Boys Will Be Boys: Re-Inhabiting the Homosocial Sphere of Take That

[PMH 7.2 (2012) 121-126] Popular Music History (print) ISSN 1740-7133 doi:10.1558/pomh.v7i2.121 Popular Music History (online) ISSN 1743-1646

David Sanjek1 Boys will be boys: re-inhabiting the homosocial sphere of Take That

Abstract With the expectations of Take That’s fans in mind, as well as those of the band itself, this essay explores the idea of reunion in terms of repetition, change, and evolution. Focusing on temporality and temperament, it explores the role our attachments to culture play in our efforts to make sense of our experiences. The paper examines these issues with reference to three potentially illuminating investigations: first, the consideration of the depiction of homosocial commu- nities in literature pursued by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; second, the distinctions made by Bruce Kawin regarding productive and counterproductive uses of time; and third, Frank Kermode’s examination of end-determined fictions and their influence upon how we construct narratives of human behaviour.

Keywords: homoromance paradigm; homosocial unit; narrative; repetition; reunion

Let me begin by stating that I come to you today neither to defend nor defame Take That. In fact, I entered this dialogue as a complete neophyte, intrigued by the concept of repetition embedded in the phenomenon of the reunion and the inter- personal dynamics inherent in the confederation of the boy band rather than as someone previously acquainted with or disposed to offer a ready opinion about Take That. If we have learned anything about musical history, it is that only a sap ignores what the little girls understand. And said sap only adds to his ineptitude if he fails to consider what transpires when those little girls grow up and experience an inevitable evolution of their infatuations over time. It is, in part, that evolution of infatuation that is to be examined in the study of the Take That reunion, and the ensuing connections between temporality and temperament. Say what you will, the constitution of our affections rarely remains any more stable than the composition of the record charts. Each routinely experiences unexpected and unprecedented alterations. Well-worn clichés such as how

1. Editor’s note: David Sanjek, Professor of Popular Music at the University of Salford, died suddenly on 29 November 2011. He had given the opening address at the conference from which the papers constituting this issue were given. After his death only an unfinished version of his talk was found among his papers. However, because of the circumstances, we have decided to include this version here, lightly edited.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield, S3 8AF. 122 Popular Music History popular music in particular provides the soundtrack of our lives attempt to make sense of how even the most mundane of our experiences routinely acquires a form of accompaniment, sometimes without our understanding, or even wishing to understand, how and or why those alliances get established in the first place. One of the determining factors of age seems to be the retrospective desire to comprehend what jump-started those feverish bursts of concentrated plea- sure; what deflates them all of a sudden; and what can, with equal lack of prec- edent, reanimate them with all their initial devastation, and more. In the midst of these acts of contemplation, sometimes we find ourselves chagrined and, pos- sibly, ashamed, to think that we could have ever fallen for something so simple- minded. Other times, we feel altogether invigorated when we re-inhabit those past moments in our lives and mourn whatever transitions now deny them their former privileged place of residence in our consciousness. In effect, each time we replay the culture we associate with our past, we initiate our own reunion not only with that material but also with a portion of ourselves that time certainly has tampered with, perhaps irreparably. Those flashbacks can fly in the face of what we believe to be the current foundations of our personalities, or remind us of just what ingredients went into constructing those foundations many years before. Whatever form of culture triggers this process for us, from the most sophis- ticated material to the most sophomoric, does not matter. What does matter is the role it plays in the effort to achieve some consonance rather than dissonance in the understanding of our experience. The late literary critic Frank Kermode reminds us of how commanding this achievement can be. He writes in The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, ‘in ‘making sense’ of the world we still feel a need, harder than ever to satisfy because of our accumulated scepticism, to experience that concordance of beginning, middle, and end which is the essence of our explanatory fictions’ (Kermode 2000: 35–36). We aim, he believes, for some form of ‘temporal integration’; in effect, ‘a need in a moment of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and to an end’ (46, 4). In order to achieve this goal, we construct what he calls ‘concord-fictions’, a form of narrative organiza- tion that answers to his injunction, ‘For to make sense of our lives from where we are, as it were, stranded in the middle, we need fictions of beginnings and fictions of ends, fictions which unite beginning and end and endow the interval between them with meaning’ (190). I submit to you that there are a significant number of individuals temporarily in Salford at this conference, weaving with all the diligence and urgency of Hom- er’s Penelope these plotlines for themselves as they experience in the form of Take That one of the principal characters in the construction of the story of their lives. And it does not take a great deal of effort to imagine that, in the course of this tour,

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013. Boys will be boys 123 the five men in the group themselves are constructing plotlines relevant to their individual sets of experience. As Jason Orange said in a 2008 interview, ‘Being a good pop band is not just about good pop songs. It’s about a good story… Our story is pretty good’ (Vernon 2008: 42). That narrative now continues. Another set of chapters in being created each night on another stage before another set of mutually engaged narrators. In the remainder of my comments, I want briefly to address two things: first, how Take That enact, in part, a plotline that others have inhabited: the homosocial unit of performers, whose lineage I want to trace back to the start of the last century. Second, how the occasion of their reunion can, or cannot, act for its audience as a simple ratification of their past or a reanimation and readjustment of its meaning. To begin, Take That assumes a place in a long line of performance ensembles, and more specifically of ensembles composed of young men or individuals who, regardless of their chronological age, enact the role of young men. The prior examples I want to highlight are from the American tradition, but I’m sure I could come up with others in other cultures, those themselves influenced by the American individuals. Youth itself has persisted as a marketable commercial package, and some of show business’s most celebrated icons began their careers before they concluded, if they in fact possess a diploma, their schooling. One of the best-known and long-lasting of those congregations was started by the celebrated Tin Pan Alley songwriter Gus Edwards (1879–1945). Following the writing of his classic song ‘School Days’ (1907), he assembled the Kid Kabaret, a congre- gation of some forty boys and girls that held the vaudeville stage for the next two decades. Eddie Cantor, George Jessel and journalist Walter Winchell got their start with Edwards. The film producer Hal Roach piggy-backed on this template with the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, virtually all-male Our Gang, who appeared in short features released from 1922 to 1944. A number of other companies followed in kind with similar groups affiliated with the characters Buster Brown and Mickey McGuire in addition to the collective, the Kiddie Troupers. Such male-dominated or male-exclusive ensembles carried over into feature films, most notably the group of young New Yorkers who performed in Stanley Kingsley’s 1936 hit stage drama Dead End, among them Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall and Billy Halop. They appeared subsequently in the 1937 Sam Goldwyn film adaptation, only to be collectively designated the Dead End Kids and hired by Warner Brothers. Members of the troupe continued in the types of roles established in these vehicles, albeit increas- ingly in a deliberately comedic vein, in a sequence of B-features under the names the East Side Kids, Boys Next Door and, eventually, the Bowery Boys. This last mon- iker attached itself to a sequence of forty-eight features released between 1946

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013. 124 Popular Music History and 1958, at which point, it goes without saying, the performers were anything but boys and their salaries and profit percentages had effectively priced them out of any residential affiliation with the Bowery. Roach’s releases on more than one occasion drew attention to their male dominance by the incorporation of a comedic narrative trope, the All Men Woman-Haters Club. This was not so much an illustration of pre-pubescent misogyny as an illustration of what sociologist Jeffery P. Dennis has called the ’homoromance’ paradigm, which he differentiates from an ‘ordinary same-sex friendship, even of the “best friend” variety, in their intensity, intimacy, and exclusivity’ (2007: ix). This category should not alert anyone’s gender radar, for it illustrates one of the countless variations among the gradations of male affiliation that complicate human behaviour. In an age that liberally tosses about terminology such as ‘bromance’ and ‘man crush’, this category seems an inalien- able part of our social fabric, yet we would be wise to remind ourselves of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s observation that ‘The dividing up of all sexual acts—indeed all persons—under the “opposite” categories of “homo” and “hetero” is not a given but a historical process’ (2008: xvi). The late literary scholar was one of the inaugurators of the theoretical analysis of homosocial alliances in literature; her works aided immeasurably in yielding up ‘this resistance to treating homo- heterosexual caegorization—still so very volatile an act—as a done deal, a trans- parently empirical fact about any person’ (xvi). The consequence of this paradigm for Take That relates to one of the persis- tent elements of their narrative: the bonds and tensions that unite and distract the group as a unit, most notably, of course, their abandonment by Robbie Wil- liams in 1995 and his re-association with them for the 2011 tour. Certainly, one of the many threads being entered among the fabric of the narratives under construction, for fans, scholars and the band itself alike, comes down to what degree and in what manner those severed bonds have become re-aligned. The obviously and painfully unrequited emotions that dominate the final sequence of the 2005 ITV1 documentary when Robbie chose not to join the others came across with an undeniable rawness. The consequences for the group, and all others, of his return are underscored by other comments made by Jason Owen in the 2008 interview that speak to the complex and commanding emotions of the ‘homoromance’:

Have you seen how we have a laugh? Bunch of lads. Mates. Men don’t…men aren’t that good really. Blokes find it harder than girls, to chat. It’s well known, isn’t it? But because we’re in close proximity a lot of the time, we’re forced to talk about things. We learned how to be close … We’re sorting our own little world out, together… It’s the best bit. Better than anything. Better than the music (Vernon 2008: 47).

Second, the phenomenon of the reunion highlights the association of temporality and temperament, as I mentioned earlier. An incontestable element of the reunion scenario is the very act of repetition. At least in part, what an audience expects amounts to a recurrence of the past, certainly in the performance of Take That’s greatest hits but at the same time in some reappearance, albeit altered by time, of the emotions they experienced on the first occasion of their hearing a particular song. This makes for a kind of mobius strip dynamic to the event, as though the past and present interwove and interpenetrated one another. In fact, these individuals would more than likely be upset and feel unfulfilled should not this scenario take hold to some degree. At the same time, the question ought to be raised as to the consequences of this scenario. What is being added to one’s experience or personality if the expectations simply amount to a repeat or an echo of a previous set of actions? Are such expectations a means of halting the forward flow of time; of returning to and re-inhabiting the adolescent phase of one’s life; of demanding of a set of performers that they too re-adopt and re-inhabit a left- behind element of their personalities, as though a snake were to re-assume its cast-off skin? I raise these questions not explicitly as a value judgment upon anyone’s expectations or assumptions, but, instead, to highlight that association of temporality and temperament. A similar effort is made by the multi-disciplinary scholar Bruce F. Kawin in his study Telling it Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film. He conducts a similar, and potentially revelatory, inquiry, and, in the process, distinguishes between two diametrically opposed approaches to temporality and recurrence:

Repetitious: when a word, precept, or experience is repeated with less impact at each recurrence, repeated to no particular end, out of a failure of invention or sloppiness of thought.

Repetitive: when a word, precept or experience is repeated with equal or greater force at each recurrence (1989: 4).

Kawin adds that a successful formation of repetition requires the interest solicited by the recurring phenomenon and its context; some events or individuals can elicit our attention in an undivided and incessant manner over the long haul, while others are short-wave broadcasts, so to speak. When does an act of assertion gain in strength with each recurrence and fortify our sense of identity and when does it render our being more flaccid and unfounded? In the present circumstances, I can simply raise these questions and leave it to our continuing conversation as to what position Take That might occupy in this dynamic.

References Dennis, Jeffery P. 2007.We Boys Together: Teenagers in Love Before Girl-Craziness. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Kawin, Bruce F. 1989. Telling it Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film. Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press. Kermode, Frank. 2000. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2008. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vernon, Polly. 2008. ‘Hats Off!’ The Guardian Music Monthly 63: 40–43, 45, 47. November.