Gary Barlow can't even begin to explain his excitement at having all five Take That members back together, he tells BRIAN BOYD
ROBBIE’S LYING on the floor, Mark is on the phone, Howard is stretching his back and Jason is dozing. Gary, though, is pacing around the room, breaking off slabs of organic chocolate, looking over his shoulder and then shoving them into his mouth. He studies the wrapper intently. “This is dead-posh chocolate. I’m usually a Cadbury’s man.” He breaks off another big chunk, then hides what’s left of the bar under a magazine before thinking better of it and putting it back in his pocket.
We’re in the penthouse suite of a London hotel. The soap opera that is Take That is back. Fifteen years after Robbie Williams flounced out and five years since their revival as a four-piece, the band that was only ever meant to be a short-lived UK version of New Kids on the Block are about to release what their record company claims, in an avalanche of exclamation marks, is the album of the decade.
Barlow – who at 10 years of age, watching Depeche Mode singing Just Can’t Get Enough on Top of the Pops, decided it was a pop star’s life for him – is unusually stolid. He displays none of the theatrics or melodrama of his band-mates. For someone who has turned notions of love, loss and regret into some of the best pop music of the past 20 years, he can sound like a middle-management drone.
“It probably comes across that way because music is all I can do. I can’t ever work a till at Sainsbury’s, so I’ve always been the ‘we have to understand how the music business works’ one in the band, because there’s nothing else out there for me,” he says. “You should see me when I arrive for work. When I get out of the car to go into the studio I really have to tell myself, ‘Don’t run! Don’t run!’ because I’m that excited. I can’t wait to get into that building. I love being able to go in and make music and produce and write songs. I love that feeling of what I’m doing now in the studio is going to make a difference to the charts.”
He pulls his chair up closer and says: “I can’t even begin to get across how exciting doing this album as the five of us was. There was so much energy. We were all dying to make this record; we had waited all this time to do this, to have Rob back again.”
The album, Progress, is a grown-up electro-pop affair with none of the lighter-in-the-air power ballads of old. It's bleepy and synthy – not too far removed from anything by The Killers and Scissor Sisters. It's like a boy band having a knee-trembler with Krautrock up a back alley.
“Normally I write on a piano; this was written on a laptop,” he says. “Nobody knew we were all working together again. We only announced in July that Robbie would be on the album, but by that stage we had spent six months sitting around a laptop in a studio. And we were a new band, literally a new band: we changed our name and everything, and the plan was to release this under our new name, The English. We figured there’s been Take That Part 1, and there’s been Robbie solo, and then there’s been Take That Part 2, so let’s just drop all that and call ourselves The English.
“Having a new name meant we weren’t going, ‘Oh, that doesn’t sound like That That, the fans won’t go for that,’ during the recording. That’s why it’s such a different sound for us. Being The English let us be something else musically. This was supposed to be our side project, our cool-music album. We did a bit of research about renaming ourselves and asked around, and all we got back from people was, ‘What? We’ve waited all this time for the five of you to get back together and you’re going to call yourselves something else?’ so we sort of gave up on the idea and went back to being Take That. But reluctantly so.”
Before all that, there was a group therapy session. When Williams walked away, or was sacked, in 1995, there was a lot of name-calling and finger-pointing in the press; it soon escalated into an all-out war between Barlow and Williams. “A lot of bad stuff happened, really bad stuff, and I hadn’t actually set eyes on Robbie for more than 10 years when we found ourselves in Los Angeles two years ago, mixing the Circus album,” he says. “He lives in Los Angeles, so we just, in a sort of impromptu way, invited him down to say hello, and I remember him walking into the room and I could barely look at him. On the surface it was all matey-matey stuff, but for me it was like meeting someone I’d never met before. To be honest I found it hard, and I sort of sat back and let the others talk to him. I think Robbie thought I was sat there steaming with anger. I wasn’t. I had dealt with all that stuff – well, okay, not all of it. But I had dealt with him saying all those things in public about me.”
On the way out Williams invited them all up to his house the following night. “That’s when it all happened,” says Barlow. “He took the lead and said to me, ‘Look, I’ve got things I’ve got to get off my chest with you,’ and I said, ‘That’s good, because so do I.’ For the next hour or so we apologised for what had been said and agreed that the whole thing was really insignificant. We ended up laughing about it. But we both needed the apologies – and we both got them. It was absolutely group therapy, and that allowed us to get back together again. But I had resented him at the time for leaving the band, because I knew it would split us up.”
When the band split it was taken as a given that Barlow, the only songwriter in the band, and a gifted one at that, would be the George Michael figure, strolling into a glittering solo career, and that the other four would be Andrew Ridgeleys. “It really didn’t turn out like that, did it?” he says, smiling grimly and reaching for the chocolate again. While Williams went on to become one of the most successful British solo artists of all time, Barlow, “the musical genius behind Take That”, was ignominiously dropped by his label and put out to pasture.
“I was depressed, very depressed,” he says. “The weight was the most noticeable thing. That was the worst bit. I was getting a bit immobile, actually; it was that bad. I had problems even walking. My wife encouraged me to see a doctor. He said that I was in the obese category – and I wasn’t just slightly obese, I was well into the obese category. He sent me to a dietician, who enrolled me in a gym, and it was so depressing being at the bottom of this mountain that you’ve got to climb. I didn’t seek help. I did it the old-fashioned way: I ate less and went to the gym. It came off slowly, and if there’s one thing I know it’s that I’ll never go back there again. There was a lot of pain, and everywhere I seemed to go I’d be tormented by that bloody song,” he says, referring to Williams’s Angels.
“It was really hard for me, but I think people get it wrong. They think that it was because Robbie was so successful and I wasn’t. But that wasn’t it; it was because my life had been ripped away from me. Music is all I can do. Music is it for me. The thought of, Christ, is this it for me? was hard, very hard. I was just thinking, I’ve worked all these years and now it’s all been taken away from me. That was the depressing thing.”
He stares out of the window for an eternity. “If you think about someone who does what we do, we spend our whole life going, ‘Is that any good? Do you like it?’ We’re constantly giving up ideas and wanting them to be accepted and loved by everyone. And if you lose your confidence you’re putting yourself down at the very first step. But the confidence is back now. I’d like to say we know what we are doing, but we don’t. You can’t in this business. You just go in and guess: ‘Is it great? I think it’s great.’ It’s never as planned as it looks. But the excitement now for us is that the new stuff is progressive and different. There’s even talk of us playing Glastonbury!”
He looks over at his bandmates. “I remember meeting them all for the first time, 20 years ago,” he says. “I’m not the same person now, and they certainly aren’t. So much has happened individually and collectively. What was that you said earlier? It’s like a soap opera. It certainly feels that way. But this episode is different: it has a kind of magic about it.”
Faster, higher, stronger
Billed as the biggest tour in UK and Irish history, Take That’s live shows for next year have already smashed box-office records (a million tickets were sold on the first day of availability).
“We have our own circuit now when we play live,” says Barlow. “We don’t go and do festivals in Belgium, because they’re not for us. We’d rather put on our own event where we know how much people are paying for car parks and Diet Cokes. I hate the idea of doing some festival and they’re ripping off all the fans and the band doesn’t even know about it.
“The new show will have the theatricality of the Circus tour, and we’ll split it up each night so that you’ll have us as the old five-piece, then you’ll have Robbie doing some solo stuff, then us as a four-piece, then us as the new-five piece. We’re just trying to integrate all of that into one show now.”
- Progress is out now
