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The former drummer of top boy band Take That, has been jailed for four years for holding up a Folkestone bank, with a gift-wrapped music stand.

Steve Tate stole £1,200 from Lloyds TSB in Cheriton in July by pretending the object he pulled out of a guitar case was a gun and saying he had a bomb strapped to his leg.

Known in the music world as Steve Washington, he spent five years touring with Take That during the height of their fame in the early 1990s.

The 46-year-old left the band to join Texas and taught part-time at Sir Paul McCartney's Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, but Tate, who left school at 12 to back American soul singer Jimmy Ruffin, was left penniless after turning to drugs in recent years.

The court heard Tate needed the cash to pay off a £400 drug debt and to cover his rent.

He was caught for the bank job in Cheriton, near his home in Folkestone, after he was seen stuffing money from the guitar case into his pockets on a nearby beach.

'It was planned in such an inept way he was bound to be caught,' said Andrew Espley, defending.

Judge Andrew Patience said: 'Here you are, a man before me to be sentenced for a grave crime who shouldn't be here at all. You have enormous talent.'