Mark Owen on the Take That songs he avoids playing

This Sunday, Mark Owen will set off on a solo tour of the UK – the first time he’s taken to the road without his Take That bandmates in almost a decade.

The star says his shows will be a “celebration of my whole career” as he turns 50, looking back at his boy band beginnings, the hippy psychedelia of his solo debut album, and even his “Tom Waits phase” in 2013.

But there are some Take That songs he’s scared of putting on the setlist.

“I couldn’t play Sure, because I’d have to do the dance moves,” he laughs.

“It’s the same thing with Pray. As soon as I hear Pray, my arms go up to the side,” he says, involuntarily doing the choreography as he speaks.

“They come together, the moves and the songs. So I couldn’t do them.”

Owen is speaking backstage at July’s Latitude Festival where, it’s true, Sure and Pray are missing in action.

If his performance at Henham Park is anything to go by, his headline shows are more likely to include latter-day Take That classics like Shine, Rule The World and These Days.

Not without coincidence, they’re all songs where Owen has a writing credit. (In the band’s early days, Gary Barlow was the self-imposed writer-in-chief, but they became more collaborative in their second incarnation.)

“There was a point in my career where I thought, oh, I can’t do Take That songs [live],” he says. “But then, when I think about it, I’m like, I can, because I wrote on them. It’s all right.”

Owen’s tour comes hot on the heels of his fifth solo album, Land Of Dreams, which last month became his highest-charting record to date, entering the UK Top 40 at number five.

From the breezy, lovestruck stroll of Jenny to the smouldering fireworks of Rio, it’s a sugar-coated love letter to the pop classics he grew up on.

The star says the album was written after the pandemic rekindled his passion for live music.

Owen moved to Los Angeles in 2019, immediately after Take That’s Odyssey tour – and just in time for Covid to trap him in a city he barely knew.

“We turned up and then LA closed,” he recalls.

As life started to return to normal, he booked a night out at LA’s famous open-air amphitheatre, the Hollywood Bowl. Then another, and another, and another.

“I was going online, booking my tickets, getting in the car, waiting outside for two-and-a-half hours, getting my slice of pizza, sitting in the audience. It was fab.”

He even ended up at the Coachella festival, where he and daughter Willow danced with Stormzy during rapper Dave’s set.

“That was a highlight for her,” he grins. “But we saw as much as we could… Maggie Rogers, Phoebe Bridgers, Billie Eilish, Harry Styles.”

Becoming an audience member for the first time in 30 years was “really inspiring”, the singer says.

“Just to see the bits where everybody jumps up and down was fab. It made me want to get back up on stage again.”

That’s why Land Of Dreams is built to be played live. Magic’s squealing guitar solo begs to be heard at 110 decibels, while You Only Want Me boasts a chorus that’s stickier than a velcro jumpsuit.

The lyrics to the latter initially seem to be about the cost of fame: “You only want me for my good looks.”

But there’s an ego-destroying pay-off that can only have been written by the father of teenage children.

“You only want me when you want a ride home.”

“That’s the main bit, that’s the reality!” Owen laughs. “What’s that TikTok trend? What it could be versus what it is. The dream compared to the reality.”

Owen wrote the song towards the end of sessions for his album, envisioning it as the perfect set-opener.

“I wanted to have something that forced me to come out with jazz hands,” he says. “I couldn’t look at my shoes and perform it. It made me have to step forward.”

Fans won’t be surprised that the musician, who was always the sensitive heart of Take That, sometimes struggles to be an extrovert.

It was, after all, his cherubic vulnerability that made millions of girls swoon in the 1990s. And his solo material has always been more maudlin than Take That’s uplifting pop, full of lyrics about lost innocence, personal inadequacies and, on Four Minute Warning, the actual end of the world.

His new record is no different. Being Human is a loving portrayal of someone (presumably his wife, Emma Ferguson) who “always makes it look so simple” while he struggles.

Rio even mentions the cost of living crisis – something the multi-millionaire doesn’t have to contend with, but the gesture is nice, all the same.

He hints at having even darker, more personal material that was discarded after the pandemic.

“I wrote a lot of songs, most of which you won’t hear,” he says. “They’re the songs I worked through to get to something like You Only Want Me.

“For where I was in my life, I turned 50 this year, I wanted songs that felt really positive and felt like my life was moving forward.

“My thought process is, I’ve probably got two more albums in me, maybe, if all goes well. Maybe another Take That record or two. But I’m at that stage where I’m not looking ahead and going, ‘Yeah, in 20 years, I can reach that point.’

“I want to do it now and enjoy it and really go for it. Not in five years’ time.”

And while Take That are currently on hiatus, they will appear on the silver screen next year in a musical based on their songs.

Greatest Days, which will star Aisling Bea, Jayde Adams and Amaka Okafor, among others, follows five best friends who reunite 25 years after having the night of their lives at a boy band concert.

While the group will be modelled on Take That, the actual members only make a brief cameo.

“We’re the backdrop to the girls’ lives, so we only have, like, two scenes,” Owen confirms.

“We went to Athens to film our bits, then the next day we went to Cannes to announce the movie’s coming in spring – and it was the same day Tom Cruise was there, so it was packed.”

And once the movie is in cinemas, Owen wants Take That to hit the road again… especially if Emily Eavis, who runs a different festival, puts in a call.

“I would love for us as a band to do Glastonbury,” he beams. “I’ve been to Glasto as a fan maybe four times. I loved watching [Paul] McCartney this year. So it’d be nice to go back and combine play and work.

“Maybe hire a caravan and then come out on Sunday and do a gig, then go back home in the caravan. Yeah, I’d love it.”