Take That - "Progress Live" tour

Hello. My name is Pete, I'm 39 years old (for the next 3 weeks at least), male, straight, and I like Take That. I always have. My philosophy towards music is that if I hear something and like it then I like it, regardless of who it is by. My record collection goes from cheesy pop at one end to stuff like Nine Inch Nails at the other. Concerts I've been to have gone from NIN to Steps (who were, admittedly, bloody awful.)

Since their comeback Lou and I have seen Take That six times, two shows on each of their three tours. Each tour has been bigger and better than the last. Last night we went to see their "Progress Live" show at the City of Manchester Stadium (we only booked one show for this tour) and it was shockingly bad. Why? Read on. (WARNING: Contains massive spoilers for the show.)

Before I begin, a brief overview of their last show, "The Circus". We saw this twice at Lancashire Cricket Club, and as you waited for the show to start there were people dressed in blue suits decorated with clouds walking through the audience, almost like clowns, handing balloons to people, taking photographs and posing for others, releasing balloons into the sky every now and again. It was a fun, off-kilter atmosphere to start the show. They gathered around the stage and, in the middle of the pitch, the four-piece Take That launched into their set. After a few songs an elephant (basically an extending lift with a fabric skin on it and people operating the legs, ears, trunk, and a woman hung from the back pretending to be a tail) rose from the central stage and the band rode to the main stage on the top. There they performed a few acoustic tracks themselves and the stage transformed itself into a circus big top before our eyes, acrobats and fire eaters everywhere, and the stage remained a riot of colour for the rest of the show. At one point the band sang a song and as they performed it they painted their face like clowns, then did a medley of their cheesiest older songs before playing their best-known, best loved songs. They ended with "Relight My Fire", "Never Forget" and "Rule The World". Fireworks exploded in the sky, the stage was lit by thousands of bulbs, and the audience stood around for a long, long time, singing the chorus of "Rule The World" over and over again. It was a triumphant show.

So, last night...

First of all, three cheers for the support act - The Pet Shop Boys. I've always been curious about seeing them live as they're supposed to be excellent, and I've always liked their music, and they didn't let me down. I'd love to go and see them the next time they tour, and was happily singing along to the likes of "Left To My Own Devices" and "Suburbia". They were great.

Anyway, at 8.15 after a silly countdown the four "comeback" members of Take That - Gary, Jason, Howard and Mark - simply walked out onto the stage, no big fanfare, no explosions - they just walked out from under the screen, all very low-key, smiled, waved, said hello and launched into "Rule The World". It sounded great, and the crowd were all singing along, giving it loads. They walked onto a small central stage in the middle of the stadium (we were in block 106, near the pitch, more or less on the half way line) and carried on with "Greatest Day", "Patience", "Hold Up A Light" and "Shine". The atmosphere was tremendous, the band looked like they were having a great time, and it was a whole lot of fun. Then they returned to the main stage and the music to "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" started. The four climbed some steps to a large video screen where a hatch opened near the bottom, they stepped through, and appeared on the video. As they reached the chorus the words changed to "Robbie Williams and the Take That Band" or something like that, and with that a hatch opened at the very top of the screen and Robbie jumped out, attached to a harness, and fell to the stage as fireworks went off, jets of flame burst from the stage, and the volume was noticeably increased. This "big entrance" instantly sent out the message: This is the main act - the part before this was the support act (maybe explaining why they just walked on to no fanfare, like a support act would) and I am what you have come to see.

From this moment on it all changed. The next 30 minutes or so were a Robbie Williams solo set, where he sang (well, shouted tunelessly) "Let Me Entertain You", "Come Undone", "Feel", "Rock DJ" and then "Angels", all the time mugging to the camera, pretending he was about to cry, and swearing - a shame there were a lot of people there with young children. At one point he did some rap of sorts about "twenty years in the making, fifteen years in the waiting, five years deliberating... ladies and gentlemen this is the Take That show", before doing yet another of his solo songs. All around us people seemed to be confused, as though they were thinking "where are Take That? I thought I'd come to see Take That," and the three people I was with - two of whom were big Robbie fans - were not at all impressed as they too had come to see Take That.

Eventually the band came back, this time on top of the huge main stage. Ah, the stage. In previous tours the stage has been used extremely well, particularly so on their "Circus" tour. Last night for the first hour or so the stage was covered by a big grey curtain. Why? Well when the band finally appeared as a five, inconveniently at the top of the lighting rig where many of the audience couldn't see them (stage still lit by daylight, band dressed in black with a black backdrop, spotlights seemingly unable to pick them out) a fleet of acrobats / dancers dressed in wetsuits started to scale this grey curtain as a wall of water poured over them (the band were singing "The Flood" - get it?) The problem was that as water is transparent and it was against a grey backdrop you couldn't really see it unless you looked at the video screens, so one of the two big special effects of the show (the other comes later) couldn't really be seen. As the song neared its end Gary, Jason, Howard and Mark were lowered to the stage in metal cages. Robbie? Attached to a harness he essentially bungee jumped to the stage, lowered head first to the ground. Why did he have to be different? Oh yes - he's what you've come to see, and the others are just backing singers.

The grey curtain lifted and we get our first glimpse of the second, and biggest, special effect of the show. In the centre of the stage is a huge seated robot, a wire-frame man. The trouble is that as the robot takes up so much of the stage, as do the musicians (huddled in two plastic tents to each side of the front of the stage) the main stage apparently can't be used for very much, so for the majority of the show the stage is redundant, a casualty of its own poor design. On previous tours the musicians have been shifted a little further back, allowing Take That and their dancers to utilise all of the space available to them, and use it they have, filling every inch with dancers etc. Not this time.

The reunited five now present a batch of songs from their new album and I make no secret of the fact that I really don't like the new album at all. I've always thought the best Take That songs have had a kind of timeless quality about them, and you can imagine them being used in adverts (e.g. "Shine" in the Morrisons ads) or sung by cover artists or in karaoke for years to come, but the new songs simply aren't very good and are not particularly memorable, on top of which they sound very much like Robbie Williams songs rather than Take That songs. I didn't mind the band taking him back, but rather than the band changing to sound like him why couldn't he have merged himself into the band?

Over to the small stage once again (most of the show happens in the middle of the pitch, again the main stage being abandoned for much of the time) where "Kidz" is performed amongst maybe a dozen or so dancers. The problem here is that the band are surrounded by the dancers and as a result you cannot see what is going on. This happens several times. Where is Gary? Which one is Robbie? It's impossible to tell. The whole thing feels like a poorly considered mess. Then in the middle of it all Robbie sings a bit of "Rudebox".

At this point I looked across to Michelle, a huge Take That fan and also a big Robbie Williams fan. She likes the new album. She was shaking her head. "This isn't good," she said. "I'm not feeling it."

Then hurrah! Gary sits at the piano and the five do a few of their older songs, such as "Back For Good" and "Pray" - the one true moment of magic as the five performed their old dance routine - and the audience are back! Throughout the section of the show after "The Flood" the audience were noticeably muted, gaps opening on the pitch as people went to buy drinks & visit the toilet, and there were polite claps rather than huge cheers as the songs ended, but this nostalgic section brought everyone back and raised the mood. And then, "Underground Machine" saw Robbie take centre stage as Gary, Jason, Howard and Mark played keyboards, guitars and drums behind him, once again giving the message that they are his backing group.

Finally something happens with the big robot. It reclines slightly, Gary stands before its feet, Robbie and Jason climb a ladder in its bottom to ascend to its chest, and Howard and Mark find themselves standing in its hands. Stagehands push it towards the centre of the stadium as the band sing the awful "Love Love" whilst wearing illuminated tracksuits, and then the robot breaks down. "Never Forget" begins but Howard (who sings lead on that one) and Mark are still stuck in its hands, which refuse to move, trapping them twenty feet or so in the air. "We've come a long way, but we're not too sure how to get down," Howard improvises, as a man with a ladder helps Mark get down from the hand in a gloriously Spinal Tap moment. Directly in front of us an inebriated woman dancing on her seat promptly falls off it, gets wedged in the gap between the seats behind her, clambers out and resumes dancing. Howard is rescued, the band conclude the song, and the ending is with us. What song can they sing to beat the triumphant "Never Forget"? How can they crown the night in a finer way? They sing the weedy "Eight Letters" from the new album, nobody singing along, people leaving in droves as the robot is elevated to a standing position by means of a mechanical arm we've been able to see behind it all along. The band walk back to the stage through the crowd as they sing, invisible to most of the audience as they are below the level of the crowd, taking gifts of scarves and feather boas, and this is the unbelievably flat finale to a catastrophically flat show. There are no fireworks. The lights come on and people drift to the exits in silence. Nobody is singing this time. There is no buzz in the crowd.

We walked back to Manchester amongst the crowd. Michelle and her friend aren't happy with the show, nor is Lou. All four of us found it a massive disappointment. At times in the show, on the few occasions the camera focused on something other than Robbie's gurning visage, it falls on Gary Barlow's face, and he looks concerned, unhappy. Maybe he senses something is wrong too?

As a show it may have cost more to produce than "The Circus", but I can't see why. It looks cheap and poorly conceived, and there is no theme, no narrative. It's a huge mess, and above all else it's a huge ego-trip for Robbie Williams, and certainly not "The Take That" show he spoke of part way through.

Lou has said she's not fussed about getting the DVD when it comes out. Michelle and Karen were both incredibly disappointed, saying if the band tour again - and it feels like an "if" - she's not sure she'll go to see them again if Robbie is with them (and she's a fan of his, remember). We walked back to Manchester dissecting the show. Very few people in the throng seemed happy, and hardly any were singing.

Take That: We want you back as four. "Progress Live" is a huge, themeless mess of a show. If you're a Robbie Williams fan you'll undoubtedly love it, but Take That fans be warned.