At this point, Take That were just another pop band in among the thousands of wannabes trying to make it. But Nigel was more than just your average pop-band manager. Somehow, he got them a slot on a satellite TV show called Cool Cube. Gary worked on new material especially for the performance, including a track called ‘Waiting Around’ and they prepared special dance routines too. The tight ‘hot pants’ they wore might have been better suited to a softporn channel but the viewers (perhaps because of, rather than despite the shorts) approved and the band were asked back several times. Breaking a pop band on TV is a crucial way of operating nowadays and Nigel was ahead of his time in using that medium to gain exposure (in more ways than one) for his band (especially important because Simon Bates was the lone DJ playing their music on Radio 1 with any frequency). Furthermore, Nigel understood the need to have omnipresent press coverage, and managed to get a press officer called Carolyn Norman to work for the band before they had even had a hit, and was pivotal in orchestrating the band’s amazing press profile right from the early days. Thus, as quickly as June 1991, she had managed to shoe-horn the band coverage in various teen magazines such as My Guy, Jackie, Number 1 and Smash Hits.
The infamous jelly-smearing video was first shown in July 1991 on another influential TV show, Pete Waterman’s The Hitman and Her, the very same show that Jason had previously appeared on as a dancer. This coincided with the release date of their debut single, entirely self-financed by Nigel and his partner—a real risk for them, and also a genuine show of faith in the band’s potential. Nigel had already spent close to £100,000 investing in Take That.
‘Do What You Like’ charted at No. 82.
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