Gary Barlow
If you’re expecting Gary Barlow’s new autobiography to be self-admiring and smug, you’re in for a shock. On the very first page of A Better Me, we meet the millionaire singer-songwriter hunched over a toilet, making himself sick.
‘I wanted to write a health book, but I realised this should actually be an autobiography, because to come out of nowhere with “Hey everyone, check out what I'm eating!” without knowing the story is a bit weird,’ he says. ‘Once you’ve read the book, you really start to understand how I got here.’
‘Here’ is Barlow at 47: svelte, successful and growing ever more handsome with age. But not so many years ago it was a different story. Bloated and bulimic, he tipped the scales at 17st 2lbs and couldn’t see a way out.
It had all started so well. Growing up in Frodsham, Cheshire, Barlow got his first keyboard at 6, played his first gig at 11, and set pulses racing at 19 when he fronted perky new boyband Take That. They rode high for five years but, after a disgruntled Robbie Williams walked out in 1995, eventually split. Suicide helplines were set up for their devastated fans.
Everyone expected Barlow to have a successful solo career and, sure enough, his first album topped the charts. But this was the era of Britpop, of jangly guitars and swaggering vocalists, and Barlow’s boy-next-door pop struck an uncool note. His second album bombed. Dropped by his record label, he watched in dismay as Robbie Williams’ career went supernova.
The book begins at Barlow’s nadir in the early 2000s. Self-imprisoned in his pop star mansion, he filled his days by chain-smoking, eating jumbo bowls of cereal and staring vacantly at the piano. Being on stage had been ‘the sparkly shirt equivalent of running a marathon’, but now that he rarely left the house, his weight ballooned.
‘The way of numbing all the painful stuff was just to eat,’ he recalls. ‘The other reason I was eating so much was because I was trying desperately not to look like me. I’d been chucked out of the music industry, and a pop star was everything I was trying not to be. I wanted to kill off that person, and the bigger I got, the less I was being recognised.’
Barlow’s D-day, or ‘Fat Day’ as he calls it, was in 2003 when his doctor warned him that he was obese. ‘From then I started to get back on my feet, and by the time the band reunited two years later I was flying: I was doing half marathons and I’d lost some weight. I was finding my way back to who I wanted to be.’
Take That’s reunion was triumphant. They released two albums and had two major tours, this time minus the PVC, bare buttocks and devil’s horns of yesteryear. Williams rejoined the band for the third album and tour, Progress, which remains the biggest-selling British tour of all time.
Yet Barlow continued to be obsessed by what he ate, saying worrying about food was ‘a near permanent anxious noise in my head’.
Meeting wellbeing gurus the Hemsley sisters in 2011 gave him a new perspective. Their message – nothing processed, no sugar – hit home and, after trying 20 different diets, Barlow saw this as a lifestyle change rather than a quick fix. The promo pictures for the X Factor, which he joined as a judge that year, were ‘the first that didn’t make me want to jump out of the window.’
Life was good. Barlow was invited by the Queen to organise her Diamond Jubilee celebration concert, and 2012 was shaping up to be his best year yet. Then tragically, just a week before Take That were due to sing at the Olympics closing ceremony, Barlow’s fourth child, Poppy, was stillborn. It was, he says, ‘the lowest place I’ve ever been in my life.’
The family locked themselves away in their Oxfordshire home. Gary busied himself by taking over the cooking, describing food as ‘the crack where the light came in that dark summer.’ Crippled with grief, he threw himself into his work, releasing both solo and Take That albums as well as writing for musical theatre.
In 2016, Barlow had an anxiety attack in an LA hotel room. Paralysed, nauseous and struggling to breathe, he alternated between sleeping and crying for three days. He had burnt out.
‘It was definitely a warning,’ he says. ‘I’d just let work take over my life and my mind, and my body just said right, if you’re not going to say stop, I’m going to say it for you.
‘It was also a little reminder of how available we’ve all become. We’ve all got these devices on us, which means we’re always ‘on’. At the time I had two phones: one to talk on while I could email on another one, and it’s just too much.’
It was time for a rethink. Barlow swapped hardcore gym workouts for yoga, read books instead of emails and went for foodie lessons at River Cottage. Taking time out has, he says, made him better at his job, a better husband and a better dad. ‘The answer was to do fewer things, but do them really brilliantly.’
Barlow continues to cook every day, and food has morphed from enemy to friend. ‘That’s the book: taking this thing that’s been your nemesis, something you’ve felt guilty about, and absolutely falling in love with it. Get in your kitchen and have a great time!’
A Better Me is disarmingly frank, and Barlow makes no apology. ‘I'm hoping that talking about this so candidly will make men talk about issues like this, because there’s no question there’s people going through this stuff,’ he says. ‘For me, being heavy does not work. It makes me feel depressed. I’m comfortable where I am right now, and this is where I want to stay.’
A Better Me: The Official Autobiography by Gary Barlow, Blink Publishing, £20
THE BAR-LOWDOWN
Barlow and wife Dawn, a former Take That dancer, have three children: Daniel, 18, Emily, 16, and Daisy, 9.
He’s great mates with Jason Donovan: they met at the school gates (their children were at the same school) and go on family holidays together.
He apologises in the book for his well-publicised tax avoidance scheme, saying it was ‘definitely one of the most stupid things I’ve done.’
The Queen had just two requests for her Jubilee concert: that it shouldn’t be too long, and that it should include Cliff Richard. When Barlow told him, Sir Cliff wept.
There’ll be a Take That Greatest Hits album and tour in 2019 but that, says Barlow, is a line in the sand. ‘It’s not about the band splitting up – there will never be another Take That split announcement – but I’m up for pastures new.’
An edited version of this feature appeared in Waitrose Weekend on October 4 2018. (c) Waitrose