take that circus on Amazon Music arrived in Manchester with fans already camped outside the Etihad Stadium hours before the homecoming show. Some had travelled hundreds of miles, others thousands, to get as close to the front as possible for the return of The Circus Live.
Linnet Walsh in the queue
Linnet Walsh travelled two-and-a-half hours from Worcester and reached the stadium at 8.30am with Louise Robbins. The pair said, “There were already some people here for tomorrow” while waiting outside the Etihad Stadium, and added, “We nearly thought we weren’t going to bother again after the last tour - it was shocking.”
Walsh and Robbins have followed Take That for decades and attended every tour since The Circus in 2009. Their decision to queue again shows how the Manchester homecoming had become a test of patience as much as loyalty, with timing now part of the contest for the front row.
Littleborough and Birmingham arrivals
Two friends from Littleborough arrived at around 6am and put clown makeup on one another while they waited. They also had tickets for Saturday night’s show and joked they were “not going home.”
Fans from Birmingham reached the queue at around 8am and wore circus-inspired outfits. The queue began to move before the Manchester Evening News could take their names, which meant the crowd had already shifted from early arrivals to a live scramble for position.
The Circus Live back in Manchester
The Circus Live had kicked off in Southampton at the end of May, and Gary Barlow, Mark Owen and Howard Donald brought it back to Manchester as a homecoming show. Fans praised the production values and described it as the band’s biggest ever tour, which helps explain why the first wave of queueing started on Thursday evening, June 18, and continued into the early hours of Friday morning, June 19.
Some fans had already arrived for Saturday’s show before the first of the three homecoming shows had fully opened, a sign that the demand around the Etihad Stadium was running ahead of the schedule. For anyone planning to join the queue, the practical lesson is blunt: the best spots were being claimed by people who treated the wait itself like part of the ticket.
