Music

If you were a 1990s pop group, you couldn’t hope for a more efficient comeback than the reunion recently staged by Take That. After a ratings-winning TV special and repackaged greatest hits collection, they announced an arena tour – which sold out – then stadium dates whose 120,000 tickets went in less than half an hour. A further date at Wembley Stadium also sold out and then, when it was announced that Wembley wouldn’t be open in time for the shows, they moved the dates to the even larger Milton Keynes Bowl, managing to shift that venue’s extra tickets too. Two weeks ago the band announced that they were signing a huge record deal, rumoured to be worth £3 million; their next album is already predicted to be one of this Christmas’s biggest sellers.

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Back in the day, Take That weren’t the only boyband on the block. East 17 were TT’s dirtier Walthamstow cousins. The idea was that while Mark Owen was taking your mum out for tea and cakes, John and Terry would be banging your sisters in an upstairs box room, and while Gary Barlow was discussing shrubs with your dad, East 17’s Brian Harvey would be in the other corner of the garden, smashed off his face on super-strength rave drugs, thwacking your Swingball backwards and forwards into the early hours. Take That covered Barry Manilow, East 17 covered Pet Shop Boys’ ‘West End Girls’, and when Take That launched pillowcases, dolls and special edition boxes of Kellogg’s Corn Pops, East 17 sent out kids with stencils and spraycans, graffiti-ing their distinctive imagery everywhere from E17 to W12. Worldwide, East 17 sold more albums than Take That. ‘We’re an average bunch of blokes from a town like yours and we make music,’ the group trumpeted when they first poked their heads into the world of pop. ‘We sing, we dance. Anyone could be us, we reckon, but they ain’t…’

East 17 are back for 2006, too, but you’d be forgiven if their own comeback had passed you by. When I spoke to East 17’s songwriter and founding member Tony Mortimer a month ago, tickets for East 17’s one show this week at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire – capacity 2,000 – were still available. ‘Everyone’s a bit older now,’ he noted. ‘They’re all going for the seated tickets.’ While Take That’s fans have sprung back to attention over the last five months, the people who bought East 17’s records simply seem to have disappeared.

What with the 1990s being a period when teenagers were actually interested in buying pop records, East 17’s solitary Number One single doesn’t tell the full story of their huge success. Their debut single ‘House Of Love’, for example, didn’t even enter the Top Five and still shifted the best part of a million copies. Today’s pop launches seem to clatter into town with an immediate air of failure and desperation, but East 17’s success had immense dignity in its apparent effortlessness. Alongside Mortimer’s fierce songwriting talents, East 17 benefited from a collision of creative minds. Tom Watkins, former manager of both Bros and the Pet Shop Boys, found a way to brilliantly bring rentboy chic to the pop charts. Likewise Form, the design powerhouse whose graphics have touched everything from Girls Aloud to Hut Recordings, developed a dazzling style for the group, including the iconic ‘dog’ logo.

Unusually for a boyband, East 17’s first few singles didn’t even feature photographs on their sleeves – the graphics were simply a procession of slightly different cartoon dogs. Likewise songwriters and producers like Stannard and Rowe –who went on to create many of the Spice Girls’ number ones – complemented Tony Mortimer’s unique writing style, and were instrumental in the band’s distinctive sound.

It was a great sound, too. Combining a British rap style with US beats and, frequently, a highly strung techno backdrop – one fallout from the early-1990s chart success of The KLF and The Shamen – East 17 carved their own musical niche. Their over-the-top tunes reached a peak with the stupendous introduction to ‘Let It Rain’ – all rainstorms and apocalyptic thunder-claps with Tony, presumably atop a windy hillock, screaming about walking ‘through the corridor of creation… nation against nation… we pray for the unseen to be seen by the eyes of man…’

Hardly ‘It Only Takes A Minute’, in other words, and compared with Take That’s greatest hits East 17’s own singles collection sounds remarkably fresh in 2006. Significantly, though, from the point of view of a comeback, Take That’s career had a definite end – with a press conference on February 13 1996 and the final, farewell release of ‘How Deep Is Your Love?’ the following month, meaning that they can now trade as a heritage act, manipulating the nostalgic yearnings of their mid-twenties audience. East 17 ended not with a boyband bang, but with the dismal whimper of a messy falling out (Tony left after Brian Harvey boasted of his prodigious drug sprees in a radio interview), followed by the other three rebranding themselves as E-17 and signing to Telstar, the label responsible for non-amazing compilation albums and the chart career of PJ & Duncan, for some terrible R&B-lite meanderings.

If there is anything to be learned from all this by today’s pop stars, it is that one must sacrifice the short-term gains of limping forward as a pale imitation of your band’s former glories, in order to maximise the potential of an eventual, all-guns-blazing reunion. This advice comes too late for East 17, unfortunately, but their Shepherd’s Bush Empire show should still be unmissable, if only for the distant promise of a set-piece involving Brian Harvey and a jacket potato.