MY MARRIAGE SECRETS
12-page midlife love special
Mrs Gary Barlow is a lucky woman. Not only is she married to a pop star worth £ 80 million with two fabulous homes in Kensington and oxfordshire, she also gets a gourmet meal cooked for her every night by the man who fronts the most successful boy band in UK chart history. when Gary isn’t preparing fabulous meals for Dawn, 49, he’s composing love songs about her. Forever love, his 1996 No1 hit, was written the year after he started dating the former dancer, who used to perform with Take That on stage, and is about his hopes that she’s ‘the one’. after 19 years of marriage and 24 years together, those romantic wishes a smitten 25-year-old Gary wrote about seem to have all come true.
Not that life as a pop star’s girlfriend was much fun for 20-something Dawn in the mid-Nineties when Take That were the biggest boy band in the country. as national heart-throbs it was important that their fan base of teenage girls believed them to be unattached and available.
‘we had to keep it quiet because none of the lads were allowed to officially have girlfriends in those days,’ Gary tells me.
‘Dawn hates attention, so it was a big deal for her to date someone like me. once news of our relationship got out, the fans didn’t respond very nicely. They used to spit at her as she went in and out
of concert venues.’ long, happy marriages and the music industry don’t tend to go hand in hand and Gary, 48, is convinced the formula to his marital success lies in the fact they’re not in competition with one another.
‘I see that so much in couples today. I can’t imagine living like that. Dawn’s never complained.
‘I’ve always been given real freedom to go off on tour or lock myself in a recording studio. She’s always wholeheartedly supported everything I do. We both grew up in solid, happy homes. There isn’t divorce in our families. I can’t recall ever hearing my mum and dad argue, and we don’t either. I like an easy life.
‘I have so many challenges in my job that, when I get home, I want a happy, calm life and that’s what she gives me.’
When we meet for our interview at the famous Abbey Road Studios, Gary looks trim and youthful. His beard is flecked with grey, he’s wearing fashionably distressed jeans and a denim jacket (yes, double denim and very fetching it looks, too).
‘I don’t mind being this age,’ he tells me. ‘I’m enjoying this stage of my life and career, far more than I did in the early days. One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned is to say No. In the past, there’s been the fear of missing out, the fear of upsetting people. But I’m not that insecure person any more.’
One thing he hasn’t said ‘no’ to is a new campaign he is fronting for Specsavers. He is the new (very smouldering) face of their stylish, Italian influenced Osiris range.
He began wearing glasses four years ago (who knew?). Had he started to do that great middleage trick of holding the menu at arm’s length?
‘Oh, I was worse than that before I got glasses,’ he says. ‘I was taking pictures of text on my phone and then zooming in to read it.’
To paraphrase the company’s famous advertising slogan, he did go to Specsavers and took things a stage further by helping to design a range.
He’s delighted when I tell him how handsome he looks in his modelling shots. ‘ You think so? I can never judge these things.’
I spent a lot of time with Take That in their Nineties heyday when I worked as a showbusiness correspondent. Back then, Jason Orange was my favourite. Today, it’s Gary who has aged the best.
No wonder so many of Take That’s now middle-aged fans have switched allegiance from Robbie Williams and Mark Owen — always the cute ones of the band — to him.
But it’s been a long and difficult journey for Gary to reach this point of contentment in his life. Anybody who read his brutally raw autobiography A Better Me, released last October, will know that fame came at great cost to his mental wellbeing.
When Take That split, he piled on weight, then became bulimic and spent nearly a decade bingeing and starving on ridiculous diets.
It wasn’t until 2005, when he started to eat ‘clean’ (before eating clean was even a thing), that he finally conquered his demons.
Out went the pies, Chinese takeaways and litres of fizzy drinks. Instead, thanks to the famous Hemsley sisters, he learnt to expand his palate. He swapped white rice for cauliflower rice, he sourced local, organic food that hadn’t been tampered with and even learnt how to butcher a pig.
‘When I originally started writing the book, the intention was to write about health and wellbeing because that’s become such a big part of my life. But then I thought people would wonder what led to that point and so it just took over and became a wartsand-all biography.
‘I decided it had to be personal and honest. I’ve had some incredible highs and some crushing lows. It was only when I recorded the audio version that I realised how much I’d been through and felt really proud to have come out the other side.’
Some of those crushing lows include the failure of his solo career and the humiliation of being dumped by his record company.
While his career floundered, Robbie’s sky- rocketed. People would shout ‘where’s Robbie?’ at him in the street to the extent that he became a recluse.
He lied to his wife about being in demand and having exciting projects in the pipeline when the phone hadn’t rung for months.
In A Better Me, he likens himself to the man who leaves the house in a suit at the same time every morning — and then spends the day sitting on a park bench because he can’t bear to tell his family that he lost his job.
At 24 years old, he paid £1 million for Delamere Manor in Cheshire, a 20-room mansion set in 100 acres of land. ‘My manager told me to buy it, so I did,’ says Gary. ‘I decorated it like I thought I was meant to, really ornate and over the top.
‘There were seven cars on the drive and I employed four gardeners. The grounds were colossal. It was insane.
‘It’s a massive First World problem, I know — oh, poor me in my huge mansion — but it became like my prison. Today, I want to get rid of things. I want my life to be as simple as possible.
‘I remember standing looking at all this ornate s*** that I’d gathered and thinking that I had to get out of there. I felt nothing but relief when I sold it and drove out of those gates.’
At his lowest point Gary ballooned to more than 17st. Now he’s five stone lighter and thinks he’s finally conquered his unhealthy relationship with food.
‘I’ve mastered self- control and I’m not a binger any more. I know when to stop. I got super obsessive about it in the past, where I wouldn’t eat anything that hadn’t
‘ Dawn needed me and I wanted to look after her. Food became my way of looking after everyone’
just been pulled out of the ground, but I’m over that now, too.
‘Eating out is still a minefield, though. I don’t trust chefs, they’re running a business. They don’t list every ingredient on a menu, do they . . . see, I told you I was obsessive!’
From the recipes Gary talks me through, it sounds as though he could give some top chefs a run for their money. He’s made his own sourdough bread in the past and is currently experimenting with Persian flavours.
Dawnhas type 1 diabetes, something she was diagnosed with six years ago when her body shut down as she suffered severe trauma following a family tragedy.
Since then, Gary has learnt to prepare meals without sugary ingredients. He even went on a course run by Hugh Fearnleywhittingstall to improve his cullinary skills.
‘I know giving up sugar is trendy, but when having it could kill you, then you really have to examine what you eat. Tomatoes, beetroot, carrots are all full of sugar. Crispy duck is a family favourite, but I’ll make the pancakes with glutenfree chickpea flour.
‘I honestly think that cooking is one of the most underrated skills someone can have. It’s easy and brings so much pleasure. I love sourcing good food for Dawn.’
There was a time, too, when cooking became a source of therapy and deep comfort for the couple. In 2012, their daughter Poppy was stillborn. In his autobiography, Gary describes, in heartbreaking detail, how he looked on helplessly as Dawn cradled their dead child in her arms, willing her back to life.
It was the trauma she suffered afterwards that caused her body to shut down, triggering her diabetes. I hadn’t heard of this before, but apparently, when the body is put under chronic stress, the immune system can attack and kill the beta cells in the pancreas that produce insulin, resulting in Type 1 diabetes.
‘Preparing food became my way of looking after everyone,’ he says. ‘There was a period when it was definitely very healing. Dawn needed me and I wanted to look after her and it felt lovely to put a pot on, cook for everyone, bring everyone together, let the smells fill the house. That’s magic. That’s a home.’
Today, Gary has become something of a role model and guru to his legions of fans. His Twitter feed is full of questions about diets and people posting before and after pictures of their weight loss. ‘If you look in my direct messages you’ll see they are all about food and diet. One thing I’ve realised over the years is that we all eat too much. You don’t have to eat until you’re stuffed and need to loosen your belt. You don’t need a plate piled high.
‘If people ask for my advice, then the first thing I say is “look at your portion sizes”.’
‘Barlow’s Bootcamp’ is a fun experiment he set up on social media to detail his exercise regime. But he replies with a refreshing: ‘Good God no’ when I ask if he has learned to love exercise. as well as the gym workouts he also practises yoga. ‘I’m terrible at it. Stiff as a board.
‘Everyone says that women need to lift more weights and men should do yoga, and that’s true. Most men who work out in the gym have no suppleness.’ and just when you think he can’t possibly get any more metrosexual, he talks to me about his new-found love of meditation.
‘I started two years ago. It took me a year to get the hang of it because I kept going “Oh I can’t do this, my brain won’t switch off.” But the ones who find it the hardest to switch off are the ones who will benefit the most.
‘I just lie down and count my breaths — four seconds in and four seconds out. I’m telling you, if I do that for 20 minutes it changes the day.’
Oh, and then there’s the retreats he likes to go on to exercise, escape and de-stress.
For a lad from Frodsham, Cheshire, who used to sing in working Men’s clubs after school, he’s certainly come a long way.
‘Look, I spent a big chunk of my life being a blinkered northern man going, “Oh what a load of rubbish” any time anybody mentioned anything vaguely healthy or alternative. My brother Ian ( a builder) finds it hilarious.’
while Gary came from a humble background — his father Colin, who died ten years ago, was a warehouseman — Gary’s own children: Dan, 18, Emily, 16, and Daisy, ten enjoy all the trappings of his wealth — a state of affairs that he battles with.
‘I worry about it constantly. I talk about it with Dawn all the time. In the end, rather than focus on the houses they live in or the holidays they go on, I look at their core values. are they nice to people? Do they look people in the eye and listen when someone is talking to them? Have they got great social skills? Yes, they have.
‘It’s true that they’ve never had to fight for the things I did . . .but they’ve still turned out great.’
His eldest, who wants to be a teacher, will leave home for university this year, while Emily is ‘super bright’ and studying for her a- levels and Daisy loves her gymnastics.
On Valentine’s night, Gary will be taking Dawn out to dinner — even though he doesn’t trust those pesky chefs — and presenting her with flowers.
He’s already decided that he wants to take a year off when he turns 50.
‘My wife and I are getting to a really lovely point in our lives now. The kids need us less and it feels like we’re entering a new phase. I want to take the time to be at home and write some new songs.’
Including a few romantic numbers for Mrs B, no doubt.
I spent a chunk of my life a blinkered Northern man going, “What a load of rubbish” about anything healthy’