Interviewed By John Aizlewood
Always a tricky one, the Christmas present for a 10-year-old son. Too young to be given wads of cash as an incentive to discover women or backpack to Tasmania and, frustratingly too old for a large sack of goodies from a big, possibly ficticious man with a suspiciously white beard. In 1981, Mr and Mrs Barlow of a Frodsham, Cheshire council estate and their son Gary, there was little festive dilema.
"I had a choice of a BMX bike or a keyboard," remembers Barlow, so wealthy ("I've got more money than I could ever dream of fucking spending") he doesn't need to work again and so young at 25 that he's never heard of Soft Cell. "I was watching Top Of The Pops and there was Marc Almond singing Tainted Love. With him there was this guy on a tiny keyboard. "I thought it sounded amazing. So thank God, I chose the keyboard."
Barlow Is In Laguna Beach, Southern California so rain is unlikely. He's in a hotel restaurant so expensive they loan dinner jackets when the air turns chill on outdoor diners. Tomorrow he will play his first solo show since he disbanded Take That, the band for whom he was chief songwriter and who managed eight British Number 1 singles from their last nine. Some, not without reason, dismissed them as the 'heirs to the Bay City Rollers'. Others noted that Back For Good, Never Forget and Pray showed that Gary Barlow might just be a songwriter to reckon with.
Shortly after that fateful Christmas, Barlow outgrew his present. "Within a fortnight, although I couldn't read music, I'd earplay tunes I knew off the telly and I'd done everything this keyboard could do," he trills matter-of-factly. "It never felt like a feat. My dad had recognised this and took me down to the shop to get an updated version with bass pedals and two keyboards, but it was £600. My dad sold all his time off work and bought it. I spent my life playing this bloody organ. I got up in the morning, I played; dinner time I came home from school, I played; I got in, I played all night."
Luckily the Barlows lived in a neighbourless bungalow. Soon, young Gary had mastered his huge new organ and the prodigy was stuck for something to do. He noticed a talent competition just around the corner at a working men's club in North Wales.
"I knew this was it. I couldn't sing yet but I could play I Am What I Am and I Will Survive, I didn't win but they offered me a job every Saturday night. They said £18 a night which was unbelievable for an 11 year old. I'd learn a new set of songs every week so my repertoire was becoming fantastic. At 14 I got an offer from a club in Runcorn, a five nights a week job backing Ken Dodd and Jim Davidson, for £140. My mum was a teacher at my school and she made me promise to be there by nine. I worked from eight until two every night, a solid six hours and did homework in the dressing room."
An academic career looked out of the question, as did friends his own age. He was in the northern beer n' fags equivalent of an East German swimming academy.
"People used to call me Musical Youth because I was so dedicated and a brilliant player. A year later my balls dropped and I started singing. I was always ambitious and I thought I could do at least as well as those artists in front of me, I started singing You'll Never Walk Alone and picked up how these club acts were singing."
Working mens' clubs are in terminal decline now, victims of the erosion of blue-collar industries and a community's notion of boozing together. They would run football and cricket teams and perhaps provide help in times of unemployment, but primarily they were a place where beer was cheap and entertainment (usually a plump comedian) was free. Enter Gary Barlow, somehow perfectly named for his new venture.
"I got an act together, me and backing tapes," he remembers, "I'd got my own car - a brand new one because of all the money I'd made which I'd never done anything to spend. Soon I was earning £5-600 for seven nights a week. It's great to have the experience of standing singing Lionel Richie's Hello and nobody clapping. It was the hardest audience and you'd never know what you were turning up to. Because I was young, I'd do a dance spot, things like The Final Countdown, but you'd never even think of doing your own songs. I was a bit of a shark and I used the day to make tapes of standards, putting my voice onto the originals. I never thought the PRS might want a cut. I used to take about eighty TDK C90s I'd bought from Dixons to sell. I'd make more money than from the gig. My pockets would be bulging with cash."
Unsurprisingly, even to a self-confessed shark, endless Always On My Minds did not make for fulfilment. When not making dodgy tapes, Barlow was writing his own songs.
"I'd always had a studio at home. I'd bought one of the first synthesizers, a Yamaha DX7, and I was really up on that side of things, so when I started writing songs at 16, my demos were exceptional. Also, what's vital about being a songwriter is a knowledge of other people's songs and I knew how songs are constructed because I'd been playing them. The money I was earning funded day trips to London to publishers and record companies. Oh, and I was really really jealous of Rock Astley. He was from around my way and used to be the drummer in a band I worked with. I wanted to be him."
His experience and detailed understanding of how I Want To Know What Love Is was written cut little ice with London's music industry.
"Everyone awlays commented on how young I was," he shrugs, still baffled by rejection. "They said the songs were good but I was very young. I never got anywhere near a deal, so, at 18 I gave up for a year and just did clubs.
As Barlow floundered over in Massachusettes, ex-Johnson Brother Maurice Starr put together a white version of his own creation, New Edition. The all singing, all dancing, non songwriting New Kids On The Block briefly ruled the world in the early 90s.
Nigel Marin-Smith, a Manchester-based modelling and casting agent, reckoned he could do the same with some British boys. He'd already recruited two part time break dancers, Howard Donald and Jason Orange, plus Mark Owen, who worked at a bank and at Strawberry Studios in Stockport, where The Housemartins and The Fall had recorded. Barlow had sent him a tape.
"I said I wasn't interested in bands, I was a solo artist," chuckles Barlow. "I thought we'd be in a transit van with the gear in the back. Nigel played me a tape of the New Kids On The Block and said it was the sort of thing he wanted, but everything would be positioned around me as the singer. It sounded quite good, but I admitted I was really crap at dancing and could only do a few hand move movements here and there. I was very keen to be a star."
Adding Robbie Williams, just 15 at the time. Take That started slowly. Martin-Smith's strategy revolved around playing school assemblies during the day and gay clubs at night. The first single, Do What You Like, released in the summer of 91, was co-written by Barlow. It wasn't a hit, but it did sneak them a deal with RCA. Within a year, they were teenybob's biggest group of all time. Better still, Martin-Smith wouldn't rip them off.
"Here were are six years later and usually bands have been to hell and back," grins Barlow, still with Martin-Smith. "It's all, Oh yeah our records were ripped off by our publishers; the promoter took all the money from our tours. We haven't got any of those stories to tell."
It's a slippery and rubbery eel, stardom. Gary Barlow chased it, hawked tapes around London, joined a band with break dancers, envied Rick Astely and played to schoolkids. Then, when it happened, it wasn't the frenzied blur of naked flesh, huge cheques and comparisons with Leonard Cohen he'd envisaged.
"You don't imagine your stardom, you only think of it as what you see on TV," he muses. "I imagined stardom as Bros being rushed out from hotels, millions of girls screaming as they pulled up in lomos. Fortunately for us fame was gradual. You know by meeting Jason that he was a painter and decorator for four years and he appreciates every inch of his fame and will never stop appreciating all the countries he's seen. We all had jobs, except me, I can't do anything else and that still worries me, but I wanted it, I wanted what I've got and that's why I appreciate it and why now I can't sit in bed thinking I've earned all this money. I want to keep proving to myself that I can still write hits and do live shows." By the time the wider world came to know Take That, it was already assumed they were gay. Barlow's early blond locks suggested that they were gay and blind.
"This is where my background comes in again," he asserts. "The drummer I worked with when I was 14 to 17 was gay, so I meant I never had a problem with it. The only thing that concerned me was image; we really didn't want people to think we were gay, because none of us were, although the shows we did only six months ago were quite camp and a dancing boy act is very camp anyway. We had a big gay following, but our female following superseded it millions of times over. It always worried us that a newspaper would invent some story."
In fact, carefully nurtured by a policy of limitless accessibility and befriending influential tabloid and teeny paper journalists, the press would never turn on Take That.
"Nobody had anything on us, we never had skeletons out of the cupboard," he claims. "We enjoyed having that image. It was as if people didn' t want to read or write bad things about is."
For five working class oiks, Take That behaved themsleves. Maybe it's as Barlow is keen to suggest - they were all lovely blokes.
"We were very, very professional, " he emphasises, "to the point where it was sometimes stupid. It was easy to have had a piss-up one night or been on drugs but our shows were so demanding we could never afford to do that. It was a very energetic show. I fucking hated it. I'm not an athletic person at all. The lads dragged me through every inch of it. Although people never believed we could be such good friends, we were so close-knit. We spent all day and all night together. Being with the boys for six years taught me so much about working with other people. I'm so glad that I'm not looking back and thinking, isn't it a shame Howard's addicted to cocaine. None of us have come out scarred by anything like that."
Let's be frank, thought, Take That were never the ugliest of men.....
"We had a lot of sex on the road," he smiles, "at the right times. They weren't lining up down the street - we never did any of that - and again, we were very press conscious. Plus the fact that most of the girls who wanted to get into the rooms looked 24 but were under 16. That's a no go that one. To back up what I'm saying, since we split, how many stories have you read by girls who've been in our beds? None at all, I believe. I'm very proud of it. There's nothing boring about it, although a lot of people do look at it like that, which is where the disbelief comes in. I'll stand by it. We had a brilliant time, we lived life to the absolute full." Alas, one of Take That, little Robbie Williams, wished to live life to the somewhat more full, going so far as to hang out with Oasis's famous naught Gallagher brother's, most memorably at Glastonbury '95. The subsequent suggestion, however, that Take That were the anti-Oasis does not impress Gary Barlow.
"Oasis and Take That have so much in common, it's not true," he states. "They're just as image based as Take That ever were, probably more, but people fail to see that and it annoys me. It's been done so many times before. I love those records but I absolutley fucking hate the characters because there's no need for it all. They're pissing off a lot of people and it's the old scenario - see you on the way down."
Desperately seekng credibility, Williams decided to become mates with them. He may have taken drugs during this period. "It never had any credibility with me whatsoever," dismisses Barlow. "I'm not easily led by magazines or what people are saying. It was an awful time for us. Everything we'd worked so hard to keep together, Robbie was undoing. It was very annoying. He was the laziest among us, the one who never bothered to turn up for tour meetings, who'd sit doing noughts and crosses at accountants meetings. Robbie always had it in him but he leant on us so much as friends that we talked him out of things he wanted to do. He had that party animal side to him and we knew that once he became a big enough star to turn around and tell people to fuck off he would. And he did. But he never had any musical flair."
Williams left in July 1995. A few months later, he brought the rest of Take That down with him. It all finished, bar the court cases, for the sake of a few million quid.
"For us to continue with the name Take That, of which Robbie was a shareholder, he wanted paying, but he wanted an extortionate sum. We were a big money making machine, but we'd be working for two years to make that up. But it went further than that. He also wanted his fifth cut for the next two years. We'd tour and he'd get paid. What band in their right mind would carry on? Anyway, by the end we'd become complacent. We had this meeting in a London hotel room and I had a little speech prepared which I was dreading. I'd been on holiday and while I was away I thought, I am absolutely bored. I'm fed up of writing songs for the same band, I'm fed up of going on tour. I was the only one who'd take it to the next level. I wanted the Nobody Else album to be accoustic, but I could never get everybody to agree. Singles could never go in at 3, it had to be Number 1 and everything had to be analysed by 500 people before anyone could agree. Eventually, we were accountants and solicitors. We weren't going to change our name, so I said, let's quit while we're at the top. Take That couldn't have gone on for ten years, we did what we had to do and then stopped. We could have gone on and in another three years been doing Blackpool Pier and milking it to its last drop, but why? It was a sigh of relief for everybody. Obviously, it was a disappointing time for Robbie because his little entrepreneurial ideas had all been fucked. In fact, when I look back, I'd have to say he did me the biggest favour in the world by forcing my hand."
It still goes on. Every time Gary Barlow edges away from Take That, Robbie Williams is there, bringing him back. "It's a year now since he left the band and he's still going on about it. We've heard enough. I know how happy I am and I know how unhappy he is. Everyone says I must hate Robbie but it's upsetting to watch what's happening. I feel like I want to help because he was my friend for five years. If he ever turned to me for help I'd give it him. Someone needs to, fast." On April 3rd, Take That fulfilled their last contractual obligations; a grim series of promotional duties in Holland. On April 4th, Barlow began work on his first solo album, Open Road. Inspiration for its sound flows from the 40 CDs he buys each month.
"I get the Top 5 British and American albums and I search until I find out what has made people buy them. It's dead interesting. What is it that's turned people onto those albums? It's an analytical way of making music but it's dead important to look at what somebody else is doing right and try and pick pieces from it. Already I'm about 50 other artists' careers, so I'm not going to change the face of music."
Lyrics come from random lines strung together and crunched into verses. Song titles may be from the dictionary. "I'll see a word like 'consolation' and think, great name for a song, but lyrics are really hard," he admits. "At this point, I need every bit of support, I don't need enemies."
And that, ultimately, is why, for only the second time in his life Gary Barlow is in California. His show, at the tiny Galaxy Theater in an industrial estate close to San Diego's John Wayne airport, is part of BMG label's, world conference. Consequently, his audience, is almost exclusively comprised or record company high-flyers whose careers may yet come to depend on Barlow's fortunes. Most importantly of all, Clive Davis is present. He is the head of Arista (a big player in America) and has decided that Gary Barlow is the only member of Take That who might have his records released in America. Whether "might" turns into "will" depends on this show.
Thus, Barlow has ignored his girlfriend Dawn Andrews (who looks as if she would rather by anywhere else but here today) and spent two days rehearsing his band's 10-song set, comprising new tunes and Take That songs, plus a cover of Roachford's Cuddly Toy. Predictably, he's a benevolant taskmaster, publishing hard without losing his cool and doing his best bingo caller impersonations.
The effort pays off at the Galaxy Theater, where only minutes ago, the announcement of Kenny G's birthday has been greeted like the second coming. Barlow and band are introduced by a bumbling Brit who bemuses all nationalities by listing how many 'units' Take That sold and asking, possibly rhetorically, "How the fuck do you follow that?". Barlow is not one for being fazed. In working mens' clubs, they'd play bingo while he was midway through The Power Of Love.
By the second song, Today I Lost You, the British stop looking tense, South East Asians tap their dainty feet like it was Bryan Adams up there and Americans look at Clive Davis before deciding what to do. Even Barlow's working mens' club banter ("Well I've had some requests. But I'm still going to do another song...") goes down well. After the closing Forever Love, Davis stands and applauds. So, therefore does everyone else. Davis demands a meeting, after which Barlow can pay attention to his girlfriend and whisk her off to Las Vegas (they lose $10 apiece, he will bang the slot machine in possibly mock frustration), the Grand Canyon and the Hoover Dam.
A few months later, the posters of Gary Barlow are as big as Elvis Presley inside RCA records and the younder man is back in London burning to duet with Aaron Neville, and in a sushi kind of mood. Much has happened. Forever Love entered the charts at Number One, before being unsurped by the shouty Spice Girls ("You can't compete with crap"); Robbie Williams has called Nigel Martin-Smith a 'cunt' in print. Open Road is complete and Barlow has already written two songs for the next album, scheduled for release in 1998 (his second solo album). The recent Elton John documentary has put the fear of God into him; it probably won't be the future, but you never know and neither does he.....
"The gig in America was judgement night, there was a lot to prove and it built a lot of bridges for me," he assers. "At the meeting Clive asked if there was anyone I'd like to work with. I said that I'd like to co-write with Diane Warren at some time in the future. He sorted it out for the next week. She's so fucking batty though, I'm stood in her house singing and all of a sudden this parrot lands on my head. I asked for Whitney and Mariah's producer, David Foster. We did that the week after. He kicked my arse a bit while I was doing the vocals. Clive moved fucking mountains. He's picked the option up and I'm getting a fresh start in America."
Implausible as it may seem, Barlow was so insecure about the fate of Forever Love in Britain that he abandoned a press campaign designed to take him away from Take That and did a Smash Hits interview for the week before the single's release.
"It was completely my call and I regret it now," he shrugs. "It was such a worrying time for me because that record needed to happen. Waiting for the midweek chart position was the longest fucking morning I've ever had, I swear on my life. When I knew it was outselling the Number 2 by three to one, I was so pleased, I thought, Brilliant. It was a surprise, God's honest truth."
His shoulders may be young, but he's good company and his head is old. His ambition is to buy his own songwriting back and to start his own publishing operation.
"Although I'm 25, fuck, I feel about 58," he laments. "I was always like this. It comes from mixing with 40-year old men in the clubs. They taught me about life. That's where I did my real growing up."
Ultimately, the aim, although the phrase is tabbo round these parts, is to do a George Michael. That is to flit from teenybob iconhood to adult stardom. If anyone can do it, Gary Barlow - for, simply he has the songs.
"George Michael is not a role model, not at all," snaps Barlow, for once testy. "there's no one as an artist who I'll be like. I really want to be far more active than him, I don't want to release an album every six years. I can't imagine not recording for six years. What does he do!? He must have a hell of a gold handicap."
What do you want?
"I really do want to be thought of as a great songwriter. That's all."
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