Not content with selling 15 million albums and 14 million singles with Take That, three years ago Gary Barlow indulged another of his passions by launching his own range of affordable organic wines. Now, with a whopping ten million glasses sold, the singer and songwriter has taken things a step further by making a new television series called Gary Barlow’s Wine Tour: South Africa, which sees him hanging out in vineyards, eating great food and cooking braai (South African barbecue) with mates including This Morning’s Ben Shephard, singers Mica Paris and Jane McDonald, and another old mucker from way back.
‘We drank a lot of wine and we had a lot of laughs,’ says Gary. ‘And the big discovery when we arrived was that Michaela Strachan had lived there for 20 years. I never realised. Michaela was on the very first TV performance Take That ever did, she introduced us on The Hitman And Her. She took me in a kayak out on Seal Island.’
The buff, bare-chested boy in that clip from 1990 looks very different to the distinguished gentleman of today, with his salt-and-pepper beard. But Springwatch’s Michaela was right when she said the band was ‘gonna be enormous’. Since then, Gary has written 13 Number One singles – ten for Take That, two for himself and one for Robbie Williams – organised the late Queen’s Diamond Jubilee concert, and been awarded an OBE, although some wonder where the knighthood is.
That would certainly be worth raising a glass of Château Barlow to; does he own a vineyard? ‘Oh goodness, no. I don’t know if I’d love that, to be honest. The part I play in all this is to bring my audience a choice of what I think is the best wine in the world and make it affordable.’ And now he’s talking about his passion on the telly. ‘ITV suggested we make something. I said, “I’ve got a 15-second pitch for you: me, friends, wine, food, travel.” They were like, “When do we start?”’
Not content with selling 15 million albums and 14 million singles with Take That, three years ago Gary Barlow indulged another of his passions by launching his own range of affordable organic wines
South Africa looks terrific in the show. ‘We were blessed every day with the most incredible scenery,’ says Gary. ‘That coast is just so bloody gorgeous and the vineyards have their own beauty.’ There were tricky moments, though. ‘It’s a complicated country and you definitely feel it. We end in Johannesburg. We know the history and it feels like a place that’s healing, but hasn’t fully healed just yet. We did have security with us. We have to.’
In the first of the five episodes, Gary and his friend and songwriting partner Eliot Kennedy visit vineyards in Stellenbosch to taste and blend wines, explore the landscape in Jeeps and on electric bikes, and have vinotherapy – a spa treatment that uses grapes to cleanse the body.
They also try a Braaibroodjie, which is a cheese toastie cooked over hot coals, but Gary’s face lights up when I ask what the best food he tasted over there was. ‘We went to the region of Constantia, where my favourite dessert wines come from. The chef there had trained in France, lived in Asia, then moved back to South Africa. We had the simplest tuna sashimi, he put grapefruit with it, it was the most incredible thing, really delicious.’
The second episode sees Gary stomping down grapes in the Cape Winelands and then meeting Michaela for a ‘jazz safari’ of Cape Town. They go home with musician Hilton Schilder to taste his Cape Malay Chicken Curry. Did Gary do any cooking at all? ‘The chef cancelled on us at another place so me and Ben Shephard had to cook. Well, we were doing the braai, so we threatened some food with fire. That’s as good as it got, but it was a good laugh.’
Gary is a man who’s really struggled with food in the past. He fell into self-doubt and depression after Take That split up for the first time in 1996 and his solo career failed. He put on a lot of weight with food binges, trying to, as he said later, ‘kill off the pop star’, and developed bulimia. So how did he get from there to the happier state he must be in now to make this programme?
In the first of the five episodes of Gary Barlow’s Wine Tour: South Africa, Gary and his friend and songwriting partner Eliot Kennedy visit vineyards in Stellenbosch to taste and blend wines
‘It’s a long time ago now,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘I came out of that hole when our second child was just born, probably the end of 2002.’ Gary has been with his wife Dawn since the 90s. They married in 2000 and have three children, Daniel, 24, Emily, 22, and Daisy, 15. They have homes in London, Oxfordshire and Santa Monica, but were still in Gary’s native Cheshire when he began to emerge from his food struggles. ‘I discovered running, which wasn’t really something I’d ever done before,’ he adds. ‘It was my antidote to everything.’
In those days he was not able to talk about how he was feeling to anybody. ‘You’ve got to remember, this wasn’t a day and age where you could say, “I need help.” It was a very different time then, especially as a man and as a new father.’
Gary couldn’t even let on to his family about his despair. ‘It was a time when I needed to be – on the outside – extremely strong and keep the house together. Even though I didn’t have a job at the time, I had to be positive for everybody. So the fact that all this was going on underneath was really painful and I was on my own.’
The trouble was, he couldn’t stop eating completely. ‘If you have a smoking addiction, you just don’t smoke. But with food, you’ve got to eat anyway, so you’ve got to work it out.’ How is he now? ‘Some years are better than others, but in general as long as I’m doing four things – sleeping, exercising well, walking a good amount per day, not drinking too much – food isn’t an issue.’
These are also his main defences against becoming overwhelmed again. ‘The stress is something that often pushes people to go for a glass of drink or a bar of chocolate,’ Gary says. ‘So if I can keep those four things working well in my life I can stay on a nice, happy, even road.’
The buff, bare-chested boy from 1990 looks very different to the distinguished gentleman of today. From left, Take That’s Gary Barlow, Robbie Williams, Jason Orange, Howard Donald and Mark Owen
There is actually a fifth thing that helps him, too. ‘I also get the treat of standing on stage,’ he says. ‘Sounds shallow, because it is; but the buzz of having an audience and doing that 70 or 80 times a year is so good for me.’
Take That reformed as a four-piece in 2005. After three more chart-topping albums, one of them with Robbie Williams, they became a trio in 2014, when Jason Orange left for a quieter life. ‘The one thing you learn the second time around is to really appreciate it, because you know what it’s like for that not to be there,’ says Gary. ‘Every night I look out and I’m like, “This is amazing.”’
He’s 53 now, so have they toned down the dancing? ‘I feel like we’re scaling it up! We’re dripping with sweat when we come off.’ How does he prepare? ‘If we’re about to go on a long tour then it’s cardio-based, because I’ve got to sing while I’m moving around. I need to be able to take a deep breath and it lasts me a few lines. Otherwise I’m on the weights and balance work. I do regular saunas, I do ice baths every day. They are a buzz. I love the pain.’
Take That are on the road again soon. ‘We go to the Middle East, Singapore, Australia, up into Asia, Japan.’ Sounds like he’ll be away from the family for a long time. ‘That is the hardest piece of everything we’ve talked about: the balance of work and home. It’s really tricky. In my defence… I’m now talking to my wife through you! This is unusual for us, to do a year of touring. We usually go for no more than three weeks at a stretch, but we can’t this time.’
Will Dawn come on tour? ‘Sadly not. We’ve still got one child at school. Dawn’s like, “I was there for the others, I want to be there for her.” But the treat for me is that I get to see my eldest daughter, who’s in Australia at the moment. I’ll be there for a month.’
Gary with son Daniel, wife Dawn and daughter Daisy in an image posted on Instagram
Gary very rarely posts photographs of the family online, but when he does his son Daniel towers over them all. ‘He did an Ironman last weekend in Wales. Obviously we’re very proud parents, but he is enormous! He eats two horses’ worth of food a day. That’s come from my wife’s side of the family, her brother’s tall.’ So how big is Daniel? ‘He’s 6ft 5in. He’s a beast. Very well-conditioned. He and his friends came to our house on Sunday and they were doing a workout for an hour and going in the sauna. I wish I’d known about all that at their age.’
It’s very different from Gary’s childhood, performing all over the north of England, sometimes in support of comedy greats like Bob Monkhouse and Ken Dodd. ‘I was working in social clubs from the age of 11 and all the bands were 30 years older than me. As the younger person I was less inclined than everyone else, so I was probably 21 before I really had a drink,’ he says. ‘I tried beer, didn’t really like it. I started on shots when we were going to nightclubs with the band, I didn’t really like that either, but I quite liked getting drunk.’
By then he’d made a demo called A Million Love Songs and been chosen by a casting agent for a new boy band called Take That, alongside Mark Owen, Jason Orange, Howard Donald and Robbie Williams. They have been celebrating the 30th anniversary of the album that really lived up to its name, Everything Changes, which went straight to Number One on its release in October 1993 and generated four chart-topping singles, including Relight My Fire with Lulu.
‘That was a huge album for us, our first real breakthrough worldwide.’ Suddenly Gary could afford the finer things. ‘I first properly enjoyed a glass of alcohol when I was about 25. Eliot took me to a restaurant – the Belvedere in Holland Park, we waited weeks for a reservation – and he said, “Right, I’m gonna make you drink some wine.” I was like, “Absolutely not. I hate wine. It’s the worst thing ever.” Eliot ordered a Châteauneuf-du-Pape. He said I’d love it and I did. That was the first time I went, “Oh, OK. I get it.”’
Gary was hooked and became a student of the grape. Does he drink on tour? ‘Only after a show. I can’t drink before, it alters your hearing. I can’t tune once I’ve had a drink. But it’s consistently afterwards. We never miss an opportunity to celebrate. Mark and Howard don’t drink, so it’s me and the team and the musicians.’
Take That are still probably the biggest British band never to have played Glastonbury, so why is that? ‘We’ve never been asked.’ Would they say yes? ‘Of course we would. That would be a first for us.’
He seems to think there might be a bit of musical snobbery at play. ‘We only did Jools Holland for the first time last year. We actually thought they never wanted us on because they looked down on us a bit, but they couldn’t have been nicer. They were so respectful to us.’
Finally, I have to ask the question every Take That fan who bought Everything Changes 30-odd years ago would be longing to ask: what are the chances of that original line-up getting back together?
Gary strokes his beard thoughtfully. ‘Will there be five again? Could be. Will there be four again? Probably. Who knows? The phone rings and it could mean anything, but that’s the thrill. We’re all mates. We all talk, some more than others. The chances of the five of us happening I would say are slim. Robbie coming back? I could see that. So there.’
That will thrill the fans, I say. Gary Barlow nods, smiles enigmatically and says, ‘Well, it thrills me.’
- Gary Barlow’s Wine Tour: South Africa, Monday 11-Friday 15 November, 2pm, ITV1 and ITVX.