Take That Birmingham NEC
According to a homemade placard held up by one woman, she has been waiting 3,722 days for this moment. 'BACK 4 GOOD THIS TIME,' exhorts another poster. You get the feeling that the reunited members of Take That - Gary Barlow, Howard Donald, Jason Orange and Mark Owen - aren't the only thirtysomethings here enthusiastically dusting off old skills, unused since the day in 1996 when the Samaritans set up helplines to cope with the fallout from Take That's split. Everyone is.
The 'boys' in Britain's original 'boy band' might have brought with them a 10-foot hologram of Robbie Williams, the prodigal, renegade member who declined their kind offer of a reunion tour because, frankly, he has bigger fish to fry. Looking around, though, the NEC is packed with the shimmering, just-visible, happy ghosts of people's former selves. Younger, more carefree versions, perhaps, before they put away their magic markers into their Take That pencil cases for the last time and realised stalking people was actually quite psychotic behaviour.
'Bet you've all got boyfriends now,' quips Mark Owen, universally held to be 'the nice one'. Rumour has it that he spent all his money on a failed solo career and needs this reunion more than any of them. 'Back then, you all had little fried eggs,' guffaws Howard Donald, aka 'the Body', who, in the recent Take That documentary, revealed he had briefly considered throwing himself in the Thames when the group broke up. 'Now you've got big knockers!' Everyone screams.
It looks set to be a long evening for anyone not inducted into fanatical Thattery, a hen nightmare with the That in the role of glorified male strippers.
Solid pop showmanship, and the ability of Take That to engender a little nostalgia even in bemused bystanders (me), wins out in the end, though. 'Relight my Fire' is a gaudy S&M carnival with lots of fire and body-bending dancers. 'Back for Good' kicks off a finale of three songs where rain pours on to the stage. The front rows get scorched, then soaked; this lot have more elements per gig than even AC/DC.
Most of Take That's actual songs still sound as syrupy and cynical as they did a decade ago. But 'Back for Good', 'Pray' and 'A Million Love Songs' have acquired a patina of quality with the years. Amusingly, their lyrics double as a poignant commentary on the group's split and reunion. 'All I do each night is pray/ Hoping that I'll be a part of you again someday,' they coo during 'Pray'; you can imagine Jason Orange, a chronic insomniac, filling his nights with similar thoughts. 'A million love songs later/ Here I am,' croons Gary Barlow, retired solo artist and backroom pop writer. Williams, you may remember, confessed he'd gladly trade his 14 Brits for the boring one's contented family life, quite some payback for all the sniping Barlow endured from Robbie for so long.
With age and freedom from the worst boy band strictures of old, it seems, comes the right for Take That to crack more dubious jokes ('What have you been doing?' asks Gary of Take That's old touring guitarist and band leader, given their old jobs back after a furlough of 10 years. 'S Club 7?' The crowd boos. 'Westlife?' More boos. 'Cheeks apart ... sorry, Worlds Apart?' Everyone screams), poke knowing fun at their old selves and make some pop cultural references unexpected of them.
Take That's triumphal reunion tour, which will play to more Britons this year than any other save Robbie's, casts the four Thats in a CGI cartoon, cryogenically frozen in a band manufacturing plant. The call comes, they return to life and bound onstage in crumpled frock coats that could well be some stylist's cheeky nod to the Libertines. Later, a disembodied Manager-God's voice booms out a series of boy band commandments as the Thats prance about robotically in black-and-white jumpsuits. 'They must always be ambiguous about their sexuality'; 'They must not become friends in case one breaks down and has to be discarded', and so on. It's Kraftwerk through and through. Moreover, there's a bold filch from Michel Gondry's 1997 video for Daft Punk's 'Around the World' when a bevy of similarly jumpsuited dancers marches up and down the steps that bookend the stage. The boys each have a go on a curious Heath Robinson-type drumkit contraption which makes them look like city-centre mime artists, or mind-boggling art pranksters.
Less entertaining is the tedious Beatles medley that harks back both to a similar medley performed on the group's 1994 tour, and to the fact that, in their day, Take That were the biggest-selling British group since the Beatles. 'That's the Beatles!' reveals Howard at the end of the medley of hits like 'Hey Jude'. You hope he has the good grace to keep his scintillating adlibs to himself when, as DJ HD, he plays funky house sets around the globe. 'Sure', meanwhile, is delivered over a sample from Gorillaz's 'Dirty Harry', which itself sounds like some old electro/hip hop tune by Afrika Bambaataa.
Like a children's cartoon with grownup jokes, you suspect much of this stuff is designed to keep the critics entertained while everyone else gets on with the important business of screaming and reliving former thrills. Mark and Jason cheerily acknowledge a gang of women wearing matching homemade T-shirts and light-up bunny ears; the poster-makers wave their works with glee. Cultural studies texts make a great deal of this sort of thing. These fans, they argue, are not just supine, screeching consumers of someone's manufactured pop product. They are active participants in their own fandom, engaging in creativity and community-building.
It's nearly a convincing argument. But it dissolves, along with all the show's winks and nods and self-awareness, when the four Thats go walkabout in the crowd. They never did it in their heyday because the threat to life and limb was too great. Tonight, they are mobbed with great enthusiasm if slightly less agility than they might have been back then, wave upon wave of mass female adoration directed at some deeply ordinary, if intriguingly damaged men from the Manchester area. And you recoil slightly. Screaming like this for the Beatles is one thing, worshipping Take That - Take That 10 years on, at that - is quite another.
