Inside Take That's early years ahead of Robbie Williams movie Better Man

You'd be forgiven for not remembering that time a CGI chimpanzee was a part of Take That. The 90s might be a little hazy, but they're not that hazy. However, in the new movie Better Man, Robbie Williams is embodied by a computer-generated ape — including during his rise to fame as a member of Take That.

Michael Gracey's film is one of the most unconventional music biopics of recent years — and, quite frankly, of all time — and the director of The Greatest Showman has promised that he won't pull any punches on the darker edges of Williams' life. Critics have been impressed at early screenings, with the movie currently boasting an 87% approval rating on aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

So, with just a few weeks to wait until we can all experience the weirdness of Better Man for ourselves, let's take a look back at the early years of Take That and how that group shaped Robbie Williams to become the global megastar he is today.

The group started with Manchester-based music manager Nigel Martin-Smith, who had carved out a niche in the 1980s by focusing on acts outside of the London bubble. At the end of the decade, he was inspired by the success of New Kids on the Block in the USA and wanted to put together a British version of the teen-orientated group.

Around this time, he caught wind of a talented teenage singer-songwriter performing in clubs around the Manchester area. That kid's name was Gary Barlow and Martin-Smith realised that he could be the focal point for his group. Martin-Smith recruited four more young men from the area — including the 16-year-old Robbie Williams — to fill out the group, then known as Kick It.

Read more: Ayda Field 'didn't get' why Robbie Williams is a monkey in biopic Better Man (Yahoo Entertainment, 5 min read)

Swiftly renamed Take That, the band got their first TV exposure on Halloween in 1990. They appeared from a Manchester nightclub on the late-night music show The Hitman and Her with a performance in which Barlow sang and the other four guys basically just danced around him.

In those early years, Martin-Smith chose an unusual look for the group. In the 2005 documentary Take That for the Record, Jason Orange explained that the idea was for them to be "quite controversial" in their look. He added: "When I look back now it was ludicrous — bondage gear and chains and lycra and all sorts of stuff."

Read more: Robbie Williams 'annoyed and sad' over gay rumours (BANG Showbiz, 2 min read)

Around this time, Martin-Smith booked a wide variety of gigs to try to appeal to as many demographics as possible, despite those daring outfits. They'd appear in school halls — "we'd invade their assemblies ... all our bondage gear on," said Orange — and gay clubs, often on the same day.

Howard Donald, in that documentary, said the gay club performances were a strange experience for the young stars. He said: "We'd be running through this crowd, having our arses pinched and our front bits pinched, trying to get to the stage, pushing past everybody and almost missing the cue for the beginning of the song."

Their first few singles, starting with Do What U Like in 1991, released via Martin-Smith's own label and failed to move mountains. That's despite a button-pushing video that showed all five of the boys naked and covered in jelly. Martin-Smith really was willing to try anything and the video had to be pretty savagely edited to reach a younger audience on TV.

"It became apparent that perhaps it wasn't appropriate. There are umpteen versions of it out there because we had to edit together one that would be acceptable for kid's TV," producer Rosemary Barratt wrote in 2011 (via Telegraph). "They didn't want a video that couldn't be shown. It's not like they were famous enough to benefit from a video being banned."

Read more: Back to the 1990s when Take That and Robbie Williams wowed audiences on Tyneside (ChronicleLive, 4 min read)

The controversy might have helped, or it might have hindered. But by the time the band's first album Take That & Party arrived in 1993, they'd had a handful of hits with A Million Love Songs and their covers of both It Only Takes a Minute and Could It Be Magic. The album went all the way to number two on the UK chart.

Watch: Music video for Take That's first single Do What U Like

In the next few years, Take That continued to perform — though more on mainstream TV than in gay clubs and at school assemblies — and managed four successive UK number one singles in 1993 and 1994. This cemented them as one of the most famous and popular groups in Britain, heading out on their first world tour in 1995 — powered by an enthusiastic fan base of teenage girls.

Read more: Robbie Williams Hits Back At Former Take That Manager's Comments In New Boyband Documentary (HuffPost, 5 min read)

All of this is set to be shown in Better Man and given an extra dose of bizarre fantasy by the fact it's taking place with a talking chimpanzee at the heart of it. Just when you thought these stories of the 1990s nightclub scene couldn't get any weirder.

Better Man is in UK cinemas from 26 December.