Take That, Wembley Stadium, 6/7/2010

Attendance: 80,000

This show did have some high expectations from me after all of the hype I had been hearing, I was expecting a real spectacle and to be fair, they didn't disappoint. The show began with a four piece set up, basically Take That minus Robbie Williams singing Rule the World, Greatest Day, Hold Up a Light, Patience and coming to a close with Shine. The crowd as you can imagine were in fits of screams and cheers. Arm waving was a staple throughout and the only people not singing along were the ones to busy screaming at the band. In terms of the actual show there were constant visuals playing on the large back screens but it wasn't really until they sang shine that we got any real theatrics when the stage was consumed by the characters of Alice in Wonderland who were dancing and acting along to the song, this part of the show was brought to a close by Mark Owen riding a large purple caterpillar off backstage.

Once the characters were all off stage we were treated to a version of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely hearts club on the big screens which as far as I could tell was to allow the stage hands time to prepare for the arrival of Robbie Williams. His arrival was signalled by Robbie appearing on the big screens with the build up intro of Let Me Entertain You. His actual entrance to the stage was by leaping through a hole which appeared in the middle of the centre screen and then cascading to start his set via a wire. Robbie's set goes off pretty well but his apparently inebriated ramblings do take away from it a little. However Mr Williams is a showman and his performance of Rock DJ, Come Undone, Feel and Angels have the Wembley Stadium crowd eating from the palm of his hand.

As Robbie finishes he leaves and a water themed backdrop starts to appear with a number of dancers who end up creating the image from the cover of their latest release Progress whilst suspended from the gantry. As the dancers are performing away the group begin to sing from the top gantry for the first time this evening as a 5 piece with The Flood, which instigates another sing-a-long from the crowd. Without losing the pace they move onto SOS and the primal thumping beat of Underground Machine, Next came an army stomp carrying a Take That led game of chess to the constant tune of Kidz, where the battle soon turned into one of the street dance variety finishing with a manly handshake. A quick costume change and into Pretty Things we go with the boys taking turns to sing from the giant robots hands which has come to life on the stage the audience seem to quieten down for this and once the boys have finished singing they have a chat to the audience, during which Jason and Robbie appear to have a little spat which to be honest was pretty cringe-worthy. After a couple of photos we receive a piano based interlude and yet another big sing-a-long consisting ofMillion Love Songs, Babe, Everything Changes and Back For Goodand the crowd perk up a bit and start bouncing again just in time for us to begin the final stages of our evening with Pray, Love Love and the final song before the encore, Never Forget which to be fair did get your hairs to stand on the back of your neck when the whole stadium sang with the boys as they were joined in the middle of the stadium by their Metal Giant friend. The boys then returned for an encore made up of No Regrets, Re-light My Fire and Eight Letters before leaving the 80,000+ fans to go home with some very happy faces.

Charli Chainsaw

 HOUSES: