Preview: The Band, Hippodrome

This April the Hippodrome welcomes The Band, Tim Firth’s new musical featuring the music of Take That.

For five 16 year-old friends in 1992, ‘the band’ is everything. Twenty-five years on, we are reunited with the group of friends, now 40-something women, as they try once more to fulfil their dream of meeting their heroes. The show features live music from boyband Five to Five.

Here’s Tim with more.

How much of the show is centered around Five To Five (and the songs of Take That), and how much is about the five friends and their reunion after all these years?
It’s easiest to put it this way: Five To Five and the songs of Take That hardly ever leave the stage.
However, the girls in the story are the only people we get to know by name. And neither those two bands or the names of any of their members are ever mentioned.

All pics: Matt Crockett

Is it as much a show about the exhilaration of fandom, as it is about music?
It is a show about fans and their music. It’s about the unique ability of music to absorb the lives of those who create it, and those who listen to it, and to hold them in joint custody. Any song is co-owned by those who create it and those who listen to it. I think it’s for this reason that fans of the music see the show in the first week, then come back in the second with friends who are just fans of… music.

From one review: “The Band’s premise: pop is all around us, and sometimes makes sense in unexpected ways”. A fair assessment?
I’d widen it. I’d say it applies to any form of music – pop, rock, whatever. I told Take That early on that I was writing a musical in which their songs could theoretically be replaced by those of another artist with a broad catalogue like theirs. They loved this idea. It meant the story had to have strong enough legs to stand on its own. It’s not about the boys, it’s not about their songs – it’s about the influence of their songs on the lives of which they became a part.
And by this, I don’t just mean fans. There are songs that are inextricably linked to times in my life which came off albums I never had any compulsion to listen to!

Is the jukebox musical a challenging medium to get right? To get the balance of story and hits right, to ensure that those hits don’t feel artificially wedged in?
I wrote a musical called Our House with Madness, a show of which I am very proud and for which my intention was to make it appear to a visiting alien that the songs were written for the story.
The Band is totally different, as you will hopefully see. I said I would never write another musical like Our House and I believe I’ve kept my word.

What do you hope the show tells us (or makes us feel) about the five friends, and how they change over 25 years, what they gain and what they lose? How much of our past selves is it possible to hang onto, etcetera?
I hope it makes us feel that going back is not always a retrograde step.
As a writer, I spend my life pearl-fishing the past as these girls are suddenly called upon to do in the story. Sometimes you don’t like what you find – but, ultimately, the musical is passionately optimistic. I find optimism is always harder to pull off. Cynicism and pessimism are easier dramatically, as you have to come up with fewer answers.

Were Take That a factor in your own life 25 years ago?
In The Band, a group of girls bunk off school to see a boyband on their first concert tour at the Apollo Theatre in Manchester. I was at that concert. I wasn’t into boybands. I went to support a friend I’d had for about three years, called Gary Barlow. I stood in the middle of screaming girls with dummies and whistles and thought, ‘this is amazing, mate, so just enjoy it ‘cause dreams like this don’t last’. Shows how much I bloody know.

The Band is at the Hippodrome from Tuesday, April 17 to Saturday, April 28. For more info and to buy tickets, visit www.atgtickets.com/shows/the-band/bristol-hippodrome

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