Songfacts®:

• It's been speculated that this song – as sung by Take That's Mark Owen – is about Robbie Williams and his battle with depression. The "Angels" singer – who left Take That in 1995 before reuniting with the band in 2010 – has dealt with depression throughout his life, checking into rehab multiple times due to drug and alcohol addiction.
  
  Speaking about "Shine," Williams said: "I do believe it was written about me. I did ask Mark when we first got back together, 'Go on, it's about me, isn't it?' I think it is."
• This was Take That's 6th consecutive UK #1 hit. The run was broken by their next single, "I'd Wait For Life," which only reached #17.
• "Shine" returned to the UK chart a few months later after interest was re-fuelled by its use in a television advertising campaign for the supermarket chain Morrisons.
• "Shine" won the 2008 Brit Award for Best British Single, which was decided by a public phone vote that night. Take That also won the award for Best Live Act. Jason Orange commented when they won the latter award: "This is a great thing for us. We've worked so hard over the years. I still can't dance, I'm 37 years old and I've got an arthritic leg and a slipped disc."
• Take That's Beautiful World DVD, which contains footage of the band filmed on their European tour, became the fastest selling music DVD in UK history when it was released in February 2008. It sold 64,000 copies in its first week of release, the first time a music DVD outsold the top album (Back to Black).
• This won the Ivor Novello award for the Most Performed Work in 2007, 15 years after the Ivors presented Gary Barlow with their Songwriter Of The Year honor.
• The music licensing company's music reporting department PPL named this as the second most played and used song in the UK of the 2000s. Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars" was the #1 song in the poll. Another Take That song, "Rule The World," was in sixth place.
• Lily Allen's 2009 single "Who'd Have Known" sounds very similar to this song. She asked Take That to sing on it - they turned down the offer but allowed her to use the tune.
• Directed by Justin Dickel, the video for "Shine" is a homage to the works of Busby Berkeley, a Hollywood film director famous for his extravagant musical productions featuring showgirls and geometric patterns. The video for "Shine" sees Owen performing on a staircase while dressed in a top hat and coattails, with the rest of the band dancing and singing around him.
• An extract from "Mr. Blue Sky" by Electric Light Orchestra is often played by an orchestra before Take That perform "Shine" live in concert.
• Barlow created and served as the main judge on the British reality television music competition Let It Shine, which was named after this song. Broadcast on BBC One in 2017, the competition set out to find five young men to star in The Band, a new musical featuring the songs of Take That.
• "Shine" appears on Take That's fourth studio album, Beautiful World, their first album in 11 years after originally splitting up in 1996. It was also the first album to feature Take That's four-member lineup minus Williams. Beautiful World became the second best-selling album of 2006 in the UK after being on sale for only one month. It's since gone on to be certified 9x Platinum in the UK, having sold almost 3 million copies.