Take That and the curse of the difficult post-tax-avoidance album

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2014/dec/04/take-that-post-tax-avoidance-album

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And then there were three … Turn up the collar on your favourite winter coat, dear readers, as we contemplate the cover of Take That’s new album. It says: we cast long shadows. It says: here’s what we’d look like if we were wrapped in cellophane. And above all, it says: we could be facing a £30m backpayment demand from the Inland Revenue. Fancy chipping in?

For those of you for whom the answer is a resounding no, the release of III this week may feel like the most candid artistic outing since Peter Kay’s Mum Wants a Bungalow Tour, only without the latter’s obviously tongue-in-cheek charm. The III refers to Take That sans Jason Orange – the only member of the group not to have invested in the aggressive tax avoidance schemes that have seen them hit the headlines this year – a band that now comprises Gary Barlow, Mark Owen and Howard Donald. It is still managed by Jonathan Wild, who was also in on the racket.

Needless to say, the album is an effort to address these matters musically, and features thoughtful ballads with titles like Goodbye A&E Unit, and Down The Streets I Don’t Pay For … forgive me. In fact, having scanned the lyrics, I am afraid I have drawn a blank on references to The Unpleasantness, with the possible exception of a track called Flaws, which runs:

“I have so many, many flaws

If you take me, you take me

They’re yours.”

It’s tempting, Gary, but when you say “they’re yours”, does that mean I’m technically liable for 50% of any HMRC demands engendered by said flaws? Because if it does, I suspect I will have developed debilitating commitment issues before the second chorus.

Having said that, I’m obviously reading way too much into Flaws, because all the evidence would suggest that Gary still doesn’t think he has done anything remotely wrong on the tax-chiselling front. In fact, he contrived to find a non-apology even more non-apologetic than the classic: “I apologise if anyone was offended.” After a four–month Twitter silence, Gary finally returned to public life in September with the sub-cursory: “I want to apologise to anyone who was offended by the tax stories.” Not by the tax-avoiding, you understand, but by the stories about it. Thus, in those few brief words, Gary suggested that the real offender here is the Times journalist who exposed him. “Our fans,” he elaborated to the Sun, “they want to buy our records and watch our tours. They’re not interested.”

Whether they are interested in cuts to their local services is a question Gary declined to bother addressing. I would like to think he perceives Take That fans to be small-government survivalists, living off the grid, whose sole use of conventional currency is to purchase Take That albums, concert tickets and merchandise. Come The End Of The World As We Know It, they will swiftly form a militia that vanquishes all other armies, installing Gary Barlow OBE as the leader of the un-free world. Policy-wise, Gary’s still brainstorming stuff, but you get the feeling one of his first acts would be to raise taxes.

As for what sort of tax-avoider Gary is, that’s an interesting one. Lost in Showbiz reckons there are two kinds of tax avoiders: people who lie to themselves about what they are doing, and people who believe the rest of us taxpaying idiots are being lied to. My guess is that Gary fits into the former category - the sort who, for instance, reassure themselves that it’s OK because they do a lot for charity. (Do they do 30 million quid’s worth of work for charity? No. No, they don’t. And even if they somehow did, it doesn’t absolve them from their basic social responsibilities.)

The second group, however, feel somehow even less enchanting. I recently had a conversation with a hugely successful chap who absolutely, unapologetically avoids tax by all manner of perfectly legal ruses. “Do you know how long the Hong Kong tax code is?” he asked me. “Under 30 pages, and for that reason there is absolutely minimal scope for avoiding tax in Hong Kong. It’s the most efficient tax system in the world. But do you know how long our tax code is?” he went on. “More than 14,000 pages. It is the longest tax code in the world. That’s a loophole finders’ charter. Come on – whatever governments say in public, they must WANT you to do this – because that, in successive governments’ decades of experience of this stuff, is what happens. And by the way, do you know who took it from 3,500 pages to well over 10,000? Gordon Brown. Don’t tell me a guy that clever didn’t know what he was doing.”

So there we are. I merely chuck that view into the mix.

Meanwhile, back to On-the-take That, who complete their return to polite society this week with a stint “editing” the Sun’s Bizarre column. Sun Showbiz editor Dan Wootton is, of course, the journalist who knows everybody best – and he certainly knows Take That well enough to have regarded it as unfriendly to bother asking them any further questions about the tax avoidance stories. Instead, readers were treated to a snap of Wootton and Take That staring intently at a single computer terminal, looking for all the world as though they were watching Seal Team Six take out Bin Laden. Were we to draw imaginary speech bubbles over their heads, I think Gary would be saying: “It’s the taxman! This is your commander-in-chief: take the shot. I repeat: TAKE THE SHOT.”

Alas, the real things he says to the Sun are rather more measured. “I always think: ‘Are we excited still?’” muses Gary of this latest album. “I think if we hadn’t carried on, it would have been because we don’t have the passion to be relevant and make good music.”

Ain’t that the truth?