Take That 'Patience'

Chart Peak: 1 (4 weeks)

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'Patience', Take That's first single in ten years, shot to the top spot in November 2006 and has just won the boys a Brit Award for Best British Single... Their album Beautiful World also gave them a No. 1 - They've proved to be as successful as ever with a sell-out reunion tour last year and a new sell-out tour just announced for the end of 2007.

As it turned out, "as successful as ever" ended up being an understatement, with that album ultimately outselling all their previous albums and becoming one of the UK's all-time top-sellers. It's hard to know how intentional it was, but with hindsight Take That wrote the perfect script for a successful comeback: first they (or at least the four of them who weren't Robbie Williams) reunited for a TV show, then released a best-of album to tie in with that. A successful tour followed and only then did they announce they'd signed a new record deal for new material, still leaving the door open for a possible full reunion with Williams. Perhaps this was all planned in advance but at least this arrangement gave them the opportunity to sell each stage in the process as a response to public demand, and of course to have pulled out had the momentum not been there - a lesson that seemed lost on many of the other boy bands who re-emerged in their wake, booked a load of arenas and wondered why there was such a big echo.

Anyway, the stage was clearly set for 'Patience' to become a big hit for them but the sheer scale of that success was still impressive. As I concluded, it was clearly the right song at the right time. But that's not to say I was ever fond of it - for all that the writing credit is to all four members and producer John Shanks this sounds very much like Gary Barlow's show and it's easy to imagine this coming out as a Barlow solo single a couple of years earlier and scraping the lower end of the Top 40. For me it's very much an example of his excessively formal and formulaic writing style, with every note going exactly where you expect and a lyric by turns whiny and patronising "My heart is numb/has no feeling" explains Gary in case we didn't know what the word "numb" meant). Shanks, known largely for his work with North American AOR acts, gives the record a radio-friendly sheen that suggests an attempt to break the US market, and it's precisely the sort of thing that can easily shift units with the right image on the front of it. Even if all the other three Thatblokes seem to do is a bit of humming in the background, lending their collective name did the trick.

Also appearing on: Now 22, 24, 26, 29, 67, 68, 72, 73, 78, 79
Available on: Beautiful World