On Friday, May 27, the British group Take That are starting yet another major tour of the British Isles and continental Europe. The group, comprised of Gary Barlow, Mark Owen, Jason Orange and Howard Donald, is coming off two highly successful series of shows within the last five years but will now have an additional weapon to make this latest juncture a blockbuster. The Progress Live Tour, in support of the album of the same name that is the fastest-selling album in the UK this century, will see the return of its prodigal son and most famous member, the immensely popular but troubled Robbie Williams, to the line-up. This makes the first time that all five founding members of the band will tour together since 1995, when Williams famously left the band after vanishing in the midst of a tour, surfacing at Glastonbury and announcing that he was sacked and / or had quit (depending on your point of view). | |
| Forerunner of A&F catalog, circa 1993 |
Take That first came to cultural dominance between 1991 and 1996. In that five-year span, they released three multi-platinum albums and scored an astonishing run of eight Number One hits from a dozen Top Ten singles. Created in the mold of the American boy band New Kids on the Block (that’s NKOTB to you), Take That’s success in the UK, Europe and Asia was built partly on the still-hummable tunes by its songwriting progeny Barlow and partly on the band’s public image. Chiseled and buffed within an inch of their lives, all five members appeared in various stages of undress in their videos (such as their first Number One, “Pray") and they were one of the first major male pop stars that used model-ized imagery with a homoerotic current. Most of their publicity stills and videos from that era undoubtedly had no small influence on the fashion world, and it is not coincidental that the Abercrombie & Fitch catalogues of the last decade and a half have looked like their videos.
