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Gary Barlow: 'I've never been cool, I'm not chasing validation anymore'

Gary Barlow: 'I've never been cool, I'm not chasing validation anymore' - Photography: Bella Howard
Gary Barlow: 'I've never been cool, I'm not chasing validation anymore' - Photography: Bella Howard

In his west London recording studio, with its glossy black grand piano, leather sofas and a few prized pieces of vintage equipment once used by The Beatles, Gary Barlow is ruminating over the golden word in the music industry. Cool.

‘I’ve never been cool,’ says the Take That frontman, and then pauses. ‘And I don’t know if I’d ever want to be. I think the most success I’ve ever had – both me, and me and the boys [his bandmates in Take That] – is when we just accepted who we are and got on with doing what we do best.

‘That’s when people connect with you. You can’t fool the public trying to pretend to be something you’re not. They can spot a fake a mile off. The trick is being exactly who you are and not just being OK with that, being happy with that.’

Barlow – a working-class son of a fertiliser factory worker from Frodsham in Cheshire – is on the cusp of his 50th birthday. Middle age and maturity suit him. A huge shift has taken place since he first hit public consciousness at the age of 21, when Take That took the world by storm with their first hit, It Only Takes a Minute, in 1992. And as he approaches his half-century he is about to take his music in an entirely different direction, with a surprisingly brilliant new twist on a classic swing album, complete with a full orchestra. ‘I wanted it to have that orchestra-swing sound, but to still feel completely fresh, modern and new.’

gary barlow  - Photography: Bella Howard
gary barlow - Photography: Bella Howard

Over the past few years, Barlow has really come into his own and become the man and the musician he always wanted to be. In the heady early days of pop stardom he was the slightly too serious, slightly too chubby boy-band star who never got quite as many catcalls as his cute, cheeky bandmates, Robbie Williams, Mark Owen, Howard Donald and Jason Orange. When they first got together to audition in 1989, they turned up in street clothes; he arrived looking smart, carrying a briefcase full of songs.

Today, Barlow is the one the rest of the band turn to (he was the one Williams confided in when he and his wife, Ayda, were struggling to conceive, and the one Owen says ‘always listens and gives solid advice’). He has grown in emotional stature – even if he is physically half the man he once was. There was a time – a terrible time in the early noughties – when he ballooned to 17st due to loss of confidence and the loss of the career he’d cared so much about. For the past seven years, his weight has stabilised around the 11st mark. As Boris Johnson urges the country to tackle obesity to make people less vulnerable to Covid-19, Barlow admits: ‘The thing I get asked about most is how I’ve kept the weight off.

Take That in 1992 (clockwise from top left): Jason Orange, Gary Barlow, Howard Donald, Mark Owen and Robbie Williams - Getty Images 
Take That in 1992 (clockwise from top left): Jason Orange, Gary Barlow, Howard Donald, Mark Owen and Robbie Williams - Getty Images

‘I know it’s hard. You can’t just be told to lose weight, it’s a whole psychological thing, so I have a lot of sympathy. I tried and failed at every single diet before I just realised it is all about eating healthily and exercising every day. I can’t cheat because it will all go back on.

‘Now I am militant about what I eat and how much I exercise. Being the weight I am makes me feel so much better about myself. It’s not just about feeling healthier, it’s about feeling more confident. If you stick to it, it will change your life.’

Today he looks fit and tanned in an expensive-looking denim shirt, white trousers and tennis shoes, as he talks about the joy of his hugely popular crooner sessions on Instagram, with the likes of Chris Martin, Cliff Richard, Ronan Keating and All Saints; worrying about his mum, Marjorie; being in love with the same woman for 25 years; and the sheer liberation of no longer caring what anyone thinks of him.

‘You finally realise it just doesn’t matter,’ he says. ‘I’m not chasing validation any more. I laughed when one review of my last solo album [Since I Saw You Last in 2013] was half a star.’ It still went to number two in the charts in the first week of its release. He is used to being written off as ‘bland, boring and cheesy’, with one critic describing Take That as ‘the boy band equivalent of a Reliant Robin’ – but their shows keep selling out. And when they (along with Robbie) put on their virtual reunion show in lockdown in May, it attracted a 35 million reach on social media and almost four million views on video on demand. His crooner sessions were watched by an extraordinary 94 million people.

The ‘fat git from Take That’ (his words) is quite rightly having the last laugh. His studios are in Notting Hill, in one of the more exclusive parts of London – a stone’s throw from Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop store, where toothpaste will set you back £12 and lace face masks at £50 a pop have all sold out. Barlow – who is friends with her ex, Chris Martin – has not yet been in, although he could easily afford multipacks of her wares. He is worth around £80 million, has homes in Oxford and Los Angeles as well as west London, and spent his teens and early 20s as the lead singer in Britain’s biggest-ever boy band, a feat he revived and rebuilt to even greater success in his mid-30s when the group reformed in 2006.

Elton John describes him as ‘one of the greatest songwriters since Paul McCartney’, he has won six Ivor Novello awards, been a judge on The X Factor (2011–2013), was personally chosen by the Queen to organise her Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012, and was made an OBE in the same year. His last tour with Take That – Greatest Hits Live in 2019 – sold out 52 shows across the UK and Europe; he’s put on three West End musicals (Finding Neverland in 2014, The Girls in 2017 and The Band in 2018) and in a few months’ time his latest album is pretty much guaranteed to be at the top of the Christmas charts.

The album, which has garnered more excitement in the business than any other solo project Barlow has done to date, will seal his reputation as one of Britain’s most versatile and accomplished musicians. And for those who think of him as just a ‘former boy-band star’, it will come as a shock to see him perform live next year, conducting a full orchestra.

‘Our symphony orchestras are the best in the world. Covid has been disastrous for musicians. So to have recorded in Abbey Road with an orchestra and to be putting this album out after we’ve been through lockdown and job losses in the entertainment industry – that’s really something to me.’

As he plays me some of his new songs, he tells me the album is a celebration of all the music he listened to growing up – Sinatra, Dean Martin, Barry Manilow (yes, Barry Manilow).

‘When I was a kid, this was the music I loved. When I started writing pop songs, I learnt to limit the range of chords I used. Writing musicals freed that up again, and then to do this felt so natural, to just let go as a musician. I felt I knew exactly what I was doing, exactly as I wanted.’

With Robbie Williams, Howard Donald and Mark Owen, performing during lockdown - Getty Images 
With Robbie Williams, Howard Donald and Mark Owen, performing during lockdown - Getty Images

But the real key to understanding Barlow is to know that he has not been formed by the dazzling glitter of his successes but by the bottomless depths of his failures and personal tragedies. There were the six years in the wilderness (1998 to 2004), when he was dropped by his record company after a brief, lukewarm solo career, mocked by his peers – including his supersuccessful former bandmate, Williams – and gave up on music to spend days sprawled sobbing over the white grand piano on which he’d written his biggest hits, smoking 15 spliffs a day.

In 2000 he suffered the indignity of being asked who he was backstage at The Brits, and the humiliation of Madame Tussauds announcing it was melting down his waxwork to make a Britney Spears. He was also regularly mocked by the press with cruel headlines such as ‘Relight My Fryer’. ‘I went from being in the biggest band in the country to being washed up at 25,’ he tells me.

‘When I came back a second time with Take That, I thought to myself: “Take all this as a bonus. Every hit, every accolade, every award. It comes, it goes. Enjoy it while you can, but don’t let it destroy you when it goes.”’

He was so ashamed to be Gary Barlow, he sabotaged any chance of recognition by comfort eating Big Macs until he reached 17st, before months of bulimia kicked in. It was his wife, Dawn Andrews – whom he met 25 years ago when she auditioned to be a backing dancer for Take That’s Nobody Else tour in 1995, and married five years later – who stood by him when everyone else (bar Elton) dropped him. It was Dawn – who now runs the lowkey ethical lifestyle brand Mobs London, along with Jason Donovan’s wife, Angela – who persuaded him to see a doctor; Dawn who made him realise he had to get his life back together.

‘Even in the worse of those times,’ he recalls, ‘I never once for a moment thought she would leave me. Not for a single second.’ I am listening to the words of the song that is playing. It’s a love song about being so intoxicated by someone you could die happy just because you found that person. Is that about Dawn? I ask. ‘Of course it is,’ he says. Every single love ballad he has ever written is about Dawn.

In all the decades I’ve known Barlow, we’ve talked about everything from the death of his beloved, quiet dad Colin in 2009, and resolving his feud with Williams (their famously acrimonious relationship after Williams quit Take That in 1995 was finally healed in 2008), to his desperation in those lost years, and his deliberate break from royal protocol when – against orders – he ‘touched’ the Queen as she got out of her Range Rover on the night of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations.

‘I was told by her footman not to touch her. But I have that exact same model of Range Rover and it’s a hell of a drop down. I wouldn’t let my mum get out of that car unaided and I certainly wasn’t going to let the Queen. I just put out my arm and she looked at me and said, “You are very kind.”

Barlow with the Queen during her Diamond Jubilee concert  - Getty Images 
Barlow with the Queen during her Diamond Jubilee concert - Getty Images

I didn’t care what I was told to do, that to me was the right thing.’

We have rarely spoken about Dawn and their three children – Daniel, 20, Emily, 18, and 11-year-old Daisy – because he has always guarded the privacy of his family life. When their baby girl, Poppy, was tragically stillborn in 2012, he and Dawn were heartbroken and, for his family’s sake, he didn’t speak about it for years.

Then, two years ago, after his book A Better Me was published, he revealed how he had a complete breakdown in the months after her birth, before realising it was his job to be strong for his wife. I will never forget him telling me how every day he would collect the flowers of condolence that came to their door and throw them over his garden fence because he could not bear to see his wife’s face if she was confronted by them. In the same way that rejection only strengthened his character as a performer, their loss solidified their relationship. He nods.

‘It’s her, not me,’ he says, playing down any emotion in true Northern-man style. ‘Dawn is an incredible woman and I was just very lucky to find her. ‘She means more to me than anything else, and when you go through difficult times, your priorities change. You don’t need to be validated by other people, by fame or success: it comes from the important things you have – your relationship, your family.

gary barlow  - Photography: Bella Howard
gary barlow - Photography: Bella Howard

‘I’m difficult. Dawn is extremely laidback, whereas I’m not at all. She has zero interest in a celebrity lifestyle, going out, having her photo taken. She would absolutely hate to do what I do, and we’ve definitely had our ups and downs, but the simple fact of why we are together is because we love each other.’

And the new fit, slimmed-down Barlow is largely thanks to Dawn. ‘I have a very attractive wife,’ he says. ‘And I want to look as good as possible for her, but also because it makes me more confident as a performer, not worrying about my weight.’

He eats clean, organic food, cooks every day and avoids sugar after taking nutritional advice from healthy-eating gurus Melissa and Jasmine Hemsley in 2007. He gets up early to exercise, and includes yoga, cardio, weights and running in his regime, often sharing videos and tips on social media.

Dawn, he says, would like him to do less and be around more. ‘I’m a nightmare husband. I’m just so… driven,’ he says, emphasising the word with his flat Cheshire vowels. ‘I always need to be doing something, planning something, putting “just one more project” in the diary. I don’t stop. I can laugh about it now, but I’m also a dreadful person to be in a band with. In fact, you really don’t want to be near me at all. I’m a dreadful pain.’ Covid has been something of a game changer. ‘Of course it has been terrible, people have died, people are losing their jobs, but for me personally, lockdown was about being given this time to think about things, to work out where you are, where you are going, and to have time with the people you love.

 Barlow with his wife Dawn - Shutterstock 
Barlow with his wife Dawn - Shutterstock

‘It was all very bleak and frightening at first. I worried about my mum because she’s on her own in Cheshire, but my brother Ian was nearby. I worried about Dawn because she has type-1 diabetes, so we had to be super-careful, spraying all the packages that came in. ‘We went through the A-level horror with Emily, which then turned out all right once the Government went back to teachers’ predictions, and we had homeschooling with Daisy, which was a complete disaster. That was tough on the parents and the kids.

‘But other things were marvellous. Me, Rob, Mark and Howard talked all the time, checking in on each other, having a laugh. I think we are genuinely closer than we ever have been because we’ve spent so much time just being together – even if it was remotely.

‘We had Daniel home from uni, which was great. We did our training together and I got to hang out with my boy and my girls. The joy of it was being together, sharing the cooking – even the dogs were happy because we were all at home.

Barlow receiving a Music Industry Trust award from Sir Elton John in 2012.  - David Fisher/Shutterstock 
Barlow receiving a Music Industry Trust award from Sir Elton John in 2012. - David Fisher/Shutterstock

Barlow talks about re-evaluating himself during lockdown, realising the privileged position he was in as a multimillionaire performer, feeling humbled by the Covid key workers. He says: ‘And you think, “What is the point of me? What do I contribute to society?”’

He tells me about how his dad bought him his first musical instrument – an organ keyboard when he was 10 – and, after teaching himself to play it, he started putting on little shows for the neighbours.

‘The neighbours would pop in and come upstairs with my mum and sit and listen. There was a really miserable guy who lived next door. He never smiled, he just went out to work and came back. And one day I remember turning around as I was playing and he was sitting there with a few other people, and he was smiling as I was singing.

‘That had a big effect on me. And so, during lockdown, when I was thinking about what I could do, I thought about that smile on his face. That’s where the idea to ring up friends and get them to do the crooner sessions with me came from. It was just about trying to lift spirits.’

As a compulsive organiser – a trait he says he shares with his daughter Emily (‘poor girl, she wishes she wasn’t like me in that respect, but she’s exactly the same’) – he has also planned out his diary for the next three years, including another album and tour.

Gary with Howard Donald and Mark Owen - Getty Images
Gary with Howard Donald and Mark Owen - Getty Images

‘I always have to have a plan. I’ve even booked the London Palladium for my 50th birthday [in January]. I thought, “What do I really want to do to mark turning 50?” I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing than singing on a stage surrounded by my friends and family – maybe I’ll have a few guests, maybe I’ll film it – all I know is that it’s already in the diary.’

And after years of describing himself as the songwriter and Williams as the ‘showman’ of the band, he is about to take the step into that role. ‘I remember seeing Frank Sinatra in London when I thought I was Billy Big Balls because Take That were top of the charts. He was in his 70s, at the end of his career, but he walked out on to the stage and I felt myself just jerk back in my seat because this guy just stood there with this absolute presence and he was the boss. You just felt it.

‘That’s what I want to do. I love this album. It’s a swing album, but all the songs are original, it’s not dated, and it’s this celebration of great music and great musicians. I didn’t ask anyone for their opinion of the songs. I don’t do that any more because I trust myself – and my daughter Daisy, who is a dancer and who just has this instant emotional response to music.

‘If these songs make people smile and want to dance then I’ve done what I set out to do. I don’t care about being cool, I want to be able to bring a bit of joy back, because that’s what we need right now. That, to me, is real success.

Gary Barlow releases his new solo album on Polydor this autumn