The fifth (of six!) single from Everything Changes, and yes, it shows. Breezy, disco-inspired, but this is the fussy, low-fat studio hack’s version of disco which dotted pop albums through the 90s and beyond. A sax solo fills in time and helps to cement the impression that this is a sketch of a song, bulked out as required by passing sessionmen.
What can be said about it? The B-Side was a medley of Beatles songs – as with the Lulu team-up, this feels a bit of a “we belong” move, though the band is asserting a continuity of boyband frenzy and light entertainment domination rather than any kind of songwriting chops. More importantly for Take That’s immediate future, this is the first number one with lead vocals from Robbie Williams. Cheeky in front of the cameras, chafing (by his later account) behind them, Robbie does nothing at all here: with hindsight you might take his perfunctory devotion as a sign of boredom, but it’s just as likely he simply wasn’t ready to own a performance yet. “I love you”, he mutters at the end: the words have rarely sounded less convincing.
Score: 4
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Not many fifth singles get to the top – “La Isla Bonita” is the only one that comes to mind. This is wafer-thin fan fodder unworthy of further comment.
No surprise that “Vienna” was the nation’s favourite number two today but where was “Mmm Mmm Mmm” ? Was it not even nominated ?
Dismal indeed. Even if a bit more proficient than some of their early singles, there`s not a hint here that they were a band who would – in the near as well as more distant future – put together some damn good pop songs that would be both instantly appealing and warrant extensive replaying, and still sound good years later. This though is just a mixture of zzz, blergh and meh.
#1 – Beneath Your Beautiful was a Number One for Labrinth last year, and that was the sixth single from his album. (Something which might seem even more impressive given that it happened in the download era, when it can be hard to even get post-album singles in the chart at all.)
Cheery fluff with entertainingly insubstantial video; I can’t decide whether its lads-mucking-around air makes it a precursor to Britpop or its sepia tones and Authentic Black People make it part of that 80s jag we were talking about with “True” and the reissue of “Stand by Me” and that. Anyway I don’t think I ever need to or want to hear it ever again [low 4]
.. and it seems such a long time since we talked about “Babe”..
a bland blur of house-y keyboards, session man sax and guide vocals.
with material like this to sing I’m not surprised that Robbie wanted out
Oh it’s alright, though for the life of me I can’t remember how the verses go. I think I might have vaguely assumed this was another of their disco cover versions.
Their next #1 to come is their nadir for me. Terrible, and a bizarre single choice when you think it led an album that would also spawn their two seminal pre-breakup hits.
Also, shout out for their next single which peaked at #3, Love Ain’t Here Anymore, which kind of passed me by until it was radically reinterpreted in one of the best X Factor performances ever, a rare case of that show being a vehicle for showcasing interesting versions of forgotten songs, rather than karaoke/pub singer versions of over-done standards. It really made me re-evaluate the original too.
http://youtu.be/YnvZJo6bUt8
It makes a change to be thinking about Take That after spending so much of the last week or so thinking about hobbits and dwarves, but there you go…the wondrous FT throws a curveball in the form of “Everything Changes”. It’s a bit dull isn’t it? Robbie’s lead vocal is alright, but you can tell he’s not enjoying it anymore. Has he already begun to lad it up with various slebs by now? The Glasto thing is just around the corner, so he must’ve been giving TT’s management cause for concern.
Well, that’s a couple of minutes, spent thinking about Take That…now, back to Middle Earth.
Wanting out? This is the same album that produced “Pray”, which was the one that sort of established them as “now, top”. So, this single would have been recorded at the same time. All that the “That” had yet to become, they hadn’t got yet.
Yes, be careful with yr chronology o commenters (and me!). This was recorded in 1993 – Robbie’s Glasto antics and band-leaving were 95 – unless he was a bad boy at Glastonbury 94 too, but if so I don’t recall it (and Oasis weren’t involved)
Snatches of this leapt to mind when I saw it was coming up. I could remember the chorus at least and the bit where Robbie goes “forever more” but nothing else stood out. On playing it again on Youtube, I found it just skating by with nothing really standing out at all, except for the bits that stuck with me through the years since it went to #1. It’s just a bit bland, as lonepilgrim points out.
Blimey they were clean cut though, right? Certainly at this point Look at that cover at the top of the article. The video showcases them all in sepia looking styled to within an inch of their lives. Howard and Jason haven’t been allowed beards yet and Robbie and Mark look like they could still be at school.
Robbie’s Glasto excursion is in just over a Popular year’s time.
ETA: Tom beat me to it on the point of chronology.
This is, and has always been, my favourite of the TT Number Ones; even as a grumpy, greasy 14-year-old who hated Take That I really enjoyed it, seeing in it a kind of cousin to the Pet Shop Boys’ Very and especially the songs on Very which weren’t singles (A different point of view, One and one make five, One in a million). When Solo Robbie started covering I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind Of Thing as part of his live set, it felt something like a full circle.
I liked that it wasn’t trying too hard, especially after the gloopy excesses of Babe (which I loathed) and Relight My Fire (which I thought was alright, but seemed to miss the point a bit. Also, the lads’ singing is better on this one.)
I’d never make the case for it being a masterpiece or anything, but… 7 or 8 for me.
Thanks for the corrections above. Glasto 94 was the year of Orbital and no Pyramid Stage.
#3 – As much as it’s the sixth track of his album it is a collaboration with Emeli Sande who just happens to have the best selling album of 2012. I don’t think people were buying it because of him more ‘you know her off the Olympics’
In regards to Everything Changes, given this is the title track off their then album you do feel the title came first long before the song.
Re 1,3,15 -I concur with Mike a pretty rare achievement, but strangely along with Labrinth last year we had David Guetta with “Titanium” which was the 5th single from his album, and Calvin Harris with “Sweet Nothing”, was the 6th single if you include “We Found Love”.
People may have been buying them because of ‘her off “Wild Ones” and ‘her off “Florence and the Machine”. QI though.
#16 – I think we can blame the collaboration phenomenon for that, it’s getting a beyond the joke now.
The sixth single from George Michael’s Faith album (Monkey) was a #1 on the US Billboard chart. The last of four US #1 singles taken from that album.
Course, it would make sense for that to be more common these days. Pre-downloads, each single would no doubt shift a load more copies of its parent album, leading to a lot more people having no reason to buy any successive singles from that album. But now it must be a lot easier to own five songs off an album and still want to buy the sixth when it comes around.
I can immediately think of an eighth single from an album that made no 2, although, as you’d expect, there were special circumstances: “Leave Me Alone” by Michael Jackson. The special circa being that the song was a bonus track on the CD version of “Bad”, when vinyl (and I suppose cassettes) still amounted for the bulk of album sales.
They took ever such a long time to “become” Take That didn’t they? At least, the national treasures Take That.
I’m especially glad we won’t have to think long and hard about Love’s Not Here Anymore, which sounded to me (anyone else?) like a gormless attempted tribute to Love Don’t Live Here Anymore, a greyed Pork Farms piecrust alongside the choux pastry of the ‘original’.
As for Everything Changes, I could only recall the back-ups on the chorus singing the title. Sticking with food comparisons (I may as well, it’s the season) this is an egg white omelette, light and insubstantial pop-house, nothing really wrong with it until Kenny G steps in and we’re back in the 80s wine bar with grey leather-tied divorcees. But at least this doesn’t have Barlow’s bovine touch.
Gosh, it’s good to be back.
#21, Wichita. Love the middle para. I find it frustrating that Barlow / Take That seem to plunder other people’s better work for specific imagery, and the phraseology of emotion (“tired tropes” as Marcello said about Wet Wet Wet (and I hope that’s what he meant)). And, all the while, adding no emotion or insight of their own. Love Ain’t Here Anymore is a marvellous case in point – it’s all in the title – the best two other examples I’d use are from bunnyable number ones.
At this point, I’ll add that sometimes on Popular, I’m fearful that other contributors will simply disagree too strongly with my opinion. With MY objections to Gary Barlow / Take That, however, I am worried that what I say will be seen as obvious and irrelevant. Like in the Emperor’s New Clothes, where the boy yells “The Emperor is Naked!” and the crowd turn on the boy and say “Yeah, do you think we didn’t know? We were enjoying ourselves on this Grand Day Out – what have you ever done, to provide us with entertainment? Kill the boy! Kill the boy!”
This is actually one of my favourite Take That hits, just because (as others have pointed out) it sounds so casual, light and airy; just right for those wonderful first couple of weeks after the clocks have gone forward.
But boy has the production dated. Is this the last Number One to feature a sax solo?
Robbie sings. Barlow usually sounds like he’s laying a guide vocal down.
#23 Re: Sax solos. Don’t know about this but surely there must be one on a Cowell/X Factor bunny? Just sounds like the type of thing he’d do.
Edge of Glory didn’t get to #1 which was my first thought.
From fairly early on it was evident that Robbie Williams had a long-term agenda of his own; in the group’s many appearances on Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast he was always the one whom your eye caught first, and most naturally, eternally romping around the garden or playing echt-bemused in his woolly hat. He never quite fit in with the notion of cosy communality inherent in boybands; but then it was the guy with the woolly hat in the Monkees who went on to invent MTV (Monkees TV? Some things are spelt out all along).
“Everything Changes,” the title track from Take That’s second album, was their first number one to feature a lead vocal by Robbie. It’s a perfectly serviceable uptempo pledge of loyalty and faith to their Others as the group depart for yet another tour, but although it was intended to signify a new element of sophistication in Take That’s music, it harks back to the days of SAW with its bright electro-Philly feel – though only half a decade away, SAW’s music was already beginning to settle into its time, a phenomenon accentuated by the imminent reappearance in 1994 of Kylie, with a single deliberately designed to sound and feel as far away from SAW as possible.
The song trots along in a way which reveals what a Waterman-produced Osmonds might have sounded like, and it’s not too bad at all with its nostalgic – if synthesised – flutes and glockenspiels and Robbie’s sturdy, confident vocal in which he discovers a couple of dozen ingenious ways of phrasing “I love you” without ever quite convincing the listener that he means it, and the fealty oath is eventually and shamefacedly punctured by the couplet: “The rumour’s true, you know that there’ve been others/What can I do? I tell you baby, they don’t mean a thing!” The long-term questions were: should we believe Robbie, and if so, what is our belief in him worth, and to whom? Still, with its cheery chorus of “We’re a thousand miles apart, but you know I love you,” I can let it pass. We always do with Robbie.
I find myself increasingly impatient to the notion that we somehow cannot do without Gary Barlow. Maybe it has something to do with his ubiquity – here we are 4 days into 2013. Mr.Barlow appeared on tv New Years Day, yesterday I became bizarrely involved in a plan to print his face on some t-shirts, tonight an aquaintance of mine is going to watch him – I would describe that as ubiquitous.
Anyway I’m not convinced as some of his fans seem to be that he’s a great songwriter. He’s an accomplished one at best and the appeal of Take That is one which I continue to find highly resistable. As for songs such as Everything Changes – yoghurt for the ears.
Given the dismal facial expressions on most of his “Friends” on that selfsame ITV broadcast, I would have thought that “Gary No Mates OBE” would have been an apter title for the programme.
I’m inclined to wait until his solo career starts (briefly) troubling Popular before really getting stuck digging into Barlow’s utter mediocrity. Repugnant mediocrity, in fact.
His first album (notable as far as I could tell for its utterly soullness production and presumably session musicianship rather than anything else, “Open Road” not being an utterly terrible song, notwithstanding) seemed to rapidly become aural wallpaper in pretty much every charity shop I set foot in within a few years of its release (always being available for purchase at what might appear to be a very reasonable price: the digital-era equivalent of the old Woolies bargain bin of 7″ singles)
But, hey, TT were still better than NKOTB, even when they were as dire and remarkably unremarkable as they were here…
I always think of Take That as a group I like but every song that’s come up so far, apart from the cover of Relight My Fire, I’ve thought ‘yeah, but I don’t like this one’. Now I think about it, apart from one possibly bunnyable example (and no, it’s not the one you’re thinking of) and grudgingly one of the post-reuinion efforts, I can’t think of any of their own songs I do like. I never thought I was susceptible to winning personalities and regional pride, but I guess I woz rong…
In other words are there some TT disco bangers that missed the top spot that I’ve forgotten? It all seems to be soppy love songs so far. In my mind, they were always more fun and more lively than this.
The best other Take That disco-type songs are It Only Takes A Minute and Could It Be Magic, which both made top 10 but not number 1 because the group’s popularity was still building at that time.
It seems Take That were a lot more disco on the way up than they were when at the top. Now in the group’s “second coming”, when they are bigger than ever, they’re also further than ever away from the pop-disco sound that made them popular in the first place.
That said, the last album WAS produced by Stuart Price. Sadly by then he himself had seemingly moved away from or lost the disco midas touch he possessed between ‘Darkdancer’ and ‘Confessions On A Dancefloor’ (not that I think the reformed TT would really have suited the approach he took with Madonna there…unless perhaps he could’ve done for them what he did with Seal on ‘Amazing’ but that probably requires a stronger solo voice than anyone in TT has.
I was looking forward to talking about Could It Be Magic (Barry Manilow cover IRC?) and was really surprised it didn’t get to number 1. It seems a smart move for a breakthrough single, I always remember the piano on it, pegging TT as more of a D:ream-style pop-dance crew than a bunch of soppy moppets. It was only later when I saw them doing Babe or Pray or maybe even IOTAM on telly that I dismissed them as girls’ music.
I’ve very little time for most of the post-reunion stuff. Apart from one quite fun and massively over-exposed number and a couple of very pretty moments in a couple of the ballads, it all seems too Coldplayish; battering the audience into submission with production heft and crafted instant-anthemicness. Actually, a lot of it sounds more like the number Chris Martin wrote for Embrace; a sort of generic post-Verve indie-ish anthem preset. Not my bag at all and I’m guessing, not a lot of people on here’s bag either.
I remember “Could it be magic” was done by Barry Manilow and Donna Summer around about the same time period (Donna did accentuate the word “come” in particular), but I don’t know which was first.
I wasn’t sure either, so I looked it up – it appeared on Manilow’s 1973 debut album and was released as a single in the US two years later. Donna’s version came the following year, and Manilow’s UK record company finally issued it as a single here at the end of 1978. The single edit – played by Ken Bruce yesterday, incidentally – is a good deal shorter than the album version which runs to nearly seven minutes – that’s the one that appears on ‘Manilow Magic.’
Barry Manilow originally recorded Could It Be Magic under the group name Featherbed, a single on Bell produced by Popular alumnus Tony Orlando. Here are Barry’s memories of its first incarnation:
“Tony had produced (a single called Amy) a few months before on which I had been a “ghost” voice of a fictitious group called “Featherbed.” Bell Records wanted another “Featherbed” record and (Could It Be Magic) seemed like a good follow-up.
I remember sitting at the piano in my small apartment, playing the song for Tony.
“Now the way I hear it, Tony,” I said, “it should be very romantic and build slowly. to a climax that makes you feel as if the performer is totally carried away with passion.” He said he understood perfectly and went away to begin producing the track.
When I showed up at the recording studio and heard the bubble gum sounding track (complete with cowbells and a girl trio!) I was thrown for a loop. He had treated Could It Be Magic in a young-sounding up-tempo way that in no way resembled the style I had hoped for.”
Agreed with the score here, but for different reasons. This is surely the least annoying entry in their dismal catalogue – still not great, just a bit of throwaway 90s pop I’d, perhaps, not turn off the radio for.
The sleeve just screams “A gestalt creature of us five would make Bobby Briggs from Twin Peaks”
My nethers were alight watching them sing this live on TOTP in sailors outfits.
Re:37 – there’s also a Sylvester version, on his live album Living Proof. I’d assumed it would be the basis of the Take That version, but it’s actually quite stately and almost melancholic.
Re: 34. Damn right. Sometimes I wonder how Chris Martin sleeps at night, thinking as a student he dreamt of Radiohead-esque iconoclasm but is now filed alongside S**** and J****** B****** (bunny block activated!) on the “nightmare rock festival lineup” memes.
Catching up a bit here! I really don’t have a problem with this – a grower, and one you can perfectly understand as a hit. More particularly in the That narrative, after those vids of them being unattainable sex objects, here they’re cheery, cheesy lads joining in and having fun with people of all ages, about to be adopted as the country’s new national treasures, even if Barlow still looks smug as hell.
This had character and personality from Robbie on lead and is a good pop track with jazzy parts to it.
Again, a perfectly solid enough track from Take That. I’ve gone with a 5/10 here.