Tom Watkins, former manager and pop Svengali of Bros, East 17 and the Pet Shop Boys, once remarked that he was not in the business of selling music but sex. No doubt the fact that he was gay also helped and he was far from the first band aide to assist a group of young good-looking working class lads to the top of the charts.

Good looks are one thing but when it comes to business acumen and the ability to spot the next big thing it is the managers who held the key to unleashing female teenage lust from Elvis Presley to Take That. Without Colonel Tom Parker or Maurice Starr, many of these performers would have spent the rest of their lives in obscurity. Indeed, once the group has split, many do.

Black influence on popular music in the twentieth century goes without saying. From the ragtime of the early days to the gangster rap and garage of its last decade, but the queer aspect has largely been ignored or dismissed. Yet without it where would many artists ended up?

Manchester's Take That was Britain's response to the huge success of New Kids on the Block, a white group managed by a black man; which was virtually unheard of before NKOTB swept all before them in the early nineties. Whereas Starr took a black sound and fashioned it for a young, white, female audience Nigel Martin-Smith's Take That went one step further.

It is clear from early publicity stills of the group that the manager clearly had a gay audience in mind. Centred round the talents of Gary Barlow, a songwriter and vocalist, Take That also engaged the talents of four other individuals, keen on mirroring the success of their Stateside compatriots. The joker in the pack, of course, would be a youthful Robbie Williams.

Ostensibly, all boy bands have been aimed at the teenage girl market. Pumped full of hormones and nowhere to go. With a sizeable disposable income, they can wet their knickers at the arena, having sated their lust on four or five unobtainable living gods and go home back to their homes in quiet, leafy suburbia. Everyone is satisfied and it is one of the best forms of safe sex known to man, woman or beast.

What set Take That apart was their wooing of the gay market. With the burgeoning dance market, known in the old days as disco, Take That came to prominence with their high energy version of Barry Manilow's Could it be magic? Featuring the vocal talents of Williams it gave them a hitherto unknown credibility with an audience that would enable them to conquer the gay market as well as that catering for young females.

Strangely, this was not good enough for one member and he struck out - Robbie Williams. Going solo from the sensation that was Take That, just as they were about to lay plans to conquer America, demonstrates a unique death wish. For the fans it was an act of ultimate betrayal, a form of social and commercial suicide.

The rest of Take That did attempt to carry on but clearly the songwriting was on the wall. Barlow, who had been the main songwriter in the band, continued the success of the group without missing a beat. Williams, still recovering from his drink and drug addictions, aided and abetted by his idolisation of Liam Gallagher, front man to Britpop kings Oasis, saw him release a cover of George Micheal's Freedom. Not the version originally recorded with his Michael's previous incarnation Wham! however, but that of the song with the rewritten lyric distancing himself from his days with Andrew Ridgeley.

Williams was finished and Barlow's star was still in the ascendant. Whereas Barlow was cashing in on the success of Take That, Williams was flushing it down the toilet, probably at The Priory, the clinic for celebrity washouts. Then, something strange happened.

After initial success, Barlow's slide towards the bargain bins came suddenly. His debut album had been recorded with breaking America, which it failed to do. In the meantime, Williams had regrouped with Guy Chambers, a songwriter, and fashioned the first of many hit singles, including the stand out No 2 hit Angels. Showing a previously hidden talent for writing lyrics, Williams made several albums in quick succession, selling out stadiums throughout Europe and hitting the top spot on a fairly regular basis, as well as duetting with the likes of Kylie Minogue and Nicole Kidman.

Williams' gamble had paid off and he made sure that his former manager knew about it. Songs such as Karma Killer and the hit single No Regrets, recorded with the aid of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, left little to the imagination about how he felt about Nigel Martin-Smith. One damning line, in particular, from the latter song gauges the nadir of their relationship when Williams knew something was up when 'you didn't like my mother.'

What exactly the problem with his falling out with Martin-Smith is not clear but it does not appear that it was anything to do with his former manager's sexuality. Indeed, Williams has led a sort of cat and mouse game with the press, even in his lyrics, about whether or not he is straight or gay. Quite a contrast to decades before when John Lennon took exception to a close friend suggesting that he and Brian Epstein had once spent a night together. Lennon battered the friend so hard he required hospital treatment.

Paul McCartney was once asked at a Beatles' press conference about their feelings of 'hints of queerness' felt by male Americans in their image. The bass player dismissed these fears saying there was more fear of that in the States then back home in England. Hardly surprising when the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, was gay and his main attraction to the group had not necessarily been their music but John Lennon.

Debate still rages, off and on, as to whether or not Epstein and Lennon ever did have a sexual relationship. Ian MacDonald, in his seminal tome on the Beatles' records Revolution in the Head, dismisses the theory posited by Tom Robinson that You've Got to Hide Your Love Away concerns homosexuality and, in particular, the singer's relationship with the manager. Yet it still fails to go away and interviews with Yoko Ono, Lennon's widow, often referred to this aspect of Lennon's life.

Pop by its very nature is transitory, ephemeral and has built-in obsolescence so no one could really imagine the effect of the Beatles when they first began to become the greatest rock 'n' roll band the world would ever see. Of course, artists had been manufactured before. Hollywood created Judy Garland and many, many stars of movie musicals, but the new music that sprang out of America in the fifties was built on the notion of authenticity. Which, of course, is bunk.

The Beatles' image, just as Presley's before them, was a construct. Just as Colonel Parker, a Dutch immigrant with a shady past, had Presley's rough edges sanded down, for a wider audience so had Brian Epstein, a gay man in a country that still banned all consensual sex between men, performed a similar trick on the Beatles.

The slicked-back hair and leather jackets they sported whilst learning their trade in the strip joints of Hamburg were replaced by modish haircuts, suits and ties to make them acceptable to the BBC and the Home Counties of England. Of course, just as with Presley, the Beatles, and especially Lennon, the rawness that gave them that edge over their rivals could never be totally suppressed. Indeed, the reason why Lennon went along with it in the first place is questionable.

Lennon was considered the rebel, the intellectual hard nut and the beating heartbeat that made the Beatles so different from all that went before. Cliff Richard and the Shadows they were not! Critics have always assumed that because Paul was the favourite of the girls next door and the musical lightweight who wrote Yesterday and Michelle that he was the more ambitious of the two songwriters.

This is to thoroughly underestimate John Lennon. His jokey, sarcastic and, at times, rather cruel sense of humour was a defence against the world. He was just as ambitious, if perhaps even more so, than his writing partner and to him the ends, at the time of taking Epstein on as manager, justified the means. His ruthlessness was allied to a need to succeed at all costs, although whether he truly admitted that to himself is another story.

With the death of their manager in 1967 and having reached their creative zenith, plus with most of the members settling down, the Beatles began to implode. Epstein's overdose, whether accidental or otherwise, was a blow to the band, whether they liked it or not. Harrison's interest in Eastern religion, McCartney's love of performing live and Lennon's love for Yoko were all creating other worlds which were more sustainable than those offered by being members of a beat combo. With three years the Beatles would be defunct and all of them embark on solo careers.

Lennon pursued recording solo material for another five years after the split, then spent another few years being a househusband, before returning to record what would be his last studio album. He was happily married to Yoko, at peace with the world and a doting father, before he was shot dead outside his home in New York on December 8 1980.

Whether Epstein and Lennon ever did consummate their relationship we will probably never ever know, but it is but one example of how the queer influence has permeated popular music throughout the twentieth century. From Porter and Coward, Little Richard and Liberace, Bowie and Bolan, the queer influence on twentieth century popular music can surely no longer be disputed and is as relevant as that of Black Americans.

© Howard Watson 2009