Beautiful World
Death, taxes, pop band reformations: such are the grim inevitabilities that punctuate life. Opening the papers to discover that Take That were reuniting was just a matter of time, the only conceivable outcome of those stalled solo careers and Celebrity Big Brother appearances.
Yet it’s hard to imagine exactly how this comeback is going to work: not only has Robbie Williams’s monstrous success cast its dark shadow over the Take That brand, but the boys obviously can’t be as much fun now as they were in the good old days. The sexual energy that powers boy bands is necessarily fleeting: the thought of them prancing about in studded G-strings now is depressing, while their fans’ hormones will largely have shifted from pre-pubescent to prenatal over the past decade.
That leaves the boys — Gary Barlow, Jason Orange, Mark Owen and Howard Donald, lest we forget — with the dreaded option of maturity, and sure enough Beautiful World lacks any old-school incentives to party. Sensibly, every band member has at least one turn at a lead vocal and Barlow has shared his writing duties, yet the result is very much a middle- management, company car of a record rather than the ludicrous hen-night limousine of their prime.
The title track is dreary utility pop, while the maudlin Hold On sounds like the kind of song enjoyed by those receiving their first divorce papers in the post. But there are a couple of surprising moments. Wooden Boat — which, on paper sounds absolutely ghastly — is Jason Orange’s first lead vocal, a folky campfire meditation on the passing of time that is genuinely affecting. Ain’t No Sense in Love musters up a dark side that subverts its string-fuelled ballad credentials, while Shine’s ELO perkiness is one of the few things recognisable on a second hearing.
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Dignity might dictate that the disco numbers have been put to rest, but you would expect that men who spent their formative years spinning in the hormonal boy band whirlpool could create a more flamboyant record than this. Today, they could sing about the sex, the fame, the madness and not worry about tarnishing their teen-dream reputations. Instead, they have let a lucklustre record do that for all the wrong reasons.
VICTORIA SEGAL