The first chart topper by one of the key UK pop acts of the decade, Number 1 on August 1 1993 was
Pray - Take That
This could be described as Take That's breakthrough hit, but saying that, their ascent at this stage was pretty much inevitable. Their previous single 'Why Can't I Wake Up With You' was weak and unmemorable, but had still reached Number 2, so as long as the next one was decent, a Number 1 was likely.
Pray is, I think, really good. Still one of their best. I was no fan of Take That at the time, as I'll get to, but Pray immediately sounded like it belonged - the intro sounded like the theme to popular Saturday night on ITV, and the chorus was once heard, never forgotten.
Barlow knew what he was doing. Everyone knew what they were doing, even though what they were doing had still, at that point, not been done that much before.
It shows how innocent I was, but also how relatively "innocent" (not really the right word) the era was that I took against Take That because I heard they'd been specially put together by a svengali (Nigel Martin-Smith). They weren't "authentic". I mean, this has been so entirely commonplace for so long, it was a laughable view even then ...
Take That took a long time to really get going, forming in 1990 releasing their first single in 1991. Pray, in 1993, was their 9th single and first Number 1. After that, 10 of their next 11 singles (with an 8 year gap in the middle) were Number 1s. Their biggest songs on Spotify, apart from Back for Good, are from their comeback era. They really had the knack.
They do still rankle a little. Pace Jason of Orange, it's a shame what a Tory/establishment lot they turned out to be. And, yes, I wish they'd held it together so Robbie Williams' solo career was never unleashed. ...
but Pray was decent.
1993's Number 1s, in general, I don't like nearly as much as those of 1992 - I Will Always Love You, No Limit, Oh Carolina, Young at Heart, Five Live EP, All That She Wants, Can't Help Falling in Love With You, Dreams, Pray, Living on My Own, Mr Vain, Boom! Shake the Room, Relight My Fire, I'd Do Anything for Love, Mr Blobby, Babe, Mr Blobby ...
... some ok ones, but quite a few stinkers. The year belonged to Take That and it was also the year pop reggae started to dominate - Shaggy, Inner Circle, Shabba, Snow, Ace of Base, UB40, Chaka Demus and Pliers ... all that stuff.
I was still, really, without a musical home. I thought Queen was my musical home, but it will turn out not to be. Perhaps this dreadful Freddie Mercury single Living on My Own, will help me break out of that Queen funk, I can't remember.
I remember my birthday (15) very well that year... cricket. There was a cricket tour to the Cotswolds, three matches in three days, and those three days were the first three times I got drunk. The first two times, successfully, the third time untidily.
I'm just about to sound about as English middle-class as anyone possibly could, so please remember I am a misanthropic Celtic republican from a broken home, but there is/was something exquisite about the culture of drinking after cricket matches in the home counties.
If, in my era, you were lucky enough to be a teenager who loved cricket and wanted to play it all summer, who was good at cricket, then the experience of playing a full afternoon's cricket in the sun, then sitting in or outside the pavilion, being bought beer by friendly elders, and chatting about nothing more or less than the day's cricket, or the next day's cricket, was as good as it gets.
I wasn't popular, people didn't want me at their parties, I wasn't attractive or charismatic, so being good at cricket, being treated as an equal and drunk with, listened to, on those evenings, meant a lot to me.
That first time, at Middleton Stoney, an obscenely picturesque cricket club. I'd taken a couple of wickets, there was a barbecue, there were four or five bottes of Becks, a clear, tipsy, head, no hangover, I felt like I'd discovered the secret to life. I more or less had.
I'm not entirely rose-tinted. By the end of that tour, some of the older lads were irritated by me. I was irritating, and callow, and lads don't want to perpetually indulge an irritating, callow 15-year old. They want to dance to Take That.
It baffled me, perhaps because I didn't really understand what lads were, that the lads at my school loved Take That. I don't know exactly what I thought they'd love instead, if anything, but the universality of Take That was key to their success, and to their long-lasting appeal, compared to some of the other massive pop acts of that decade, who I will get to down the line.
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