Читать книгу Take That and Robbie Williams - Emily Herbert - Страница 7

The place was Burslem, a small town that forms part of Stoke-on-Trent. The date was 13 February 1974 and the locals at the Red Lion pub had something to celebrate. At the nearby Royal Infirmary, the pub’s landlady, Jan Williams, had gone into labour with her second child. Her husband, Peter, was the pub’s landlord.

‘It’s a boy!’ the cry went up as Robert Peter Maximilian Williams made his way into the world, a half-brother to Sally, then eight, Jan’s child from a previous relationship. Growing up in the pub, Robbie was an entertainer from the start, singing, dancing and showing off to the Red Lion’s regulars. ‘Rob used to come down after closing time in his pyjamas and would sing a song or do impressions,’ his father recalled later. ‘He would be doing Margaret Thatcher or Brian Clough. They loved it.’

Robbie showed a huge amount of drive from the outset, entering himself in a talent competition at the tender age of three. It was completely off his own bat. ‘There was no pushy mother there, no parental supervision,’ he said. ‘My mum was actually shitting herself because she couldn’t find me. It was just like, “There is the stage. I should be on that because I’m good at that.”’ He won.

But Robbie’s early childhood was certainly not a blissful idyll. In fact, when he was little more than a toddler, events occurred that are widely believed to have contributed to the problems, specifically with drink, that plagued him later in life. A few months after Robbie was born, his father Peter won a pub comedy competition. The prize was £2. He then went on New Faces on television, for which he was paid £5. But these successes were to come at a very high price for, when Robbie was just two, his father decided to make a go of it professionally and launched a stage career under the name Pete Conway. He left the pub, went out on the road and shortly afterwards the marriage broke down.

Robbie always made light of this but the pain it caused him must have been considerable. ‘Dad left when I was two,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘We’ve become mates now but there’s that blood link. My dad is very good at what he does. He’s got excellent comic timing. He’s so professional. That’s what I admire him for. I was too young at the time to remember my parents’ divorce. I can’t wish for anything more than what I’ve got with my mum and sister; what I’ve got is fantastic. So I can’t say I missed having a father full time. I mean, that’s the way I grew up.’ It was, but it is hard not to suspect that it also had its downside.

To a certain extent, Robbie’s grandfather stepped into the breach, with a strong bond forming between man and boy. Robbie once recalled ‘jumping up and down with my granddad, Jack Farrell, to strengthen me legs. He was in the army, a big man, Jack the Giant Killer, and he didn’t want me growing up soft – so he’d get me to practise hitting him. I must have been three or four.’

Robbie, Jan and Sally, who he sometimes refers to as his second mother, were very close. Jan’s mother Nan – real name Bertha – was also part of the family set-up, which was just as well as young Robbie needed a lot of control. He once threw the pub’s £3,000 takings out of the window on a Port Vale FC match day, followed by his mother’s bra and his sister’s knickers. It was a wild streak that would resurface some years on.

That urge to entertain was growing. When Robbie was four, he was taken on holiday to Torremolinos: halfway through the trip, he wandered off and lost his mother in the crowds. When she found him hours later, he was singing and dancing for the crowd – complete with busker’s hat on the ground to collect loose change.

A teacher at Robbie’s primary school, John Collis, cast Robbie in his first play – as the Devil. ‘It was certainly suiting to his personality at the time and probably now as well,’ Collis later recalled. ‘I can still see him now with those little red horns on.’

Elements of the older Robbie were in evidence even when he was very young. A chubby little boy, Robbie would always have issues with his weight and once said that his earliest memory was of two little boys laughing at his belly on the beach at Babbacombe. But he was a popular boy. One of Jan’s friends was Patricia McNair, a hairdresser, who had a young son, Jamie, with whom Robbie used to play. She also used to cut his hair. ‘He used to come over on Saturday night and entertain us with his songs and dances,’ she later recalled. ‘Even then, when he was just seven, you could tell he was an entertainer. He was a great kid – naughty and lots of fun.’

Robbie was brought up a Catholic and that aspect of his life also endures. As an adult, he had a statue of St Teresa at the bottom of his bed when he lived in London’s Notting Hill, a present from his mother. ‘When I come home drunk, St Teresa turns her head away from me, I swear she does,’ he once remarked. It was only partly a joke.

The first gig Robbie ever went to was by the pop group Showaddywaddy, who revived songs from the 1950s. ‘It was fantastic,’ Robbie recalled. ‘I wanted the Teddy Boy outfit and everything but my mum wouldn’t get me one because she thought I’d grow out of it.’ Robbie also made his mark on an international statesman early on. When Robbie was eight, Jan took him on holiday to the Victoria Falls Hotel in Zimbabwe, where they saw Joshua Nkomo, the country’s president. ‘I said to my mum, “That’s the president of Africa,”’ said Robbie. ‘It was the time Lenny Henry was doing his African impressions and I went up to Joshua Nkomo when my mum wasn’t looking, and I said, “Hello, I’m Robert from England and I can do impressions of black men.” And then I did my Lenny Henry. He just laughed and then I had a great chat with him. He was fascinated that a kid could just come up to him when he had men with guns – a kid who was not scared. He signed an autograph for me.’

Back home, however, there were problems on the business front. Takings at the pub were falling, so the family moved briefly to a council estate and then into a semi in the nearby town of Tunstall. Jan started running a florist’s, while Robbie attended Mill Hill Primary School, taking part in school plays. He also joined a number of amateur-dramatics associations, including the Stoke-on-Trent Operatic Society, the Newcastle Amateur Dramatic Society and the Stokeon-Trent Pantomime Society. By the age of 11, he was taking part in Hans Christian Andersen productions, playing the king’s son in The King and I and the fiddler in Fiddler on the Roof. He was known as Swellhead, but also as Fatsikins because of his weight, by fellow pupils – he deflected this by making them laugh. His ambition back then was to become an actor – he hadn’t even thought of being a pop star.

As Robbie entered his teens, he began to meet up with his father Peter, who, before becoming a publican, had been a policeman and electricity inspector. The significance of this cannot be overestimated. It remains the most sensitive part of Robbie’s life and one that, to this day, he doesn’t like to talk about. But the fact is that throughout his early childhood, he hardly saw his father and this inevitably had an impact. When asked why he started bingeing on drink and drugs, Robbie once said, ‘What do they expect me to say, that maybe my dad didn’t love me enough?’ It was a telling remark, as was the fact that the first time he got drunk was when he visited Peter in Scarborough, where he was working as a comedian.

‘Rob is sensitive about Pete,’ said Tony Hollins, Peter’s best man and later his manager, ‘because he doesn’t want the public to know that there were a great many years when they simply weren’t in contact at all.’ When they did meet up, Robbie ‘came to idolise his father’, according to Hollins, but ‘he realised that his mother had been left with the responsibility of looking after the family on her own’. Whatever happened subsequently between Robbie and his father, those were the formative years. It was bound to leave its mark.

But from his mid-teens, Robbie began to see his father a lot more and was influenced by his taste in music – Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. The two began to visit The Duke William pub in Hanley, where they would take to the stage in open-mic nights. ‘He thinks he was just an average boy from Stoke but he was more talented than that,’ said Peter. ‘He always loved the stage. When he left school, he stood up in front of everyone and sang, “Every Time We Say Goodbye”, the Cole Porter song. Robbie has sung that song since he was a kid and has recorded it himself. He grew up with Sinatra and Dean Martin and Nat King Cole because I was very much into them myself – still am!’

Robbie was also developing his own tastes. The first album he ever bought was Pink Floyd’s The Wall. He also enjoyed Showaddywaddy, Adam and the Ants, Darts and lots of electronic music. He got his first taste of showbiz, at one remove, when Peter introduced him to a DJ friend: Robbie would help collate the sports news on a Saturday and sometimes do impressions during weekday afternoons, all for the princely sum of £10 a week.

By now Pete was dividing his time between the northern club circuit and summer holiday camps. Every summer, Robbie would spend three weeks with him at camps in Scarborough, Cornwall and Wales, and started to learn the tricks of the trade. Robbie’s stage persona has always been very cheeky chappy and this is where it comes from. ‘I grew up on holiday camps,’ he once said. ‘I grew up with very old-school entertainers – their profession was to entertain people. Their expression, as they came on stage, was, “Always remember to smile.” That was a sign on the door as you went up on stage: “Always remember to smile, ’cause they smile with you.” Now it seems that there’s a sign on the door saying, “Always look at your feet, because if you look at the crowd, you might get scared and you might scare them, too.”’ That certainly wasn’t a philosophy that young Robbie ever practised.

Robbie moved on to St Margaret Ward RC High School, where he became the class clown and became very interested in football. Academic work did not feature highly. As an adult he has voiced regrets about not working harder at school but, at the time, his interests were football, acting and girls. Little Fatsikins showed early signs of becoming a ladies’ man: he lost his virginity at 14. ‘She was tall, red-haired and mad for it,’ he later recalled. ‘She came up to me in classroom one day and, in front of my mates, said, “Your place, Friday, after school.” Of course, I put on a big, macho show as if to say, “Of course, I’ve done this dozens of times.” But although I fancied her, this girl scared the life out of me. On the Friday, I took her home and, after a quick snog, completely lost my bottle. But as I asked her to leave, I suddenly realised how much stick I was going to get from my friends. I took her up to my room and about two and a half minutes later, it was all over. It was a less than impressive performance but I was thrilled and naturally told all my friends what a stud I’d been.’

At the age of 15, Robbie landed the role of the Artful Dodger in the North Staffordshire Amateur Dramatic Society’s production of Oliver! – a part that was to prove something of a watershed in his life. Brian Rawlins, who was the founder of the society and played Fagin, remembered young Robbie fondly. ‘When we were rehearsing, we got a professional pickpocket to show us how it should be done,’ he said. ‘Robbie became very good at it. You would keep finding things missing in rehearsals and then Robbie would pop up waving your wallet, or whatever he had taken.

‘Robbie was a nice lad with lots of personality and confident even then. He was very much the local boy, with a strong local accent, which he had to cover up when he played Dodger. His mum was great, too – they were very close. He helped every Saturday afternoon in the flower shop she owned in Newcastle-under-Lyme. He was a bright lad, with a spark in his eye which still comes across now, but he was also very sensitive. He would get upset if he was ever told off and would get quite emotional about it.’

It is fair to say that playing the Artful Dodger changed Robbie’s life. ‘It was my first lead role,’ he said. ‘And I walked out from the side of the stage, whistling and doing this walk, and the whole audience just took a breath, gasped. I physically heard them do it. I’d just won them over by walking on stage. And I can always remember coming out for the curtain call and my cheers drowning everyone else’s out. I thought, “I am really good at this.”’ He was right.

That year was to be a turning point in many ways, carrying with it upheaval and sadness, as well as opportunities. Robbie’s much-loved aunt Jo, his mother’s sister, died, bringing a great deal of anguish to the family. Some months later, Robbie’s mother Jan turned on the radio and heard an entrepreneur called Nigel Martin-Smith talking about founding a new boy band, one to rival the massively popular New Kids on the Block. Pretending to be Robbie, Jan wrote in and asked for an audition. Robbie got his audition but Nigel was unconvinced; Jan sent in copies of local press cuttings talking about Robbie’s ‘uncanny stage presence’. The wheels had begun to turn.

Robbie sat his GCSEs and, to no one’s surprise, failed the lot. He wasn’t thick but he’d done no work, on top of which he’d taken acid for the first time just before his RE exam. Even so, it was a blow when he learned of his grades. ‘Me and my friend Lee just got our exam results and we both failed really badly,’ he later recalled. ‘We didn’t know how we were going to tell our parents. So we went to the bottle shop and bought ten each of the cheapest cans of bitter we could buy and sat on the bowling green and just necked these bitters – trying to figure out a way to tell our parents because they had hoped for so much for us. They wanted me to go on to university. I went back to my mum, pissed, and said that I had something to tell her and she said she had something to tell me – “You’re in the band.” Then she said, “What did you have to tell me?” and I said it didn’t matter. I ran upstairs and shouted at the top of my voice, “I’m going to be famous!”’ As one door had shut, another had opened. Robbie was on his way.

Ironically, given the band’s later incarnation, Robbie’s inclusion was an afterthought. Martin-Smith had originally wanted a foursome and had already got it. Gary Barlow, the singer/songwriter, Mark Owen, the looker, and Jason Orange and Howard Donald, the dancers, were already on board. Then, early in 1990, he received Jan’s letter. ‘I originally wanted Take That to be a four-piece band,’ he said in later years. ‘The only reason I took on a fifth was because I thought one of them would be bound to drop out, get a job at Tescos or get married.’

Like Robbie, Martin-Smith had left school at 15 with no qualifications. In 1981, he’d launched a modelling agency, which went on to employ ten staff and make a £1 million annual turnover. But he wanted to manage a pop group: ‘I’ll just trust my instincts,’ he said of the way he put the band together. ‘They need no singing skills, but they must be able to move well and have star quality. Yes, that’s vital.’ The band’s name was inspired by Madonna, who’d grabbed her crotch in one performance and shouted, ‘Take that!’

At first there was some debate in Robbie’s family as to whether he should join the band. It was originally formed to appeal to the gay circuit – Martin-Smith is gay – and was set to perform in gay clubs. ‘I didn’t know that sort of thing happened,’ Robbie said. In later years, there has been a great deal of speculation about Robbie’s own sexuality, a lot of it fuelled by him. The reality is almost certainly that, while still a young man, he was introduced to a world he had never seen before and – half-joking, half-fascinated – made a few remarks that were later open to question. As his marriage later proved, Robbie is totally straight. Even so, his family were a little worried: was this quite the right milieu for a young and impressionable boy? His father Pete was relaxed, pointing out that the world of show business is full of gay men, and Robbie’s grandmother took an even more robust point of view. ‘I’d be more worried if he was going to become a priest,’ she said.

And what did the four young men of Take That think? They’d been all set to go as a quartet when they suddenly discovered they were about to have a new boy in their midst. ‘This picture looked like a fourteen-year-old school kid,’ said Gary. He was only one year out. ‘The manager said, “His name’s Robbie and he’s got a really good voice.” He was one of those precocious school kids, who danced outrageously and was dead cheeky but quite a likeable young lad.’

Martin-Smith, meanwhile, was delighted with his discovery and, despite the later bitterness between them, spoke warmly of his young protégé in the early days. ‘Robbie Williams is a huge talent, but his talent is not just for music,’ he said some years after the band was formed. ‘It’s for playing the part of being a rock star. When he auditioned for me, he did impressions – and very good ones. I remember in the very early days of Take That, we were in a karaoke bar and Robbie got up and sang “Mack the Knife”. He could have been Frank Sinatra. He was amazing. I knew he had bags of talent. He only gave away a bit at a time.’

And so in September 1990, the contracts were signed. It was much like starting a new school term: so much lay ahead and they were all young and nervous. ‘I remember the first time I ever met the lads at the Take That auditions,’ Robbie later recalled. ‘I came with my mum and I was saying out of the corner of my mouth, “Right, Mum – go now.” Marky was doing exactly the same thing at the other end of the street with his mum. As I walked into the audition, there was this guy sat there with really untrendy Adidas bottoms on, massive Converse trainers, a stupid, spiky haircut – and I’m not dissing him here. I mean it lovingly. He’s got his legs crossed, with his hands on his knee and this bloody leather briefcase, which had song sheets for crap cabaret songs in it. I looked at him and I was told, “This is Gary Barlow. He’s a professional club singer and he’s going to make this group happen.”

‘Then there was this guy called Jason, who was all full of himself because he’d been on The Hit Man and Her and I was completely impressed. The fact that Jason had been on telly and liked RS2000 cars made him God in my eyes. He was cocky and strutty and I just thought he was great. Then, as I was halfway through my audition, in walks this other bloke called Howard – who was late as always. And he was really shy. So that was the scenario. Take That met for the first time and I remember just looking round and thinking, “Oh shit! I wish I’d passed my exams!”

‘Then Gary called me over and said, “Right, son, here’s what you do.” He called me “son”! He made me laugh from that moment on. He’s got this brilliant northern humour and it’s all really clever, quick one-liners. He’s got loads of jokes – he is Gary “Bernard Manning/Roy Chubby Brown” Barlow. Me and him used to have some laughs.’

And so rehearsals began. Robbie commuted between Manchester and Stoke-on-Trent (Jan paid the £8 fare) as Take That worked with a producer called Ian Levine. It took Robbie a while to settle in to his new life: he felt trapped and resentful. Indeed, he nearly left until his father talked him round. ‘I walked out of rehearsal one day and went to see my dad,’ Robbie said. ‘He was a bluecoat, working the holiday camps. I wanted to go on the road with him and leave the band but he gave me a sobering lecture. He told me toilet rolls don’t grow on trees, you have to buy them, you have to learn to do your laundry and iron, you have to buy food and cook for yourself. He made me realise what a tough life it could be when you don’t earn much money and then he said to me, “How are you going to feel when they are at No 1?” So I put my head down and stayed.’

Robbie was later to claim that the band’s management had deliberately favoured Gary rather than him, but the fact was that Gary was seen as the pivotal member of the band and Robbie was not. Nor was he working as hard as the others wanted him to. ‘Rob didn’t want to learn the routine, or else he was the slowest,’ said Kim Gavin, the boys’ choreographer. ‘Everyone else would get up and go and have a break, and you’d have to go over it with him quite a few times. He’d make a joke of it, of course, but he was the last to learn.’

The band’s first gig was in a nightclub in Huddersfield called Flicks and it did not herald future glories. ‘There were only about twenty people out there and a dog, and only about ten of those were interested in watching,’ Gary said. They got £20 each – which, as Jason vividly put it, ‘paid for a Kentucky Fried Chicken for each of us’.

Then the sessions in gay clubs began, rather better paid at £500 a time. ‘At the beginning, our following was totally gay,’ Robbie said. ‘Totally gay. At the start, we did gay clubs and that. And it was fucking good groundwork for us. The gay clubs and the gay community – they embraced us with open arms. I think that anything the gay community comes up with will be dissed at first. Dismiss the music, dismiss the clothes, dismiss everything ’cause it’s gay. And then, like, two to five years later, everyone’s going, “Fucking hell! I’m mad for that music! I’m mad for those clothes!” And it’s always the same. The gay community embraced us with open arms and then, before you know it, “Fucking hell, Take That, yeah! I’ve always quite liked them.” I suppose that was my first taste of fame. The first time I was totally approved of.’

There were a lot of firsts going on. Robbie started experimenting with drugs, mainly ecstasy. They were going through their leather phase: legend has it that they were walking past London’s Hyper Hyper on Kensington High Street when Jason saw a leather jacket with tassels, bought it and then everyone else wanted one. Nigel Martin-Smith started circulating demo tapes and got them a spot on Sky TV: they performed two numbers and were interviewed for ten minutes. Fame remained aloof.

Nigel was pretty sure of his band, though, so he remortgaged his house and used the funds to release Take That’s first single, ‘Do What U Like’ on his own label, Dance UK. It only charted at UK No 82, and the accompanying video made it pretty clear where they’d spent the last year. Although there were a few girls present, they were all dressed in black leather, writhing around naked on the floor and covering each other with jelly. It was banned from primetime television but it was enough to get some interest going in the industry. In September 1991, exactly a year after they’d started, the boys landed a deal with RCA.

On signing the contract, each of them got a £20,000 advance, although the deal didn’t always bring what they’d expected. ‘We were all in B&Bs,’ said Gary much later on. ‘We’d get to our room and open the door and there’d be five single beds. I’d never had friends quite like these before. I hadn’t been used to making sacrifices. I was quite a bold, selfish person at that time. And there was a bit of snobbery as well, because I was the musical one, at the end of the day. But I grew to love these four people I was with.’

A month later, Take That’s second single, ‘Promises’, was released. By now the band was starting to reach out to teenage girls rather than gay men, so the leather was banished and the boys toured the country, putting in appearances everywhere, including Wogan, Pebble Mill and Going Live. ‘Promises’ entered the charts at UK No 38.

But the expected lift-off didn’t happen. The earlier strategy of playing gay clubs might have taught them their trade but it hadn’t established the mainstream following they needed now. Their third single, ‘Once You’ve Tasted Love’, only made it to UK No 44 despite, rather bizarrely, the boys touring with the Family Planning Association to promote awareness of safe sex. ‘We’re becoming the most famous people in Britain for not having a hit,’ Gary snapped.

Other people were beginning to wonder, too. ‘We had been giving them a lot of space and, after their second single with RCA bombed, we wondered if we were flogging a dead horse,’ said Mike Soutar, then editor of Smash Hits magazine. ‘Other bands would have given up. They set out to find fame and fortune or whatever, find what they are looking for and don’t like it. Take That are talented and resilient and have what it takes. The key to their success is that they are very hardworking, are genuine good blokes and they are believable.’

And so they knuckled down. The release of the first album was postponed and the band went all out to nurture the fan base they needed, performing four shows a day. There would be a school gig during the day as part of the ‘Big Schools’ tour, an evening matinee, an under-18s club and an over-18s club. Slowly it began to pay off.

‘When we were first signed up by RCA, we did think we were going to make it right away,’ said Gary. ‘We didn’t and we learned a lesson. We went round all the clubs, everywhere from schools, youth clubs, gay clubs – we covered the lot. We worked at the grassroots level because that’s where it really counts. Fans don’t just appear out of thin air. You have to make people like you – you have to give them something. By the time we released “It Only Takes A Minute”, people from Doncaster to Devon and Dundee actually knew us from appearances on their doorstep. Then, all of a sudden, it took off.’

But it wasn’t much fun at the time. Radio 1 declined to play ‘Once You’ve Tasted Love’, which badly knocked its chances of success and their confidence, too. Robbie, now 17, was considering leaving again. But Gary, above all, was determined that they should fight on.

The turning point came with a show at the Hollywood disco in Romford, Essex. They had invited the pop editors of three newspapers but the only one that turned up was the Daily Star’s Rave team, who met the boys for a drink and were then driven on to the gig in the band’s ‘That-mobile’ – actually a mini-bus. They were particularly taken with Robbie, who entertained them with ‘impressions of Norman Wisdom and Bros’, before becoming even more impressed when they saw the show. Rave invited them to play at a Christmas party in London’s Limelight Club in front of ‘dozens of VIPs’, where they met some of the movers and shakers in the music industry. This time round, at long last, everything fell into place. After slogging around some of the most basic gigs in the country, learning their trade and building up a fan base, to say nothing of battling disappointment and setbacks, Take That were about to become the hottest ticket in town.