Dedicated to my fellow 1990s Take That screaming fans
★ This article was discussed in the New Zealander podcast I'm with the boyband by "boybandologists" Amy and Zoe [episode 39 'MMMBOP' of 24th January 2020]. Click here to hear the clip!?
This story begins shortly before my early teens, in the mid-1990s, in a state school in Rome, Italy, where a classmate called Valentina S. and I shared a huge love for Take That and were massively frustrated by the state of things, especially the state of English.
I remember I was in Year 6 aged 11 when I had the brilliant idea of showing the lyrics of the 1993 Take That single Babe to my then-English teacher. I was desperate to translate my favourite song into Italian, but I couldn't get past Babe, where have you been? We'd only studied the past tense until then, and I'd never met this form of present perfect before.
The teacher stared at the compact disc with empty eyes, scratching her nose. Then she said that this wasn't included in our course syllabus?and handed the booklet back to me as if it was a piece of crap. To this day - if I think that we were being assigned (poor) grades in English by an incompetent idiot who couldn't even understand where have you been - I would bang my head against the wall.
There was no easily available home Internet at the time, and especially there was no Google Translator, so everything we could hope for was for our print teen magazines to publish some translations. Meanwhile and just in case, we would still memorise every single Take That song word by word. And believe me, you really have to be crazy to learn by heart hundreds of words?you don't even know how to pronounce. But we refused to let the total inadequacy of our state-funded schools ruin our Take That fandom.