Gay Factor: Sounding a Bum Note on the Take That/Robbie Reunion

Robbie Williams

Gay interest was surely aroused by the preview of Shame (the single and video), combining the talents of Gary Barlow and Robbie Williams for the first time since the latter went defiantly solo 15 years ago. Since then to his recent marriage, Robbie has pursued an unevenly successful career, teasing us with ambiguous messages as to his queer credentials.

Now we have a song of reconciliation and a video with clear visual references to Brokeback Mountain and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  Barlow and Williams dance holding token females in a bar whilst gazing longingly into each others’ eyes. They both strip to the waist (showing some evident gym work), race joyfully to the top of a mountain ridge with a lake far below it, and then turn their faces back to the sun just as you think they will join hands and jump.

The end of this romantic sequence is perhaps symbolic of what Barlow has admitted may be only an eighteen month joint venture with the band, with Robbie likely to resume his lone career after that. What deserves deeper examination is the gay factor in all this, and how it helps us to decode the hidden meaning of the song’s chorus, “What a shame we never listened…”

In the music industry things are often not as they seem. Only this week Simon Cowell has been brought to book by an increasingly distrustful and aware public for using auto-tuning to improve the quality of singers appearing in his talent shows.  Few will know that decades ago when a young  Cilla Black was recording You’re My World, she was incapable of singing it through without struggling with the notes. The final released single was actually a cleverly spliced version of many separate attempts to get it right, though it sounded seamless.

Similarly, rumour and ambiguity have always been grist to the music industry’s mill. In the eighties one such rumour was of intimacy between Gary Barlow and Elton John, and between Robbie Williams and George Michael. The affairs were never substantiated, but the rumours were symptomatic of the game of sexual ambiguity many stars have been prepared to play, no doubt encouraged by a particularly lucrative gay market. Gary and Robbie may now have found themselves wives, but their latest collaboration seems calculated to appeal to a gay audience just the same.

In his book, What Are You Looking At?  (1993)  gay commentator Paul Burston reminds us that Take That’s pop career was launched in gay clubs, and one video at the outset showed the lads in bondage outfits rubbing jelly and jam into their cavorting torsos. Howard reported to The Face that jam was lodged under his foreskin “for weeks” afterwards!  Around the time the book was published Robbie is quoted as saying:

“We don’t mind the rumours about being gay. One of us might even be gay.” 

…presumably himself.  And however they changed into straighter looking guys, their raw sexual energy fuelled that selfsame element of doubt.

Barlow and the other members of Take That feel guilty for falling out with the vulnerable younger Robbie, and Shame is on one level an admission of collective regret for not listening properly to one another over the years since Robbie departed, and no doubt alludes to the band’s own break-up and re-forming.

Ricky Martin

Perhaps there’s guilt for not listening to their gay fans too. Shame they didn’t come clean about the extent of their gay feelings long ago when guys were struggling with a lack of high profile support, to the extent that some advocated outing  prominent actors and pop stars. Ricky Martin’s more recent belated coming out is yet another instance of a performer putting their career before showing solidarity with their gay fans who may be starving for role models and reassurance.  A much better way has been shown by Will Young.

If there is a kind of apology to gay fans in the release of Shame,  it’s undermined by the video’s allusions to homoerotic movies. What the gay world really needs in the twenty-first century is an end to the lies, the closet, and the confusion,  cynicism and exploitation  it has always engendered.

By John Hartley

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