This story begins shortly before my early teens, in the mid-1990s, in a state-funded school in Rome, Italy, where a classmate of mine called Valentina S. and I shared a huge love for Take That.
We were massively frustrated by the state of things, though – especially the state of English.
I remember I was in Year 6 aged 11 when I had the brilliant idea of asking my then-English teacher if she could help me understand the lyrics of the 1993 Take That hit Babe.
I was desperately trying 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 CD booklet 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 widely available home Internet back then, and especially, there was no Google Translator, so everything we could hope for was for our print teen magazines to come up with random translations once a week.
Meanwhile, and just in case, we would still memorise every single Take That song word by word by wearing out those CD booklets.
And believe me, you really need to be crazy to learn by heart floods of words you don’t even know how to pronounce.
By no means would we let the total inadequacy of state-funded schools ruin our Take That fandom.
After all, we had a name to defend.
I mean, it’s no accident that, in 1995, footage taken from the 1994 Pops Tour concerts in Rome and Milan, showing hordes of Italian girls screaming, crying, climbing walls, and nearly getting arrested, was chosen to make the music video of Never Forget.
Around the same time, Gary Barlow & co. admitted that the craziest fans in the world were actually the Italians, together with the Japanese.
I have no idea about the Japanese, but I can confirm that people in Italy are nuts, and that everything changes but us.
When we were like 12 or 13, with no Internet, no social media and no English skills whatsoever, and based uniquely on some unfounded rumour that spread out of nowhere, the above-mentioned Valentina S. spent weeks stalking the national radio until they finally let her on the phone with Gary Barlow for 10 seconds; as for me, I still refuse to share the details of how I managed to hack Mark Owen’s home address and sent a million love letters to the Lake District in England.
And the all of us, you know, we would all fall asleep in front of MTV trying to find and record Take That music videos on VHS tapes and we would all get angry at the Backstreet Boys for being aired more frequently than the Fab Five.
These days, I heard of a younger compatriot of mine who queued for hours outside a gate in Milan with the sole purpose of throwing a bag full of gifts right in Mark Owen’s face, just the day after having thrown him her bra during a live show.
Today, as well as yesterday, and always, there are no rules, no personal space, no good manners – there isn’t a single thing in the world that will stop the Italians.
Not even the police.
What our security guys do in most cases is tell you off, patronise you, scare you to death by calling their supervisor, make a big fuss out of it all and then let you do exactly whatever you are doing.
They know their sisters and daughters are just the same.
Because you may and may not go bananas the Italian way, but the thing about boybands and live shows is that by singing your heart out, you’ll suddenly remember that you do have a heart, a heart surprisingly similar to the ones of thousands of strangers in your hometown singing the same old songs, wearing the same outdated concert outfits and occasionally throwing bras at middle-aged men as if they were kids – as if the 1990s were never over.
Come on, don’t ever let that sparkle fade away – at any age.
Together, we will rule the world.
★ If you enjoyed this, you’ll also love How to meet Take That