How I dealt with tragedy of our still-born baby by Gary Barlow
GARY BARLOW has called on men to be more open about their emotions after writing about his stillborn daughter helped him deal with the tragedy.
The Take That legend struggled to cope following Poppy’s death in 2012. He went on to suffer a breakdown two years ago.
In a deeply personal interview due to be broadcast today on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Barlow tells host Lauren Laverne that it is difficult for men to grieve openly.
“For anyone who has been through anything like this, I think it’s something you accept you’re going to be dealing with for the rest of your life,” he said.
“In a strange way, you don’t want it to end because it’s one of the few things you have to remind you of the person that’s not there.
“In some ways the pain and the grief brings you closer to them. I can’t really explain it, it’s the simplest way of saying how it feels.”
The 47-year-old shared his grief in 2013 track Let Me Go.
Barlow also revealed that he and Dawn, his wife of 18 years, “talked endlessly” about whether he should write about Poppy’s death in his autobiography, A Better Me, which was published in October. “In the last year I felt like it’s probably time and quite important, actually,” he said.
“It felt important to me as a man, as a 47-year-old man, to talk about something bad that’s happened and how it made me feel.
“You can pick up several magazines and know how women deal with things and learn how other people have experienced them but for some reason men don’t talk about those things.”
It is not the first time the former X Factor judge has opened up about his emotional difficulties, having previously lifted the lid on his battle with depression.
The hitmaker has also spoken openly about his battle with bulimia in the early 2000s.
Barlow said there was a point when he hit rock bottom and realised something had to be done for the sake of his children.
“It involved a trip to the doctor who informed me of my weight and that I was in a bad place,” he recalled.
“The musical confidence had gone and now the personal confidence had gone. It didn’t feel right and so I needed to change that.”
During Desert Island Discs, Barlow also confesses that his ego was partly to blame for Take That’s break-up in the mid-Nineties.
“I was just on a mission,” he said. “I wanted to get there regardless of the thoughts and feelings of anyone else. So when I look back at the demise of it, it was actually a healthy thing that happened for me – and thank goodness it happened.”
Despite his success, the six-time Ivor Novello award winner lives in fear that his luck will eventually run out.
“I constantly wake with the fear that the luck that has followed me around for 30 years has now vanished because I never actually feel like I really know.
“I just sit, I play and sometimes I get something really good and sometimes I get nothing.
“There is no secret. Ask me how I do it – I’ve no idea.”
Barlow, who is father to Daniel, 18, Emily, 16, and Daisy, nine, also told how he has taken “full responsibility” for a tax avoidance scandal he was caught up in during 2014.
The pop star said it was “really awful”, and added: “I don’t know a thing about accounts.
“I signed those things, it’s my responsibility, so all I could do at that point was just say, ‘I’m sorry, whatever I owe, just pay it back immediately’.”
Barlow chose an eclectic set of songs for his Desert Island Discs, including Just Can’t Get Enough by Depeche Mode and Glenn Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy.
Desert Island Discs is on BBC Radio 4 today at 11.15am.