TAKE THAT – "Everything Changes"

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.

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]

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

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

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.

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.

Thanks for the corrections above. Glasto 94 was the year of Orbital and no Pyramid Stage.

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.

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.

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.

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!”

Robbie sings. Barlow usually sounds like he’s laying a guide vocal down.

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.

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 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…

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.

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 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.’

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.

My nethers were alight watching them sing this live on TOTP in sailors outfits.

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.

This had character and personality from Robbie on lead and is a good pop track with jazzy parts to it.