Take That on their Christmas traditions

We return to the festive season: what are their earliest Christmas memories? ‘Midnight mass,’ Owen replies. ‘It was the only night of the year you could stay up ridiculously late. You’d walk to church, see all your mates, a bit dressed up, there was a different energy. It was celebratory, not like going to mass.’ Owen was briefly an Oldham altar boy. ‘Always nicking the wafers,’ he says. ‘Midnight mass was probably my first-ever night out.’ He smiles. ‘The first of many.’ He is now fully sober.

Donald turns out to be surprisingly curmudgeonly — ‘Oh, he’s the Grinch,’ laughs Barlow, ‘two kids under two and he hates Christmas’ — but dredges up his own festive memory. ‘Do you remember the phones that used to have dials?’ he says. ‘And they’d have little shitty phone locks you put on the bottom to stop you ringing? Every day I’d get a knife and open it up and ring Father Christmas, which was £1, which was why my mum put the phone lock on. He’d tell you a story down the phone. It only lasted five minutes but I was so into it. While I was on the phone, I’d be eating the Cadbury’s decorations off the false tree.’

Barlow told his daughter, nine-year-old Daisy, not long ago about his own first memory. ‘We were living in our old-old house on Ashton Drive,’ he says of the house he was born into, ‘and I remember waking up. It was the middle of the night. I opened the window and I saw him.’

Him?

‘I saw the sleigh, going across the sky. Glitter coming off the back. I looked and there was a drum kit. I went dum, dum, dum [taps three imaginary drums] and went back to sleep.’

You, Gary Barlow, actually saw Father Christmas?

‘I mean, I must’ve believed so much that I actually saw it. Daisy was like...’ he pulls a flabbergasted face, ‘“You saw him?” I said, yeah. Loads of reindeers towing the sleigh. I remember it clearly. I was three.’

The details of a very Take That Christmas come thick and fast in an hour of circumspect, middle-aged festive chatter. Donald’s least favourite Christmas song is Paul McCartney’s Wonderful Christmastime (‘Don’t say that, he’s always really nice about us,’ instructs Owen. ‘I like the rest,’ says Donald. ‘Just not that one. Hate it’). Barlow can remember appearing as a 15-year-old

sporting a mullet on daytime TV favourite Pebble Mill making

his first — and tellingly, last — attempt at writing a Christmas song.

For Owen, poignant memories are sparked by the Wham! hit Last Christmas. ‘There’s a sadness to all the best Christmas songs,’ he notes. ‘That one reminds me of being in nightclubs, trying to get off with girls and not getting off with girls. It reminds me of skating, going up to someone and saying, “Do you want a dance,” and them going, “No”. Then that song comes on.’ A name comes to him, as if from nowhere: ‘Becky Bliss. She snogged my best mate after that, too.’

‘Becky Bliss?’ says Barlow, mouth agape. ‘Wasn’t that a drag queen somewhere?’

‘I think I’ve seen a couple of her videos,’ says Donald.

How organised are they, come Christmas? Barlow has all his presents bought, wrapped and tidied away by the end of October. The family tree, a fake he thinks came from The White Company, went up on 1 December (he compensates with pine-scented candles). He’s already booked next year’s Christmas holiday. ‘Did it yesterday,’ he says, pleased as punch.

Owen, a marginally less organised Christmas spirit, ordered his tree for 17 December. ‘Oh, and lads,’ he reminds, ‘get your

pub lunches booked because you’ll never get in otherwise.’ They will all spend Christmas with their immediate families in the homes in the Shires that their rock-solid graft as Take That has afforded them, a million miles from the back seat of a Ford Fiesta on Rochdale Road. They will all cook. They will all have turkey. Because it’s Christmas.

And when will Donald’s tree go up? ‘Probably the 28th of December,’ he says, with a cackle.

As their 29th year together draws to a close, Take That are preparing for the end of another chapter. ‘I think it’s a farewell to this period,’ says Barlow of the forthcoming tour. ‘We’ve definitely seen the Nineties as stage one and this is chapter two and [the tour] is definitely the end of chapter two and it’s lovely that it is. It’s then quite exciting to think what happens next.’

‘It’s not going to be emotional for me,’ says Donald, ‘because I believe there’s going to be more.’ Could Take That end up like the Rolling Stones, touring into their 70s? ‘Absolutely, definitely we could,’ says Barlow, ‘If we have the appetite for it.’

Somehow, towards the end of this conversation, the subject turns to Take That tribute bands, specifically the Nineties Mancunian lesbian tribute outfit Fake Twat, of whom the boys were unaware.

‘Take Twat?’ says Donald, mishearing their name. ‘Brilliant.’

‘No!’ says Owen, mock aghast.

‘Fake,’ corrects Barlow, absolutely delighted with an unlikely new piece of the Take That jigsaw slotting into place. ‘Fake Twat. I love that. How could we have missed them?’

‘We should take them on tour,’ notes Donald.

And the three wise men of Take That collapse into a pool of cordial Northern laughter. ‘Surreal-er things have happened to us,’ says Barlow.

Take That’s musical ‘The Band’ is at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until 12 January (020 7930 8800; thebandmusical.com)