

I’m 42, my biggest material’s when the band releases something, and I’m just a fifth of that. ‘I’m not looking to sell ten million albums. Given how personal the material is, and given that his last solo album plunged him into depression, isn’t he concerned how this one will be received? ‘This is going to sound wrong, but I couldn’t care less,’ he says. I don’t want to put down what my whole living is, but it deserves more than a three-minute song.’ It would feel cheap to word-for-word describe it’s bigger than that.

But I’d be insensitive if I wrote it in a way where everyone realised what it was, too. ‘Even if it’s a happy song, it’s all in there somewhere. Did they influence the album? ‘Like the good things in life, the bad things happen, and it’s impossible to sit and write music like I do and for it not to be on the page,’ he answers seriously. But this is the first personal material he has written since these events. Barlow has been open about the devastating effect of his father’s death but I have been told he doesn’t want to talk about Poppy, whose stillbirth he and Dawn announced with consummate dignity last year. This is an older, wiser Gary Barlow, a dad of three who has been through the loss of his father in 2009 and the stillbirth of his fourth child Poppy last year, but who has also learned that there can be a second act in the career of a man who has sold 50 million albums (and sometimes a third, fourth and fifth act, too). The figure sitting in front of me in the incongruously pimped-out North London studio he bought from producer Nellee Hooper is trim, surprisingly short, surprisingly handsome and surprisingly serene.
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‘It still all feels very risky, a real roll of the dice.’īarlow announced the news on Twitter but has shared the full story only with ES Magazine. ‘I’ve often said that I wouldn’t go back and put myself up there again, because it ended so badly last time,’ says Barlow in his still-strong Cheshire accent. On his 21st year in show business, Gary Barlow - former Take That frontman turned The X-Factor judge and minstrel to the court of Queen Elizabeth - is releasing his first solo album since 1999’s Twelve Months, Eleven Days crashed and burned, sending him into an almost career-ending depression. He phrase ‘many happy returns’ seems apt. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.
