THE Band may be a musical that features the hits of Take That.

But in a way, Tim Firth’s latest production has more in common with The Lord of the Rings than the bestselling pop group.

The former Stockton Heath Primary School student used the music of Take That as a jumping off point for a story about five friends whose lives have been defined by the songs they love.

And the band in the title actually refers to the wrist band the girls were given at their first concert.

Playwright Tim, best known for Calendar Girls, said: “There’s a double play on that notion of the band as it’s this eternal thing that binds all the girls together. It’s like a musical Lord of the Rings.”

It was this twist on the idea of creating a story featuring Take That that convinced Tim to jump onboard.

The 52-year-old has actually known Gary Barlow for more than 25 years after the pair met through a TV show called Nationwide which ran a Christmas song competition.

Then around 15 years ago Gary started discussing the prospect of a Take That musical with Tim but he was not sure it was for him.

Tim, whose play The Fleet Street Nativity was based on his school nativities at Stockton Heath Primary, added: “I’d always slightly resisted because I’d done it once with Madness and that was the only time I wanted to do that.

“You want to work on new ideas all the time in your career and I didn’t want to kind of go back and do it again.

“Bizarrely it was the idea for the TV programme Let It Shine that changed everything.

“When that came up I said to Gary and the producers: ‘You’re mad if you think you’ll find five guys who can sing and dance and be able to play the lead parts in a musical about Take That. That’s a really tall order.

“Then I can’t remember when it was but I thought in the dark of the night: ‘What if the boys weren’t trying to be Take That?

“’What if the boys were almost like a dancing Greek chorus and that the story was about something else?’

“Then this story started to appear out of nowhere for me about girls who had been fans of a band when they were 16 who then meet again when they’re in their 40s.

“The music is a massive part of the background of the story and the band are a constant presence in the lives of the girls in that they never leave the stage.

“But actually the main story is about a group of fans and the tragedy that happens to them and the extraordinary rebirth these women have meeting again in their 40s.

“The theory was that technically you should be able to take the music of Take That completely out of this story and put in the music of any band that anybody ever loved that is still around.

“We’ve all been fans of some band or some music and it’s the degree to which that music becomes partly owned by the artist and partly owned by you.

“Because in listening to it all the circumstances that were around your life when you first heard it – who you were in love with, where you wanted to be, your happiness, where you were in the world – all that gets absorbed by that song and then it is released whenever you hear it.

“It’s about the power of a song as an eternal part of your life. So the songs are like time travel. The songs join the worlds of the girls of 16 and the girls of 40 together.”

So what music holds that sort of power over Tim?

Tim, patron of Stockton Heath Festival, said: “The tragic thing is at the time I was that age I was already listening to musicals.

“I had mates who were into Ted Nugent and AC/DC and I remember going to see Ultravox at the Apollo.

“At our time we were in the netherworld of the new romantics so I spent most of the early 80s with my vest over my T-shirt listening to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.

“There’s a song called Waiting for a Train by Flash and the Pan and if you play that now and I can see the look of my friends and smell the inside of the crappy Vauxhall Viva that I was driving around him.

“It’s very odd and I don’t think anything quite does that like music.”

  • The Band is at Manchester Opera House from September 8 to 30. Visit atgtickets.com/shows/the-band/opera-house-manchester