Take That: Homoeroticism? What homoeroticism? Photograph: Guardian picture library
New boy band Billiam are being sold on a near-the-knuckle naked shot. It's in their press pack, on their MySpace front page, and in their first photoshoot for the gay magazine, AXM. It's quite a convincing pastiche of gay porn, right down to the bizarro location, distracting hair-don'ts and the "I hope nobody I know sees this" second-thoughts looks.
For a boy band to get their bits out before they've even had a hit marks a new low (or maybe high?) in pop marketing. It's like being taken on a dinner date, and someone whopping their tackle on the table before you've even finished your starter. It also smacks of desperation. As if the image exists to divert attention from how unlistenable their music is. (Which, incidentally, it is.)
But Take That broke through with their video for Do What U Like, where you saw their bums smeared with jelly. It's thanks to the That and their seminal soft porno promos such as Pray that the homoerotic boyband video became such a cliche it could be so hilariously sent up on Blink 182's All the Small Things.
Pop has always been about selling the sexiness of young men, and its history has been a slow undressing of the male form; from Elvis's swinging trousersnake, through David Cassidy's "Naked Lunch Box" Rolling Stone cover, to D'Angelo's Untitled. The video for the latter was a high water mark in musical homoerotica. A literal prick tease; although you never actually see his whatnot when you watch it, it's hard to think of anything else.
It makes you wonder who all this is aimed at. Women don't generally like porn. Post-Take That, gay men are seen as the second biggest audience for boy bands. But whilst I saw many a Take That video, calendar and doll given as - often ironic - gifts on queens' birthdays, I never saw many gay men express much interest in buying their actual records.
Peter Robinson of Popjustice has argued convincingly that the demise of interest in boy bands may be connected with the rise in the ease with which people can download porn proper. But I'm fascinated by how far this pop/porn continuum will go.
Last year Bel Ami , the Czech gay porn studio for fans of cute twinks, put some of their stable of stars out on the Erotic Hypnotic tour of Europe's gay clubs. But this was really more of a high-class strip show.
The blueprint may be the lesbian band Rock Bitch, whose racy SM HM shows regularly sell out to the dirty raincoat brigade.
Surely it can't be long before a boyband is marketed with the slogan; "Never mind the bollocks, here are our knobs!"
