Arena Magazine, May 1996
Interviewed by Giles Smith
GARY BARLOW, who is eating a Kit-Kat, says, "I was always a bit of an afterthought in Take That. I was always the last one the stylist bought clothes for because I wasn't interested in clothes and I never looked that good when I was in them. I was always the fat, white one everyone pushed to one side so they could get a shot of Mark and Robbie. The only thing I could shout and wave my arms about was the music. I could say, 'Here - listen to this. This is my music.' "Now on his own, Gary Barlow confronts the predicament faced by any pop star whose career has opened to the sound of screaming girls. Count the artists in the last quarter of a century who have graduated with any dignity from the scream school. There's George Michael, who stepped, re-made, from the wreckage of Wham! And that's about it. There was, as I recall, precious little public call for new, mature work from Les McKeown of The Bay City Rollers. And Bros, anyone? What hope then, for Gaz from the That?
Except that, all along, it's been made clear to us that if anyone in that fresh-faced, all-dancing combo had a future, it was Gary. He was in Take That, but he wasn't essentially of Take That. He was the podgy one with the unwieldy haircuts, but this was OK, because he was the brains. (Unfair on Barlow, all this, who would strike you as a handsome boy in any other context than a photograph of Take That.) And now the end has come, so we're going to see how it pans out.
About the others - Jason, cute Mark, Howard and the chaotic and errant Robbie - we just don't know. Gary thinks they'll be OK, including Robbie. (Gary is very disappointed in Robbie, for reasons we will come to.) But Gary was the lead singer and, more importantly, Gary wrote the songs - "Back For Good", "Babe", "Pray", "A Million Love Songs", a stream of gleamingly hooked, radio-friendly ballads and bouncers, the songs of someone, it was readily apparent, gifted beyond his tender years. He's already won two Ivor Novello songwriting awards; this year, to mark the demise of Take That, the Ivor Novello people have decided to give him a kind of Lifetime Achievement award. Gary Barlow is the grand old age of 25.So how could we not feel confident for Gary? Gary was the talent. Gary is the talent. Now all he has to do is prove it.
I meet Gary Barlow in a recording studio in west London. It is only a month since Take That announced their dissolution inducing nationwide sobbing, an item on News At Ten and the installation of helplines for the distressed. The band's farewell single, a suitably sugary version of The Bee Gees' "How Deep Is Your Love?" is at number one and, as Barlow is pleased to learn during the afternoon from someone at RCA Records holding steady. The farewell live shows have yet to happen. But already Barlow is at work on his first solo album.
He is wearing black trousers and shiny black shoes, and a tight brown shirt, open at the neck to reveal a fairly heavy weight silver pendant, and he is shuffling semi-purposefully between a keyboard and the mixing desk. What kind of person do you expect a 25-year-old to be, who is already a multi millionaire, who has spent the last five years being screamed at all over Europe and Asia, who has, as he puts it, "lived the full pop star thing"? My money was on a braying yob in pricey clobber, whose brain had long since turned to banana daiquiri. Gary Barlow is not like this. His eyes are lively, his voice engagingly up-tempo. His accent is undiluted Cheshire. He is charming and courteous. He can be a bit prim but he laughs a lot, including at himself. He has no front; a more ingenuous person, in fact, it would be hard to imagine. Within seconds of meeting him, it's difficult - and all those Take That fans know exactly how difficult - not to wish you were his friend.A story which may help us understand Gary Barlow. At 16 and a nobody, he was ringing up publishers in London and getting appointments to play them his songs. He would travel down from Cheshire on the train, wearing a suit and carrying his cassettes in a briefcase, trying to look like a businessman. For two years, on and off, he tried this and in all that time he got nothing. Worse than nothing. At Rocket Publishing an executive listened to Barlow's material in frozen silence, then stood up, removed the tape from the machine and threw it out of the window. He told Barlow, who was already hastily fastening his briefcase, "Don't ever bring your songs in here again."
"I think he must have had a really bad week," Barlow says, a conclusion which speaks volumes about the sweetness of Barlow's nature and his irreducible self-belief.
And now here's Barlow, some seven or eight years later, retired from the biggest teen band to sweep Britain in more than a decade and plotting the next move in a career which has been, in many respects, as rigorously pre-planned and sorted as a military strike. "In Take That, we always talked about the end," he says. "It was the topic of conversation at least once a week. We always talked about bands like Wham! and The Jam, the ones who cut it when they were right at the top. That's what we had to do: keep it all positive until we could just feel it drifting away a little bit and then - bang."
The bang came after a post-Christmas band meeting this year in which everyone agreed they could sense a slip coming. Barlow describes sitting at the Smash Hits Awards last autumn, watching a succession of boy bands take the stage, "and they all looked like us, and they all danced like us, and they didn't sound any different. I thought, 'we can't be here next year'."
And after the bang, the solo album - the record with which Barlow either makes that tricky leap from Girls' pencil cases to adults' CD players, or doesn't. In the studio, Barlow puts a DAT in the machine and plays me the story so far- three tracks, none of them finished. There's a big ballad with, as yet, no drums on. There's a breezy, acoustic-based number called "Open Road" with a penny whistle solo in the middle which may, Barlow says, become the album's title track. And, closest to completion, there's a huge tune called "Never Knew".
I have no idea how many times Barlow must have heard this song while making it, but he seems delighted to hear it again snapping his fingers, tapping his thighs, standing with his eyes closed, slowly shaking his head, absorbed in it entirely. The chorus descends out of a pent-up verse, through fat wedges of harmony vocals. It sounds like George Michael before he became so stiflingly caught up in himself.
It sounds like George Michael, only, perhaps, slightly more commercial.
IN A QUIET ROOM at the back of the studio Gary Barlow tells me he was only 14 when people started telling him he was going to be a star. These were the people who had seen him do his keyboard and vocal routine on the club circuit around his home town in Cheshire: "I Am What I Am", £18 nightly, thank you, God bless.
Barlow's father used to be, according to Gary, "a product manager. Quite well paid - not like a solicitor, but they're scrimpers and savers, my mum and dad. They'll clear out the attic and do boot sales for the next four weeks." Now his parents live in a house he has bought them; Gary has also bought a house for his older brother, lan, who is a builder and whose Axe Attack albums Gary endured as a child. "I hated him as a youngster," Barlow says, "but we get on so well now. He could be the real upset, forgotten-about brother and he isn't: he's just so proud of what I do. And he's so happy with the way he lives, he doesn't fancy what I've got."
When he was ten, Barlow's parents bought him a keyboard for Christmas. It was either that or a BMX bike. "I'd been through about three BMXes already and I felt like I wanted to get into music a bit, so I went for the keyboard." Barlow exhausted its repertoire of noises within weeks. His father then cashed in some days off and bought him a fully-fledged home organ, with foot pedals. Barlow learned "A Whiter Shade Of Pale" - and when everyone was sick of that - "I Will Survive".
At 12 he was playing weekends in the bar at a Labour club in North Wales. At 14 he had a four-nights-a-week slot worth £120 in a cabaret club, backing visiting comedians - Jim Davidson, Ken Dodd and the like. At 16 he left school and worked up his own cabaret act: "I'd do 'The Way You Make Me Feel', Michael Jackson, and do a bit of a routine to it. None of these 40-year-old singers could do that. They'd be out of breath bending to one knee." And by 18, Barlow had served his apprenticeship and was ready for something else.
"At that time I was quite bitter, bit of a chip on my shoulder, quite bitchy. I'd been on the club scene too long and everyone's very bitchy there: 'Oooh! Have you seen the dress she's wearing?' and all that. I was 18 going on 58."
Just before he met the man who planned Take That, Barlow had been offered a cabaret spot on a year-long cruise on the Canberra. "The guy who offered it to me said, 'Listen, it's girls for days, weeks, months. You're kissing one good-bye and watching the next one come up the gangplank'. I thought 'I like the sound of this - this is where I should be'. But then I went for a couple of meetings in Manchester with Nigel Martin-Smith and he had a couple of silver discs on the wall. And I thought, 'No - this is where I want to be. I can do the Canberra when I'm 30.
"I think," Barlow says, "I took the better option."
BARLOW REMEMBERS EXACTLY where he was when he first heard from Nigel Martin-Smith, the recipient - like so many people in the music business in 1991 - of a Gary Barlow song tape. "I was out the front, washing my car. A Ford Orion you could fit the speaker for my keyboard on the back seat." Martin-Smith, a pop and fashion agent in his thirties with an office in Manchester, had, as Barlow puts it, "an idea for a band". The band would be about "the comradeship between five nice young people". Martin-Smith showed Barlow a video of New Kids On The Block, the white, American all-teen act. "I'd never heard of them before," Barlow says. "I was totally out of touch because of playing in the clubs."
Barlow thought it only fair to warn Martin-Smith that he was "crap at dancing". Martin-Smith told him not to worry: he could be the singer in the middle and everything would be structured around him. "He told me, 'It's too early for you to be a solo artist. It would be better to have a foil around you and eventually leave the band.' It's weird talking about this now."
Barlow gave up working nights, sold his Ford Orion and went on the dole. "We all had jobs we jacked in: Jason, painting and decorating; Howard, car-spraying, Mark was a teaboy at Strawberry Studios." Barlow already knew Mark. Martin-Smith introduced them both to the other two. "Our manager put us on a little wage and kept us all hyped up. I remember saying to Jason, 'One day we're going to be coming in and talking to each other about the houses we've bought and the cars we've bought and the watches we've bought. We laugh about that moment, because that's exactly what we do."
After a while, Martin-Smith appeared with a photograph and said he was thinking about a fifth member. "This picture looked like a 14-year-old school kid, and I was a bit unsure," Barlow says. "The manager said, 'His name's Robbie and he's got a really good voice.' He was one of those precocious schoolkids who danced outrageously and was dead cheeky, but quite a likable young lad."
Martin-Smith blagged his confection a spot on Sky TV - two highly-choreographed numbers and a ten-minute interview and then hawked the video around the record companies. When there were no takers, Martin-Smith remortgaged his house and, late in 1991, released the first Take That single, "Do What U Like", on his own label. "We got loads of teenage press," Barlow says. "There were all these faceless rave acts in the charts and suddenly it was, like, 'Shit, here comes a band, and they're not bad looking. Give them the front cover!"'
Soon Take That had a record deal with RCA and Barlow had a publishing deal with Virgin. "And all of a sudden there was £150,000 in my bank account." To push "It Only Takes A Minute" into the Top 20 in 1992, Martin-Smith sent Take That on a nationwide tour of schools, sealing their fate as teen-fodder. "We would do one school in assembly, one at three in the afternoon, one early evening for the under -18s, one later for the over -18s, then maybe a gay club at one in the morning. We were everywhere with that record.
"We had a great time. We were all in B&Bs. We'd get to our room and open the door and there'd be five single beds. I'd never had friends like these before. I hadn't been used to making sacrifices. I was quite a bold, selfish person at that time. And there was a bit of snobbery as well, because I was the musical one at the end of the day. But I grew to love these four people I was with. I can really understand why girls love Mark so much they can't go to sleep at night. I love Mark. He's one of the nicest people I know. I love Howard: he's probably my best friend in the band. I love Jason. And I loved Robbie when he was Robbie."
Ah, yes: Robbie Williams. Robbie the spike-cropped maverick, Robbie the rebel who spoiled the game plan by leaving Take That in July last year (News At Ten items, the first lot of helplines for the distressed) and has done little since but live in conspicuous places, in a most un-Take That fashion. "I'm disappointed in Robbie," Barlow says, looking sombre now and speaking gently. "He's taken a different road from us. I can't say it's wrong because I don't know where he's at, really, but I'm just very disappointed in the way he's turned out. A lot of the things he's said in articles have hurt us all - that he was a prisoner in Take That, that none of us are close friends, that we've never been friends. It's complete rubbish. We're all so close and we've always been close."He'd always been Mark's best friend. Jason and Howard were a bit of a clan and Mark and Robbie were another. I would never join Mark and Robbie, I'd always join Jason and Howard, because they were that little bit older. Mark grew up and became a very truthful, good-living person. He got into Buddhism - he became a very interesting person, I thought. And I think he left Robbie behind and Robbie resented that."
Barlow reckons Take That knew they were losing Robbie long before he finally told them he wanted to go. "We were doing dance routines on stage and Robbie was doing his own routine. We were afraid to say, 'Robbie, you dickhead: fucking get it together, we're a five-piece band here.' We couldn't do that any more: he was a bit of a loose cannon. He'd missed out on his teenage years and he wanted to live them now."
Barlow says he noticed how Robbie was developing "a following of really funny people, not the sort of people we'd ever been friends with really - real trendies." He also saw how "every other week he'd be in the paper, coming out of a club with a girl on his arm. And it wasn't our image, that. There wasn't a rule book, but we'd always been aware of the guide lines, of what we could and couldn't do. Because part of the charm of Take That was that nobody could ever get near them: nobody was an insider, there was no scandal, there were no wild parties. When we arrived it was beautiful: nice wave, we'd do the gig and we were home. But all of a sudden people had an in, and it was Robbie.
"We thought, we'd like to do that: we'd like to go in and out of clubs and get drunk and have girls and not worry about being seen. We said to Robbie, 'Cool it, Rob. Be a bit more shady about it.' But Robbie was on a complete rebellion at this point. I don't think he ever liked the music in Take That very much and he certainly didn't like the tours, because they were so energetic. It meant he couldn't be up until six in the morning: he had to get some sort of rest to be able to get through the show. It was all coming to a head round about the time of Glastonbury in June last year, when we heard he'd been on the stage with Oasis. That felt shocking at the time."
According to Barlow, shortly after Glastonbury Robbie told the band at a meeting he was going to leave in six months. The group told him they would rather he didn't leave at all, but that if he was set on it, they would prefer that he left immediately, rather than hand them the problem further down the line. "And Rob says, 'Right then, I'll go now.' And off he walked.
"I saw him about three months ago," Barlow says. "It was at the MTV party in Paris. I found myself for the first three minutes just staring at him. He was fascinating me. Because he was a different person. His hair and his ears were different. He just wasn't that person I'd spent four years with." As it happened, Take That survived happily as a four-piece at least, for another six months. Their first concerts without Robbie were received with pretty much undiminished rapture. "I think Robbie was convinced that we'd never do it," Barlow says. "That's when a bitterness started setting in. I don't feel any bitterness towards Robbie, though. I think he's just involved with the wrong sort of people. He needs to make a fucking record. He should get his act together."
WHEN IT GETS TO 7pm, Barlow leaves his producer and engineers fiddling and we go for a Japanese meal (Barlow's favourite). We take Barlow's S-class Mercedes, which is black, with tinted windows and is the size of a tank. Barlow backs it gingerly between the concrete pillars in the studio's basement car park. As we drive, Barlow tells me about the flat he rents when he's in London - a high-security place with views across the Thames. He's paranoid about the tabloids discovering it, because then - he reckons - he would have to put up net curtains, which would spoil the view. This morning, Barlow says, he bashed his back hoovering the place. He would pay someone to do the cleaning, but he doesn't feel he can trust anyone.
As we dash across the road to the restaurant, a woman driving a Golf recognises Barlow and blows him a kiss across her steering wheel. He smiles back. He gets recognised a lot. When he signs autographs, Barlow signs himself "Gary", underlined with a streak of kisses. It's become a mechanical response. Sometimes, Gary says, he goes to sign a cheque and, before he can stop himself, he's putting the little row of crosses on.
Mostly he likes the attention, but some times it troubles him. "It worries me that if I stop and talk to these people, someone is going to bring a knife out. Then there's the ones who phone you at home. It's just worrying to wonder where it goes next. I'd move house and it would be on the local TV news. And I'd have to ring them up and say, 'Thanks very much. What you don't realise is there's girls under 14 years old who'll stand out here until one in the morning, and I have to clear paedophiles off the car park outside my house on a regular basis. Because, unfortunately, wherever our fans go, you get this little network of perverts as well. So I've got all this sleaze and smut round my house where I live thanks to you putting it on the TV.' "
Barlow says he is proud, looking back over the history of Take That, of the way they have come through - or at least, of the way four of them have come through. "I've seen these people deal with their fame so well. We've had the first class hotels, the limos. We've had the girls in the mini skirts at the bar waiting. We've had endless amounts of people offering us free drugs. And not one of us has come out of it affected by it. None of us has a drink problem, none of us has a drug problem. And because we've stopped at the top, we've all got a chance to do our own things now."
Barlow talks about wanting to settle down - "within the next two years". He's had a girlfriend now for some seven months: he would prefer it if I didn't mention her name or say where he met her because "it just creates problems for her". But he says he is very serious about her and that they discuss things, and he's not used to that. "I don't think I ever communicated with any of my girlfriends before. I don't remember even having a decent chat with any of them. "In the record industry, you're out of date literally as soon as your song has gone to the cutting room; it's over and you've got to replace it with something else. To have something you feel you could have forever is completely different and it really brings things into perspective. It's a really lovely feeling, and one I've never felt before."
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