If pop comebacks are doomed to fail, then Take That have got some explaining to do. Not content with rising from the dead in 2006, even after Robbie Williams refused to rejoin the 1990s boy band that was his alma mater, Take That have gone from strength to strength, releasing two hugely successful albums of new material, getting their songs on Morrisons ads and their faces all over M&S billboards.
This year they have entered the record books with the fastest-selling tour to date: a cool one million fans will see their heroes perform live this summer on a tour rumoured to cost £10 million to stage. So exactly who are all these diehard devotees, who never lost the faith during those cruel years when it looked as if Britain’s best-loved boy band would stay in pop’s dumper for ever? I’ve come to the Ricoh Arena in Coventry to find out.
It would be wrong to say that all human life is here, because all human life is not an overweight thirtysomething with dyed blonde highlights and a deranged grin. But when the Mexican wave goes around the open-air football pitch and all you can see is a human tide of 40,000 Dorothy Perkins smock tops, it does feel as if all the happiest human lives are in attendance.
For one local fan, Deborah Leask, this is her eleventh Take That show — the 42-year-old’s husband buys her the tickets “because his life wouldn’t be worth living otherwise — would it, love?” He grins. He camped out in a sleeping bag to get these ones for the whole family, in November. “I had to take a sickie. I came down here in the car about 12 at night and there were just loads of women. They let us inside and give us a bacon sandwich and a cup of coffee in the morning. I was number 83 in the queue.”
“We’re used to the camping,” his wife says, “because they are the best band in the world, incredible, I can’t put it into words.”
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Everybody says the same thing — they have come because they have always loved the band and because the live shows are incredible. Nobody wants Robbie Williams back — they love him separately, but the four-piece are better off without him. He betrayed them. He’d want to be the centre of attention. He couldn’t dance like they can now. As for how they coped with the wilderness years, the fans say they never dreamt this would happen.
If all you know of Take That is that they are nice friendly chaps with nice friendly songs, it is hard to imagine what these fans mean when they say the live show is “like nothing you’ve ever seen”. But the Circus tour, named after the band’s new album, really is one. There are clowns, acrobats, tightrope walkers, a hot-air balloon, a waterfall that appears from nowhere and soaks the delighted audience, and a 30ft silver elephant that strides along a catwalk, with the four members of Take That rising up inside its mechanical belly, singing.
The band also do cartwheels and formation dances, paint their own faces as clowns, and ride unicycles (though poor old Gary Barlow needs stabilisers). It’s like Cirque de Soleil at Elton John’s summer ball crossed with the Top of the Pops Christmas special and the final of The X Factor. If Boris Johnson is still wondering how London 2012 can possibly compare with the spectacular opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, he might want to recycle Take That’s entire set.
Indeed, the ailing Government could learn a thing or two from such a united mass congregation. So it shouldn’t surprise me to find a fan who already works in politics, but it does: 29-year-old Charlotte Ritchie studied international relations to postgraduate level and is a policy director for a chamber of commerce, lobbying the Government. Her schoolfriend Kate Booth is a Birmingham solicitor, and they have been Take That obsessives since their early teens. They say that the inner circle of fans knew the boys’ addresses and phone numbers and used to hang around outside their houses. I gently point out that the police have a word for that kind of person. “Stalker,” Ritchie sighs, “I know. Once at Mark Owen’s house there were girls that pulled hairs out of Howard [Donald]’s stepdad’s head.”
I’m sorry. Did you just say, once at Mark Owen’s house there were . . . “Yes, yes, they lived near each other. And people used to take Sellotape, so when his family answered the door, you’d reach inside and get a few bits of woodchip off the wall to take home.”
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The dads and husbands tonight all seem to be pretending to have come for their loved ones’ sakes. Patience, the band’s comeback song, turns out to be a huge hit with men — around the arena every bloke knows all the words. Stu Watson, 35, says that his wife, Jackie, has dragged him here. He says he loves “the Kaiser Chiefs and NME-type music, not all this boy-band crap”. But she tells us that he is lying. “He can’t get enough of it; he’s been listening to it and singing along all the way from Skegness.”
As for me, I enter the concert feeling fairly amicable towards Take That and leave furious. How can people prefer Mark to Howard when he’s clearly a god among men? Jason Orange is chiselled, Gary’s got bravado and Mark is sweet, but — oh, Howard. I wasn’t even one of those teenagers who loved the band but now I see myself rising up in the hot-air balloon with Howard. Yes, it should be, would be, definitely could be magic.
Take That play Croke Park, Dublin, tomorrow, then continue their UK tour. Details from www.takethat.com/tour