gary's vocals are notably influenced by Rick Astley. This disappeared by the second album.
• The Merch: 90s Take That had everything from hats to drinks bottles to their own action figures. 00s Take That have calmed things down a bit, but you can still buy charm bracelets, bags, and even tour-themed baby clothes.
• One-Hit Wonder: In the USA, they're only known for their sole Top 40 hit, "Back for Good". That song was a massive success there (reaching the top ten and going platinum), and they would've probably had a few more hits, but they broke up shortly after the single's release.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Gary is missing from the night-time scenes in the video for "Up All Night" because his wife went into labour during filming.
• Reality Subtext: Post-reunion Take That tends to have a lot of this.
  • Naming your big comeback single after a decade away "Patience" is maybe a bit on the nose, after all.
  • Progress in particular borders on being a Concept Album for the amount of time it spends discussing the band and its history, most notably on the album's opening and closing tracks^note not counting the Hidden Track "Flowerbed", "The Flood" and "Eight Letters", respectively.
  • Off the same album, "What Do You Want From Me?" was widely interpreted as being about Mark Owen's much publicised marital difficulties at the time (although according to Word of God, the track was written and completed before all that became public).
  • One Dutch radio DJ interpreted the song "Freeze", off III, as being about Jason Orange's departure from the band. According to Mark, it wasn't deliberately written to be about that, but the emotions of the experience may well have seeped in.
• Real-Life Relative: Howard Donald's daughter, Grace (seven years old at the time) sings the outro on the song "Mancunian Way", off Beautiful World.
• Romance on the Set: Gary and his wife, Dawn Andrews, who was a backup dancer on Take That's final tour and married him a few years later.^note She also makes an Early-Bird Cameo in his very first music video from before Take That, a hilariously bad cover of "Love is in the Air" recorded under the name Kurtis Rush. Also, Jason Orange briefly dated Catherine Tate after they met filming the video for "Happy Now" for Comic Relief. And that's leaving aside the whole question of "Relight My Fire" and what ever happened between him and Lulu...^note  They didn't...

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